I can appreciate that word-choice hasn’t always been the president’s strong point, but this one is even more embarrassing than most. SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN: Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq, a group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure […]
If accurate, this is simply stunning. A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here. The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number […]
So, is this finally the election cycle in which socially-conservative voters move away from the culture war and start voting on their economic self-interest? It depends a bit on whom you ask. The Washington Post, in an interesting front-page piece today, says the notion of basing votes on far-right “values” is in decline, especially in […]
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * In Connecticut, Ned Lamont (D) has narrowed the gap a little against Sen. Joe Lieberman (I), but only a little. A new Hartford Courant/University of Connecticut poll shows the incumbent leading by […]
On Sept. 10, 2001, the National Security Agency picked up suggestive comments by al Queda operatives, including, “Tomorrow is zero hour.” The tape of the conversation was not translated until after 9/11. Soon after, as Newsweek reported, FBI Director Robert Mueller established a 12-hour rule: all significant electronic intercepts of suspected terrorist conversations must be […]
Given controversies about this earlier this year, I assumed candidates and campaigns would know better than to use troops, in uniform, as props in political TV ads. I assumed wrong. The Army is reviewing the appearance of a soldier in uniform in a political television ad by Ohio Sen. Mike DeWine. The soldier wears Army […]
The New York Times noted yesterday that the Republican Party and its campaign committees, despite all of the scandals and polls, has one thing going for them: with four weeks until the election, they still have all kinds of money. The question, of course, is what the GOP plans to do with these vast resources. […]
It’s hard to imagine anyone taking a “breaking story” from The American Spectator seriously, but the barely-breathing magazine — or, more accurately, its blog — “reported” yesterday that it had learned from Democratic sources that the entire Mark Foley scandal was orchestrated by Democrats as some kind of “October surprise.” Indeed, to hear the Spectator […]
Today’s edition of quick hits. * James Steinberg, Bill Clinton’s deputy national security adviser and now dean of the Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, was spot-on arguing that the North Korea crisis should prompt people to repeat Ronald Reagan’s most famous 1980 campaign line — “With respect to the axis […]
Conservatives have finally come up with a relatively compelling response to the Mark [tag]Foley[/tag] scandal. The first response from Republicans (“We didn’t know anything”) didn’t work. The second response (“We should all wait until we have all the facts”) was unpersuasive, because all the available evidence was already pretty bad. The third response (“Let’s blame […]