Throughout the 1990s, Sidney Blumenthal was an effective and articulate advocate, defending the Clintons from scurrilous attacks launched by right-wing pseudo-journalists. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Blumenthal has apparently decided that those right-wing pseudo-journalists’ smears deserve to be taken seriously after all. Yesterday, Peter Dreier, a professor at Occidental college, broke what appears to have […]
The U.S. Attorney Purge scandal may be over, but the Bush administration hasn’t changed its habit of ridding itself of those guilty of independent thinking. The battle over dioxin contamination in this economically stressed region [of Michigan] had been raging for years when a top Bush administration official turned up the pressure on Dow Chemical […]
The “academic cornerstone” of Bush’s education policy is a flop. But in this case, the failure is even more embarrassing that it appears at first glance. President Bush’s $1 billion a year initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension, according to a Department of Education report released on […]
When Hillary Clinton first embraced John McCain’s idea for a temporary gas-tax holiday, I assumed she’d probably stumbled upon it by accident. Maybe, I thought, she was feeling a little desperate, and decided a little conservative pseudo-populism might be worth a point or two in Indiana. It never occurred to me Clinton would use the […]
Today’s edition of quick hits. * Bloodshed in Baghdad: “A double suicide bombing struck a wedding convoy northeast of Baghdad Thursday, killing at least 35 people and wounding 65 others, police said. In Baghdad, a car bomb aimed at a U.S. patrol in Baghdad on Thursday killed an American soldier and least nine Iraqi civilians […]
Ben Stein, a former Nixon aide and game-show host, probably best known for his role as a monotone teacher in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” released an anti-evolution documentary recently called, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” The premise, as I understand it, is that those who reject modern biology struggle professionally in the sciences. Kevin recently saw […]
Just today, we learned that nearly half the country has “major concerns” that John McCain is too closely aligned with the Bush administration. Given this, you’d think McCain would start doing a little more to distance himself from the least popular president in modern history. Instead, he’s defending Bush on the “Mission Accomplished” banner flown […]
At least it’s about policy. That’s what I keep telling myself — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain are still going at it over a proposed “gas-tax holiday.” Given that they could be arguing about far more ridiculous subjects, I guess this is as good a controversy as any. First up, CNN’s John Roberts […]
It’s not a widely recognized “holiday,” but today is the official National Day of Prayer. (Ironically, the NDP and “Law Day” fall on the same day.) The name is rather self-explanatory: It’s a day, set aside by law, in which the federal government encourages the nation to pray. And if you’re thinking it’s none of […]
Joe Klein recently predicted that John McCain would avoid a cheap and pathetic style of campaigning. McCain, Klein said, “sees the tawdry ceremonies of politics — the spin and hucksterism — as unworthy.” If he doesn’t, “McCain will have to live with the knowledge that in the most important business of his life, he chose […]