When I worked in Washington, I heard plenty of gossip about the often-demeaning demands public officials would make of their staffers. From what I heard, Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson was one of the worst, making someone from her staff pick her up at home every morning, without knocking on the door or using the […]
Voters in Alabama, Idaho, and Indiana haven’t supported a Democratic presidential candidate in the last five election cycles. Neither party bothers to campaign in these states anymore — the result is a foregone conclusion. I figure the only way to stop Bush from winning in these states is to keep his name off the ballot. […]
I don’t want to beat a dead horse, and everyone online has already blogged extensively about the Santorum controversy, but I wanted to follow up on some thoughts from Friday. As you know by now, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum started quite a political controversy last week by equating “consensual (gay) sex” with polygamy, bigamy, and […]
Just as a rule, you know you’re in trouble when the sentence begins, “We were not lying, but…” In the months of build-up towards war in Iraq, the White House seemed to have trouble maintaining a consistent argument as to why the invasion was necessary. First, the administration hinted that Iraq was somehow involved in […]
If you’re ever in the mood to see dozens of professional adults transform into wild-eyed madmen before your very eyes, walk into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and say two words: Ralph Nader. The 2000 election was almost three years ago and far more attention is now being spent on finding the right […]
I know it can’t be easy for Bush to try and generate public demand for his tax cut plan. Even voters with a passive familiarity with current events know that the U.S. is running huge deficits, government programs are getting cut, and unless they’re pretty wealthy, they don’t have much more money in their pocket […]
As political conventions of the last century have gone, there’s a predictable pattern. Both parties select a host city about two years before the convention and then schedule the events for the summer preceding the November election. The party that doesn’t have the White House goes first, usually a couple of weeks before the party […]
The firestorm surrounding Sen. Rick Santorum’s (R-Pa.) comments equating homosexuality with polygamy, bigamy, and incest is continuing today, with all the predictable players making all the expected announcements. Santorum still thinks he’s right, the religious right wants the GOP to do more to rally to his defense, and the left is still angry. But thanks […]
The more I think about the foreign policy divisions within the Bush administration, the more I believe it is without precedent in American history. As the LA Times noted today, it’s not unusual for there to be criticism from GOP hawks against a more moderate State Department. In the 1950s, Secretary of State Dean Acheson […]
Gary Kamiya, executive editor of Salon, should have had a hunch he was going to stir up some controversy, but he wrote what he was thinking anyway. On April 11, just two days after Saddam Hussein’s government was driven from Baghdad, Kamiya wrote a provocative article about Iraqi “liberation” and the celebrating going on in […]