When President Bush came out against singing the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish, I wondered if he had committed the same offense in the past. The answer, it turns out, is yes. Atrios points to this quote from Kevin Phillips’ book American Dynasty: When visiting cities like Chicago, Milwaukee or Philadelphia, in pivotal states, [Bush] would

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Jonathan Schwarz at Tiny Revolution plots their approval trajectories. It turns out that disapproval of Bush right now is almost as high as Nixon’s when he resigned:

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I have to admit that, like Noam Scheiber and Bob Somerby, I didn’t find Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner very funny. But a lot of people are obsessed with it and the media’s failure to devote much coverage to it. Here’s Scheiber’s analysis: My sense is that the blogosphere response is

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I’m not a big Evan Bayh fan, but I’m excited he supports abolishing the Electoral College (via Drudge): Q: “Why do you think we should abolish the Electoral College?” BAYH: “I think our president should be chosen by the majority of the American people. That is ordinarily the case. But in 2000, as we all

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A defense lawyer in the Duke lacrosse case has requested the removal of District Attorney Mike Nifong, among other things, in motions filed today: Kirk Osborn, the lawyer for one of the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape, filed legal motions this morning, including one that demanded that Durham’s district attorney drop out of the

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In an essay about his new book Hostile Takeover, David Sirota compares American politics to The Matrix (“the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth”) before unleashing a barrage of frenzied populism: The fact is, most of that nonsensical political discourse is designed to hide the two fundamental

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The Republican plan to refund $100 to taxpayers to compensate for higher gas taxes doesn’t seem to be very popular: Aides for several Republican senators reported a surge of calls and e-mail messages from constituents ridiculing the rebate as a paltry and transparent effort to pander to voters before the midterm elections in November. “The

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If you haven’t been following Dateline Hollywood, the satirical entertainment news website co-edited by my friend and former Spinsanity colleague Ben Fritz, make sure to check out the weekly film reviews of their new critic Woody Wittman: Woody is like The Today Show’s Gene Shalit if he lived in his mother’s basement. Or as Fishbowl

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Ford is considering a reality show in which contestants compete to design a new model, with the winner’s idea being built as a concept car: Under one situation Ford is considering, aspiring car designers would compete against one another to design the next hot Ford vehicle. The script would play out something like this: Each

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