Month: March 2007
-
Strassel suggests Bush mandate to remove US attys.
According to Wall Street Journal editorial board member Kimberley A. Strassel, the Bush administration’s purge of US attorneys was just an attempt to fulfill his mandate from the voters: The administration’s ineptitude has given the left an opening to claim the White House is politicizing justice. It matters little that many voters put Mr. Bush
-
The discourse of flip-flops and authenticity
The New Republic’s Jon Chait has written the best piece to date on the problems with using flip-flops as a metric of authenticity. Here’s the core of his argument: The Talmudic exercise of counting flip-flops, though, tells you little about a politician’s ideological malleability. Anybody who spends enough time in elected politics will rack up
-
A new job for Peter Pace?
The Economist’s Democracy in America blog offers an amusing suggestion for re-assigning General Peter Pace, who called homosexuality acts “immoral” in an interview with the Chicago Tribune: TROUBLE ahead. The Chicago Tribune reports on an interview with General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff: “I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are
-
Debate supports the troops
Walter Dellinger and Christopher Schroeder (a professor at Duke Law) conclude their New York Times op-ed today on Congress’s power to regulate military activities with a nice summary of why debate supports the troops: One final debate-stifling claim deserves mention: the argument that even to debate our troops’ mission in Iraq somehow undercuts and endangers
-
Joseph Bottum: Bush is a conservative
As President Bush’s unpopularity and incompetence have become more clear, prominent conservatives have tried to disassociate him from the movement by arguing that he is not a true conservative. Even Jeb Bush blamed the GOP’s defeat in November on the party not being conservative enough. But Joseph Bottum, a prominent social conservative, has the appropriate
-
Jon Chait pummels David Brooks
David Brooks is a great pop sociologist, but he’s not much of an empiricist. Jon Chait administers the necessary beatdown: David Brooks’s column in yesterday’s New York Times tries to wedge TNR into a larger theory of the change in American liberalism. He has some kind words for us, and his theory is at least
-
George W. Bush: How unpopular?
How unpopular is George W. Bush? As I mentioned, he’s not far above Harry Truman, the most unpopular second term president ever. University of Wisconsin prof and Pollster.com blogger Charles Franklin illustrates the comparison with yet another excellent graph putting Bush’s approval ratings in historical perspective:
-
Dick Cheney: How unpopular?
Matthew Yglesias makes a common liberal claim about Dick Cheney’s popularity: Substantively, the man is a horror. Conveniently, he’s also wildly unpopular. I mean, he’s got to be one of the least-popular major American political figures ever. It seems to me that “When Dick Cheney criticizes the House Democrats, that’s how we know we must
-
Israel’s naked ambassador
Via Drudge, an all-time great weird news article: Israel is replacing its ambassador in El Salvador after the envoy was found outside the embassy, drunk, wearing only bondage gear, officials said. …Haaretz website reports that police found Mr Refael in the Israeli embassy compound two weeks ago. He was inebriated, his hands were tied and
-
McCain and Mankiw on supply-side economics
As part of his ongoing capitulation to the conservative movement, John McCain has sadly begun to make false claims about the revenue effects of tax cuts, as Jon Chait points out: The old McCain called President Bush’s tax cuts fiscally and socially irresponsible, a giveaway to the rich in a time of rising inequality. The