Month: March 2008
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Brooks cites McCain 1983 speech
In his column Friday, David Brooks cites John McCain’s 1983 speech arguing for US withdrawal from Lebanon, writing “This was not the speech of a man who thinks military force is the answer to every problem. It was the speech of one who conforms policies to facts.” For those are interested, here is a more
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My favorite award ever
I just found a post on Eat the Press (the Huffington Post media blog) naming my Time.com column on ending my guest blogging for The American Prospect as the “Most Overanalyzed Defenestration” of 2006. I’m so proud.
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Dean: Keeping everybody happy
This quote from DNC chairman Howard Dean should be seen as more evidence that big name Democrats are not going to push Hillary Clinton out of the presidential campaign any time soon: Faced with such disturbing trends, some Democrats want party elders either to persuade Clinton to drop out, or to orchestrate enough superdelegate endorsements
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NYT omits GOP’s supply-side claims
Here’s the lede to a Louis Uchitelle story in Wednesday’s New York Times about the “political comeback” of supply-side economics: When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he promised to cut taxes in what seemed, at the time, a magical way. Tax revenue would go up, not down, he said, as the economy boomed
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Yglesias: The case for partisanship
Writing in The Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias does a good job emphasizing a point I’ve also made here — namely, that the reduced partisanship of the mid-twentieth century was largely a result of the ugly history of race in the South: Yet as today’s presidential candidates call for a less divisive kind of politics, it’s worth
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Bizarre blog comments
I’ve deleted a couple of choice comments to avoid wrecking the threads, but they’re just too wacky not to share. Full details after the jump.
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Hillary’s still more polarizing
For years now, I’ve written about the potential weaknesses of Hillary Clinton in a general election campaign due to her high unfavorable ratings. Ezra Klein disagreed (here and here), arguing that any candidate in national politics becomes polarizing over time. But as I argued, there’s a big difference between ending up as a polarizing figure
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NYT: The cutting edge of youth culture
My friend Ben Fritz appropriately mocks some breaking news from the New York Times — young people email links to their friends! According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and
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The economics of Hillary withdrawal
Matthew Yglesias seems a bit puzzled that Democratic party elders haven’t stepped in to force Hillary Clinton out of the race. He writes that “insofar as it’s really true that [Nancy Pelosi] and ‘other leading members of Congress’ think [don’t think Hillary can win and want her to give up], they need to communicate it
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Justice Scalia inflates the denominator
With math skills like this, it’s no wonder Antonin Scalia went to law school: A couple of years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia, concurring in a Supreme Court death penalty decision, took stock of the American criminal justice system and pronounced himself satisfied. The rate at which innocent people are convicted of felonies is, he said,