Month: January 2010
-
Sending Haitian refugees to Guantánamo?!
I understand the concern about a potential wave of Haitian refugees, but someone at the State Department needs to construct a new contingency plan: United States officials say they worry that in the coming weeks, worsening conditions in Haiti could spur an exodus. They have not only started a campaign to persuade Haitians to stay
-
How conservative is Scott Brown?
A major question in the special Senate election going on in Massachusetts right now is whether the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, is too conservative for the state. Matthew Yglesias says Brown is playing a losing hand: At the end of the day, it’s hardly impossible for a Republican to win statewide in Massachusetts. Mitt Romney
-
How often should presidents lose?
Matthew Yglesias has the best take on a new CQ study which finds that President Obama has the highest “success rate” on Congressional votes for any first-year president since Eisenhower: I continue to think that this approach may prove counterproductive in the midterms. The kind of activists who you need to give money, volunteer, and
-
Harry Reid: Not anti-gambling
Adam Nagourney’s profile of Harry Reid for the New York Times Magazine includes a potentially misleading statement about Harry Reid’s feelings toward gambling (emphasis added): By reputation and appearance, Reid, who is 70, is one of the blander elected officials in Washington. Upon closer inspection, he is deeply and deceptively interesting. He is a senator
-
Twitter roundup
Here are the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!): –Headline: “Obama concedes he hasn’t brought country together.” In other news, the sun came up today. -Are the advantages of prediction markets being oversold? -Michael Kinsley on the Reid quote as meta-gaffe: “It is entirely the creation of the process of publicizing it.” -Ezra
-
The politics of “jobs, jobs, jobs”
The White House keeps saying that President Obama is focused on “jobs, jobs, jobs,” but what is he going to do to create jobs? The only examples I’ve seen are small-bore ideas like “cash for caulkers” that are the economic equivalent of President Clinton promoting school uniforms. In reality, the jobs push is mostly for
-
Barack Obama: Prisoner of circumstance
It’s time to lay down a marker on punditry about the Obama White House. During the next eleven months, it will become increasingly obvious that Democrats face an unfavorable political environment and that President Obama’s approval ratings are trending downward. Inside the Beltway, these outcomes will be interpreted as evidence that the Obama administration has
-
Hyping the Dodd/Dorgan retirements
As others have noted, media coverage of the surprise retirements of Democratic senators Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan has been shockingly bad. First, many outlets have exaggerated the damage that was done to Democratic prospects in November. Consider this statement by Melissa Block on NPR’s All Things Considered: 2010 just got tougher for Democrats now
-
Brennan attacks dissent as helping Al Qaeda
No one seems to have noticed, but John Brennan, a high-ranking counterterrorism official in the Obama administration, recently castigated Republican critics of the White House as “playing into Al Qaeda’s strategic effort,” reprising an anti-dissent argument frequently used by the GOP during the Bush years: The president’s statement that there was a “systemic failure” [to
-
Correcting Douthat on the filibuster
[Updated with a response from Keith Krehbiel] New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has mounted a defense of the filibuster on his blog as producing centrist outcomes: If you were so inclined, then, you could cite the final vote on both Bush-era bills [the 2001 tax cut and Medicare coverage of prescription drugs] as exhibits