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Cokie Roberts: Iowa-1 “doesn’t really have any immigrants”
Today on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” analyst Cokie Roberts understated the significance of immigration in Iowa’s 1st District, where it has become a hot issue among Republican candidates in a competitive open-seat Congressional race: And that’s surprising, Renee, because Iowa is about 94 percent white, as opposed to the rest of the country being about 75
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Political incivility watch: Havesi and Malkin
Our political discourse continues to sink to new lows. The state comptroller of New York, Alan Havesi, was forced to apologize after praising Senator Chuck Schumer as a metaphorical presidential assassin: The man who, how do I phrase this diplomatically, who will put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with
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California assembly passes National Popular Vote
The movement led by National Popular Vote to award the presidency to the candidate with the most votes via an interstate compact took a step forward on Tuesday as the California Assembly approved the measure: Seeking to force presidential candidates to pay attention to California’s 15.5 million voters, state lawmakers on Tuesday jumped aboard a
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Misleading paraphrase of Howard Dean
Here’s an example of how political myths are born through inaccurate paraphrases. Yesterday Washington Times columnist Greg Pierce claimed that Howard Dean had “suggested that opponents of homosexual ‘marriage’ are bigots.” This explosive claim that was immediately trumpeted by Matt Drudge, who inflated it to state that “Dem Chair Dean Compares Gay Marriage Opponents To
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Overstating the media’s importance
I’m sick of people elevating the media into the central force in American politics. The Note, an idiotic arbiter of media conventional wisdom if there ever was one, suggests today that the impending departure of Associated Press chief political writer “will change the contours of the 2006 and 2008 elections in ways that can now
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New comment policy
Rather than manually approving every comment, which is time-consuming and slows down discussion, I have turned on a Typepad feature that requires commenters to verify that they aren’t a spambot before their comments can be posted. I still reserve the right to delete comments that are off-topic, inflammatory or otherwise inappropriate. (Trackbacks will still be
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Democrats still have cultural problems
Josh Marshall is angry about Jeffrey Goldberg’s story in the latest issue of the New Yorker on the state of the Democratic Party and so am I, but for very different reasons. Marshall thinks the article is cliche-ridden and out of touch with what’s really going on in the party. Maybe so, but the message
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Wall Street Journal agitprop on “Team B”
In an editorial about new CIA director General Michael Hayden today, the Wall Street Journal editorial board slips in some revisionist history on “Team B,” the outside team brought in to provide an alternative analysis of the Soviet threat: The CIA’s Iraq mistakes have been amply documented. But the agency’s career analysts also got their
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Jonathan Chait on the Hillary backlash
Via Andrew Sullivan, Jon Chait has a perfect analysis of Hillary Clinton’s problems in the LA Times: It appears the grand Clinton strategy is backfiring. As a prospective national candidate, she has two great vulnerabilities. First, many voters think she’s too liberal. Second, many voters also see her as cold, calculating and unlikable. Her response
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Nancy Pelosi’s lioness metaphor
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is popularizing a weird metaphor to make Democratic women seem tougher on national security. In the latest New Yorker, Pelosi is quoted as follows: I’m a mom. I have five children, and I have five grandchildren. I always say to people, ‘Think lioness.’ This is how Democrats are. You threaten