Until I get a chance to read Tony Blair‘s memoir A Journey, reviews will have to suffice. Writing in The New Yorker, John Lanchester is not such a fan, although he offers a quote from Blair that is worth its weight in gold. “That Blair was a formidable politician,” writes Lanchester, “can be seen in …
As Lori Montgomery reports in the Washington Post, “Senate Republicans are rolling out a plan to permanently extend an array of expiring tax breaks that would deprive the Treasury of more than $4 trillion over the next decade, nearly doubling projected deficits over that period unless dramatic spending cuts are made. The measure, introduced by …
I just received a note on Facebook from my cousin, Walter King. He and I played together when we were six or seven or so, but then his family moved to Oklahoma. I have seen him but once in the intervening time, at a family reunion at the home of our cousin Charlotte, maybe 25 …
Christine O’Donnell‘s Tea Party-fueled victory over the seemingly safe establishment figure Mike Castle in Delaware is prompting no shortage of chin-stroking among the punditry, all wondering what this development, coming on the heels of all the other victories Tea Party candidates have had over Republican mainstays in GOP intra-party rumbles, is apt to mean for …
In a comment on the declining state of magazine journalism, conservative firebug Dinesh D’Souza has published an article in Forbes that is one of the goofiest, sloppiest, most nonsensical pieces of punditry I have had the misfortune to read. D’Souza, once a rising star among right-wing polemicists, proves himself one of its dimmer bulbs in …
For years, the Republican establishment has encouraged its right-wing fringe, confident that good tough anti-communist talk from Nixon would keep the Birchers in line while his Commerce Secretary sold Pepsi to the Soviets, or that family values invocations from Reagan would keep the evangelicals coming back, even if he never did a thing to outlaw …
As Chris Cilizza points out in The Washington Post, “the White House has become very interested in House Minority Leader John Boehner of late.” In a speech last week in Boehner’s home state of Ohio, President Obama mentioned Boehner an incredible eight times. Over the weekend, White House surrogates drew attention to an article in …
Sure, some people are going to buy the September issue of Details because Zac Efron‘s picture is on the cover, but some are going to be drawn to the cover line that says “Why You Should Lie to Your Boss.” I hope so, anyway, because I wrote it–a nice little tongue-in-cheek service piece about how …
Terry Jones, whom some may call Reverend but not me, is the gun-toting pastor of a dinky, fifty-member church in Gainesville Florida, who has this week held the country in thrall with his ugly proposal to burn copies of the Koran. I know–if you’re like me, you’re thinking, Do I have a dog in this …
Thanks to Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, some truly ridiculous blather by Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi and a man whose name is bruited about as a potential Republican nomination for president, has been exposed for the noxious nonsense that it is. Barbour. who is 62, recently gave …