As Joe Nocera reminds us today in the Times, “Not a single top executive at any of the firms that nearly brought down the financial system has spent so much as a day in jail. . . .What is also true, and which is every bit as corrosive to our belief in the rule of …
Michael Gerson—David Brooks without the tough, biting, punky edge–tells us in The Washington Post that we should not write off Mitt Romney. Sure, things look bad for the Republican brand right now, he says, but we should resist the temptation to speculate this situation into infinity. Just eight months ago, he reminds us, “President Obama …
“You know, you never want to say, ‘It’s all them,’” President Obama told Barbara Walters last week, “But I do think that right now at least, in the Republican Party there are a couple of notions. Number one is that compromise is a dirty word. Number two, anything that Obama’s for, we’re against.” Come on, …
Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, hit the nail on the head in a piece that he wrote for the Times last week, in which he bemoaned President Obama‘s failure to seize the narrative of the political issues of our times. Imagine, says Westen, how things would have been different if Obama …
In one of the most perceptive articles I have read in a long time, pollster par excellance Stan Greenberg wonders why Democrats are not finding better traction with the voters. “With high unemployment and the rich getting richer,” writes Greenberg in the New York Times, “you would think that voters of average means would flock …
July 12, 2511–Archeologists working in the remnants of the great financial meltdown found remnants of a rare 21st century recording that survived the Great iTunes implosion of 2022. Performed by an obscure 21st century blues singer named Blind Muddy Obama, it is entitled “Band Aids and Peas,” and apparently contains references to the debt ceiling …
TALKIN’ THE 2011 DEBT CEILING PEAS AND BAND AIDS BLUES Read More »
I didn’t want to write about Donald Trump anymore, but he is making me do it. Today, President Obama published on the White House website a long-form version of his birth certificate. This “certificate” is a longer, more complete document than the “certification” that his campaign released in 2008, which is what a citizen of …
The head of Fox News, the prodigiously jowly former Richard Nixon tub-thumper Roger Ailes, gave an interview to Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast earlier this week. It is instructive to read what Ailes said, because his comments are full of lies of every sort–simple untruths, hyperbolic overstatement, nasty misinterpretation. They show what a low, …
Yesterday in The Washington Post, Doug Schoen and Patrick Caddell, two formerly hotshot pollsters, wrote what certainly has to be the most disingenuous, cynical and purely dumb op-ed article of the year. Called “One and Done,” Schoen and Caddell argue the entirely preposterous position that to be a great president, Barack Obama should not seek …
On the heels of last night’s big Republican wins in the midterm elections (control of the House, several more Senate seats, a whole bunch of governorships and state legislatures), there is a kind of reasoning going on this morning that follows this line: people didn’t like the health care bill, therefore they didn’t like big …