The Senate today mustered only 56 votes – four short of the necessary 60 – to break a filibuster and bring to a vote a defense appropriations bill containing two highly controversial provisions: (1) a measure repealing the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy (a Clinton-era policy) that permits gays to serve in the military only if they are not openly gay, and (2) the | Read More »
By now most of you have seen Harry Reid’s reported remarks, from a book on the 2008 election, enthusing that Barack Obama could be a successful presidential candidate because he was “light-skinned” and “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” The real story here is the Left’s hypocrisy: Reid has committed a sin that would be unpardonable by anyone but a Democratic | Read More »
One of the most elusive concepts in politics is the notion of a mandate. Presidents love to claim them to bulldoze opposition (“the American people elected me to do this!”), but they can evaporate with astonishing speed, most famously in the case of the backlash against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Court-packing” plan after FDR had won the most sweeping electoral endorsement for any party in a | Read More »
One of the convenient campaign-season fictions of the Democrats, especially the Obama camp, is that somehow “change” and “new politics” will lead us to an era of post-partisan sensible centrism. Here’s another little glimpse of the reality: John McCain and Joe Lieberman have a lot in common. Both have been party-line voters for some parts of their party’s agenda, but both have also frequently been | Read More »
UPDATE: Looks like they are voting anyway and at last check, the House is all but set to vote the deal down. Hold on to your seatbelts, folks. So, the word just came down that the Senate will not vote on the bailout package until Wednesday night. House Republicans should refuse to vote on the deal until the ballots are cast in the Senate. And | Read More »
Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” Holmes: “That was the curious incident.” In politics, actions speak louder than words, and inaction sometimes speaks even louder. With John McCain leaving the campaign trail to go to Washington to | Read More »
If there’s one lesson we should all bear in mind as fear stalks Wall Street and the presidential race keeps getting tighter as it races towards its conclusion, it is this: Don’t Panic. Now, the current crisis is not an illusion; at its core, it’s about markets that valued assets one way and now value them as being worth considerably less, and that has all | Read More »
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