It’s Election Day today in Lousiana: [T]he electorate will settle increasingly nasty bouts for lieutenant governor, secretary of state and the state board of education. Local ballots are dotted with contested legislative matchups, a handful of judicial contests in New Orleans, and parish offices in Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Tammany, St. Charles and St. John the Baptist. Voters also must navigate a gaggle of | Read More »
I could hardly sum up more pithily the problem with Mitt Romney’s candidacy in four words than “David Brooks loves him.” Brooks’ column today is revealingly out of step with the party and the nation Romney is seeking to lead. Let’s start with what’s missing from Brooks’ description of the job Romney is applying for: [T]he challenges ahead are technically difficult. There’s a reason that | Read More »
The 2012 presidential election season has not been a normal one in many ways. History teaches us that every election season brings something new we haven’t seen before – but also that progress in electioneering, as in most walks of life, is more gradual than people are wont to predict. The candidate who says “this time, everything is different” or “the old rules don’t apply” | Read More »
President Obama is on the prowl for new targets for (1) raising more tax revenue and/or (2) demonizing “the rich” for campaign purposes. Among Obama’s proposals, besides raising taxes on high-income individuals generally, is to more than double the tax rate paid by many private equity and venture capital investors from 15% to 35%, by reclassifying sales of their businesses (or shares in their businesses) | Read More »
Until September 11, 2001, I worked in the World Trade Center, halfway up Tower One. I wasn’t doing political blogging at the time, but was writing “the Baseball Crank” as a weekly baseball column for the online edition of the Providence (R.I.) Journal. Here’s my account of that day, written for ProJo two days later while it was all still fresh. We run this every | Read More »
The major controversy right now in the GOP presidential primaries is over Rick Perry’s contention that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that can’t deliver on its promises under its current structure. Mitt Romney doesn’t exactly dispute this – in fact, Romney himself said the same thing in his book, but then Romney always did like to attack other Republicans for things he himself has | Read More »
Let me offer my takes on last night’s GOP primary debate (I saw all but the very end). -Short answer? The debate reinforced, rather than changed, my impression of each of the eight candidates on stage. Which is usually what these debates do, but there’s always the odd night when somebody really makes a good impression or shoots themself in the foot. -Globally, the bad | Read More »
I confess: on some level, I like Jerry Brown. He’s one of those guys – like Pat Moynihan, Paul Tsongas or Bill Bradley – who really, truly and honestly believes in the goals of liberalism, yet is periodically honest enough to be blunt about its failures in the real world. He even studied to be a priest, way back when. One can argue, as Steven | Read More »
The Washington Post’s in-house left-wing activist, Greg Sargent, thinks he can convince you that he has a “gotcha” moment with Rick Perry’s recent book “Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington”: Rick Perry’s campaign is now distancing him from another controversial claim in his book: That we should repeal the 16th Amendment and replace it with a “Fair Tax,” a radical idea that’s | Read More »
Last weekend, Republicans waiting for the proverbial man on the white horse to ride in and save them from an unsatisfactory 2012 primary field got their answer, or at any rate the best answer they are likely to get: Texas Governor Rick Perry. And while Perry entered stage right, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, my previous choice among the announced candidates in the field, exited | Read More »
This anonymously-sourced report from The Hill, which clearly derives in good part from Republican sources, is pretty damning about President Obama’s leadership, if it turns out to be accurate: GOP aides and lawmakers, speaking on background, portrayed Boehner as the calm negotiator who repeatedly exasperated President Obama. Boehner last month asked the networks to televise his response to Obama’s address to the nation, a request | Read More »
So, a member of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors – Jeff Stone, a Republican – has proposed splitting the state of California, with San Diego and the largely rural, Republican-leaning south east of the state becoming “South California,” and LA remaining with the liberal coast and northern part of the state. You can follow the link to the LA Times for the map of | Read More »
You too can ask President Obama a question on Twitter, using the hashtag #askobama. Of course, the tiny fraction of those tweets to be answered will doubtless be carefully screened, and the answers vetted before posting them. I’d say Saturday Night Live should satirize this, but it already did, the last time something like this was tried as if it was a totally brand-new idea, | Read More »
Expecting consistency from left-wing political activists is folly, but rarely does one get such a glaring example as the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen on presidential “signing statements.” Watch, and your head will spin. During the Bush years, liberal commentators suddenly discovered that they didn’t like the longstanding practice of “signing statements” by which the President offered his own interpretation of legislation he was signing, in | Read More »
So often, the problem with the New York Times op-ed page is not just the left-leaning politics, but the poor quality of the contributors, despite the fact that they occupy some of the highest-paid and most-visible perches in the punditocracy. And the hallmark of poor quality punditry is the failure to think through the implications of one’s arguments. So it is with today’s column from | Read More »
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