NOTHING INEVITABLE ABOUT IT.Roger Lowenstein's review of Jacob Hacker's The Great Risk Shift in this weekend's NY Times was a surprisingly myopic and -- in the old, populist sense -- elitist piece of writing. His review is hampered, to be sure, by fundamental misreadings of Hacker, but the most glaring deficiency is a blase, even bored attitude towards the woes and worries of those below him on the income ladder.
HOT OFF THE PRESSES: THE NOVEMBER PRINT ISSUE. There remain too many Tapped readers out there who aren't subscribers to The American Prospect. That's a problem. The release of our November print issue might provide a nice occasion to reconsider this unfortunate state of affairs.
TALKING TO IRAN AND SYRIA. The momentum is building for the U.S. to start talking to Iran and Syria over the fate of Iraq. The latest: apparently the British Foreign Office backs the Baker-Hamilton Commission (a.k.a. the Iraq Study Group) in talking to the Iranians and Syrians. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is also on board. There is more at play here than just Iraq, however.
THE DOUG FEITH WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. From Mike Rubin and Andy McCarthy over at The Corner and Eli Lake of The New York Sun comes word of a truly bizarre NRSC NRCC attack on a Democratic candidate for the PA-10, Chris Carney.
TO RODHAM OR NOT RODHAM. I've very much bought into the John-McCain-is-unbeatable interpretation of contemporary American politics, so I'm glad to see this poll assuring me that my predictive abilities are absolute shite and that Hillary would pound the guy. CNN's reportage of their own poll, however, must be among the worst analyses I've ever seen:
If presidential elections were held today, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would likely have a comfortable edge over Sen. John McCain, but take away her maiden name and McCain has a better shot of landing in the Oval Office.
ONE LAST BIT ON OBAMA. On the plus side for his national ambitions, I'm fairly certain that, were he to get elected, his eventual presidential memoirs would be the best since Ulysses S. Grant. The man can write.
Georgetown students attending the lecture had questions not only about Scalia�s views on education, but on hot topics such as the sale of medicinal marijuana, campaign finance reform and censorship of high school newspapers.
WHEN THERE'S NO ONE LEFT TO SWIFTBOAT.Piercementioned this last week, but it deserves all the attention it can get. Kevin Tillman, U.S. Army Ranger and brother of fallen American hero Pat Tillman, joins the ranks of the shrill:
Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.
Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.
DON'T TAKE IT FROM ME. My latest piece for New York Times Select (sorry, subscription req�d.) looks at the geography of the coming electoral storm of 2006. Some key graphs on the House side of the equation:
Blizzard is the most applicable term for the brewing cataclysm. Why? Because if Mother Nature sweeps a new Democratic majority -- or two -- into power in Washington, the disproportionate share of Republican defeats will occur in the Rust Belt states of the Northeast-Midwest corridor.
Coupled with isolated twisters in the Plains and a few Western earthquakes, what you have is the formula for a Republican natural disaster north of the Mason-Dixon Line�.
