Dana Goldstein

PEACE ALERT. The progressive blogosphere tends to greet talk of Dennis Kucinich‘s proposed “Department of Peace” with a sort of raised-eyebrow smile-and-nod. You know, how sweet. Can we please return to the scheduled programming? So imagine my surprise to learn in the pages of City Journal, best known as the champion of Giuliani-era reform in […]

OUR FAVORITE BUSH APPOINTEE. Bush père, that is. According to Jeffrey Toobin‘s upcoming book on the Supreme Court, Justice David Souter almost resigned from the Court in protest after Bush v. Gore, and was so distraught he would sometimes cry when recalling the case, the Washington Examiner‘s Yeas and Neas blog reports. Apparently Souter also […]

FAIR PAY ACT PASSES HOUSE. Congress today voted 225-199 to overturn the Supreme Court’s May ruling that all claims of pay discrimination must be filed within 180 days of the first pay check at a new salary. The House bill reverts to the accepted interpretation of the Civil Rights Act, in which each pay check […]

EDWARDS “HIDING BEHIND HIS WIFE.” Writing about Elizabeth Edwards‘ appearance at the BlogHer conference, Addie confesses that although she was turned off during the YouTube/CNN debate when John Edwards opposed gay marriage but said his wife supported it, she became an Elizabeth acolyte (and there are many) when she saw the prospective first lady in […]

WHO DESERVES TO VOTE? In his Los Angeles Times column, Jonah Goldberg plays a thought experiment in which all Americans, not only immigrants, would have to pass a civics test in order to gain the right to vote. Some more serious people suggest that voting should be mandatory, believing that if the “disenfranchised” — often […]

FORGET IRAN. How about a CIA proxy war in Pakistan? That’s what the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius suggests the United States do to root out al-Qaeda factions in the northwest Pakistani province of Waziristan. Intervening in another Muslim country is risky, to put it mildly. That’s why a successful counterinsurgency program would need Pakistani support […]

HILLARY AND OUTSOURCING. The Obama campaign fumbled badly in June when it attempted to make an issue of Hillary Clinton‘s ties to Indian businesses implicated in the outsourcing of American jobs, releasing a press release that identified her as (D-Punjab). Today the Los Angeles Times offers up a more analytical take on the Senator’s ties […]

JOE BIDEN, SECRETARY OF STATE? He’s certainly been impressively forthright in the debates, and as Helene Cooper reports in the New York Times, his plan to partition Iraq into Shiastan, Sunnistan, and Kurdistan is gaining traction in Washington. Cooper writes: Foreign policy analysts…pointed out that breaking up Iraq could cause bloodletting (as if that isn’t […]

HRC MUST BE PISSED… …at the childhood friend, John Peavoy, who handed over a cache of letters she wrote him in college to a New York Times reporter. An English professor at Scripps College in California, Peavoy says he’s not sure whether he’ll vote for Clinton (with whom he hasn’t spoken in decades) or Barack […]

BUSH V. CALIFORNIA. FBI Director Robert Mueller wasn’t the only one revealing fishy and potentially illegal Administration blunders yesterday. Testifying before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, Stephen L. Johnson, head of the EPA, declined to say whether the Transportation Department is lobbying against California’s proposed guidelines for cutting automobile carbon emissions […]