Garance Franke-Ruta

THE O’BAMA THING. Barack Obama has joked for years that people in Chicago voted for him because they thought his name was “O’Bama.” Now comes word in The New York Sun that he does, in fact, have Irish ancestry: So it turns out, the Daily Telegraph reports from Dublin, that Barack Obama’s great-great-great-great grandfather was […]

MUST READ OF THE DAY. In the latest issue of The Washington Monthly (via Kevin Drum), Phillip Longman provides a brilliant critique of the health-coverage-centric worldview that the also talented Jonathan Cohn lays out in his new book, Sick. Though Longman barely reviews Cohn’s book, he’s written what is easily one of the most important […]

THE EMERGING ANTI-OBAMA INDUSTRY. Over at my other blog, I noticed that Human Events magazine is flacking a massive “expose” on Barack Obama. In the past month, whenever I’ve written about Obama on my site, which has a Google AdSense account, a link to HumanEvents.com promising “Barack Obama Exposed Check out this FREE special report […]

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. People sometimes like to argue that gender has no impact on how candidates approach women’s issues, and that all the Democrats are equally good and knowledgeable on reproductive rights topics. I present to you Bill Richardson, as described by Mark Kleiman, at the California Democratic Party 2007 Convention over the weekend: Richardson…just […]

THE EXODUS. Baghdad Burning author and Iraqi blogger Riverbend, who has chronicled the war for the past three-and-a-half years, has announced that she plans to join the refugee exodus from the still war-torn state: On a personal note, we’ve finally decided to leave. I guess I’ve known we would be leaving for a while now. […]

JOKER’S WILD. John McCain jokes — again — about war: Republican presidential contender John McCain dismissed a demand by a prominent House Democrat that he apologize to U.S. troops in Iraq for making a joke about an explosive device, saying critics should “lighten up.” In an appearance Tuesday night on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show […]

HIGH LIEBERMANISM. Did Joe Lieberman just call the Democratic leadership pawns of al-Qaeda? In today’s Washington Post he writes: When politicians here declare that Iraq is “lost” in reaction to al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks and demand timetables for withdrawal, they are doing exactly what al-Qaeda hopes they will do, although I know that is not their […]

LOSING A WAR THAT’S WORTH WINNING. The evening news broke of David Halberstam‘s death, my mother, who had done some work with his then-wife, Polish actress Elzbieta Czyzewska, in 1967, wrote me with this recollection: They gave a big party one night where I talked politics with H. and he said about Vietnam, �This war […]

REAL CASH. To follow up on Kay‘s item, it’s worth pointing out that the amount of money women lose to gender inequality is quite a bit higher on a per-person basis than the amounts politicians normally talk about when they promise even generous middle-class tax relief. A full-time year-round female employee whose salary, 10 years […]

LEDEENISM BACKFIRES IN IRAN. Laura Secor reports that Iranian regime-change advocate Michael Ledeen‘s writings are being used as a pretext to crack down on civil society reformers in Iran: The reform era, Amir explained to me, may not have accomplished all Iranians had hoped it would in terms of structural political change. But it had […]