Garance Franke-Ruta

D.C., A CITY TOO SMALL FOR SECRETS. A friend points me to this item in the new LieberDem blog — I guess Joe Lieberman‘s backers finally decided to fight fire with fire, launching the blog on July 6 — by former Lieberman communications director Dan Gerstein: Of all the absurdities about the misguided campaign to […]

SPEAKING OF DATA… The Young Turks’ Cenk Uyger has an amusing post over at The Huffington Post where he points out that the median age of a viewer of Bill O’Reilley�s FOX News show is 71 years old. (Via The NYT.) So if you ever wondered which is the official newshour of cranky old men, […]

A TECHNICAL PSA. I know this will seem dreadfully behind the times to the more technically sophisticated readers of this blog, but since most journalists I know are not yet using RSS readers, I’d like to heartily recommend the technology. Not having an RSS feeder to help you manage your blogs in 2006 is almost […]

NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS. Says Danny Rubinstein in Haaretz: Israeli political sources said late last week that the aim of the military operations in the Gaza Strip and the detention of senior Hamas officials in the West Bank was to make clear to Hamas that the abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit will be […]

FOUND IT. Some readers were wondering why I asserted last week that blog readers were more likely to be based in California than in, say, swing congressional districts. And that since they can’t easily engage in local GOTV opportunities in such races, I argued that their actual electoral impact was somewhat lower than what their […]

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ORANGE ALERTS? Anyone else remember these? Funny how we’ve only had one elevation of the national threat level since President Bush was re-elected, and how the last such alert based on “new and unusually specific information about where al-Qaeda would like to attack” was lowered on November 10, 2004. Since then we’ve […]

A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE. Each person who opposes Joe Lieberman has their own theory of when the tide started to turn against him, and why, but I date it to the speech he gave at the National Press Club on August 4, 2003. Lieberman in 2003 pioneered a raft of negative criticisms later used […]

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SHUT WINDOW. Nir Rosen on how America missed the window of opportunity when withdrawal might have improved the situation on the ground in Iraq — and why it should leave, anyway: I supported a withdrawal certainly until 2005. In my articles, I was saying that an American withdrawal would […]

BEING THERE. Matt‘s dig at Michael Ledeen reminded me that I wanted to highlight this Ross Douthat item from a few weeks back about how Ledeen has never actually been to Iran, the country on which he claims unparalleled expertise: I don’t want to resurrect my ancient feud with Michael Ledeen or anything, but I […]

THE POLITICS OF PERSONALITY. There’s a fascinating new Gallup poll out today parsing the public’s views of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Surprise finding: Only 3 percent of Democrats dislike Clinton on account of her views on the Iraq War. The main reasons Democrats do object to Clinton are, instead, a perception that she’s wishy-washy or changes […]