Garance Franke-Ruta

THE PLAME-IRAN CONNECTION. Kevin wonders what’s up with David Shuster‘s assertion that Valerie Plame was working on Iran issues while undercover at the CIA. In today’s Washington Post chat, Tom Edsall reports that Walter Pincus is on the case, so I suspect we will all have answers soon enough: Washington, D.C.: MSNBC reported last night […]

BUSH V. NIXON. Via Kevin Drum, Jonathan Schwarz at Tiny Revolution graphs the approval and disapproval ratings of George W. Bush and Richard Nixon. The similarity of their trajectories doesn’t bode well for Bush’s effort to revive his presidency, although the graphs also make it very clear that Bush did benefit politically, at least in […]

GLOBALIZING THE WOMB. Thanks to an eye-opening Los Angeles Times article yesterday, you can add “reproductive tourism” to the list of words you never thought you’d hear yoked together. It’s not just call centers going to India — now American couples are apparently turning to Indian women to act as surrogate mothers, and at a […]

A REAL WHITE HOUSE SNOW JOB. Unless President Bush wants to face headlines cracking jokes about “snow jobs” and “getting snowed” for the next three years, selecting FOX News’ Tony Snow to be the new White House spokesman doesn’t seem like the best idea. I don’t particularly think the identity of the White House spokesman […]

VOTER TARGETING VS. MOVEMENT BUILDING. One of the peculiarities of this moment in progressive movement building is the way progressive interest groups are being asked to put aside their interests in favor of building a smooth, unified political party that can win elections at the very moment that some rather compelling evidence has begun to […]

TODAY’S MUST READ ON IRAN. A great deal of ink has been spilled on Iran of late, but very little of it on proposing any kind of US action other than engagement through the United Nations or (futile and probably self-destructive) air strikes. Slate‘s Fred Kaplan has started to close that gap, arguing: The military […]

THE GREAT MCCAIN DIVIDE. Looking at the various defenses of John McCain coming from centrist and liberal writers over the past few weeks and discussed by Matt and Ezra below, I think what we’re seeing is the emergence of a new opinion fault line that McCain will have trouble crossing in 2008: the divide between […]

THE POWER OF SOCIAL CAPITAL. I suspect most readers of this site are not regular readers of The Wall Street Journal‘s Weekend Edition — I know I’m not — so I want to highly recommend the paper’s Saturday front-pager “Illegal at Princeton” if you can find a copy or subscribe online. The tale of Dan-el […]

THE ORIGINS OF THE ARTICLE. My first thought upon reading Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer‘s article about “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” was that if they were going for maximal controversy, they’d missed the moment of greatest potential impact by several years. Their description of an expansionist Israel dominated by the Likud was […]

MITT ROMNEY CHANNELS JOHN EDWARDS. This is a bit of an old story already, but I think it’s still worth noting for the historical record, since I haven’t seen it noted elsewhere, that John Edwards, not Mitt Romney, was the first presidential candidate to propose making health insurance mandatory. Romney’s just the first to get […]