Garance Franke-Ruta

The New Republic argues in a staff editorial this week that Bill Richardson should drop out of the presidential contest and concentrate on becoming the Senator from New Mexico now that G.O.P. Sen. Pete Domenici has announced plans to retire at the end of his term in 2008. I couldn’t disagree more. Given how well […]

Julie Bosman had an interesting piece in The New York Times yesterday about the way online media, blogs, and online organizing are playing a much less prominent role in Iowa than they are elsewhere. In particular, she noted a survey that found that “only about 7 percent [of likely caucus-goers] visited candidate pages on the […]

Matt Yglesias says he finds himself struggling to “convey how terrified I am of the prospect of a Rudy Giuliani presidency in terms of its impact on our foreign policy.” As I’ve watched the Giuliani campaign build a foreign policy team, it’s occurred to me that the easiest way to understand the entire Giuliani phenomenon […]

The libertarian magazine Reason holds a monthly happy hour here in Washington, which I stopped by once a few years ago. It was at a smoky bar (this was before the city banned smoking in bars), and the room was packed with a crowd that appeared to consist of approximately 92 men and, uh, me. […]

I want to somewhat belatedly respond to Kevin Drum‘s response to my post on Barack Obama‘s missing the vote on the Kyl-Lieberman amendment to the Defense Authorization bill, which passed the Senate 76-22, with Obama and John McCain as the only absences. Drum, in response to my contention that the Obama campaign’s efforts to paint […]

I read this Noam Scheiber item on The Plank with interest, as Noam’s been on a bit of a roll lately with his campaign analysis, and earlier got the diagnosis of the problems with the Barack Obama and John Edwards campaign exactly right. But one thing that seriously undermines Obama’s case for his judgment in […]

Readers of my other blog will know that I have a long-standing interest with gastro-politics, which is the foodie way of saying the pernicious impact of our farm policies on our national health and budget, not to mention the taste of tomatoes. And so I am pleased to note that today Oxfam, known mainly for […]

The Washington Post has much more on the leak of the Al Qaeda video, including the apparently direct line from the SITE Institute through the White House to Fox News: She spoke first with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, whom she had previously met, and then with Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president […]

Just in case all the media cocks crowing about Hillary Clinton‘s alleged “cackle” didn’t adequately send the message that the first serious female presidential candidate in American history will be, by many men’s pens, constantly yoked to an archetypically evil female character from the superstitious, pre-Enlightenment past, Matt Drudge makes the connection plain today by […]

The New York Sun‘s Eli Lake reports today that the private intelligence group that had penetrated Al Qaeda’s intranet — and yes, the terrorist group has an intranet, named Obelisk — is accusing the Bush administration of leaking the video they sent it and thereby compromising one of America’s clearest views into the heart of […]