Jamelle Bouie

Andrew Sullivan has returned from his vacation to write a long — and excellent — blog post on the Obama administration’s embrace of George W. Bush‘s “blanket secrecy and protection of the national security apparatus from the rule of law.” Here is the core of Sullivan’s argument: The Bush executive is therefore now a part […]

(Time.com) Apparently, Mississippi governor — and presidential contender — Haley Barbour sees President Obama as a fundamentally mysterious and unquantified person: Barbour was asked by a reporter whether the Pew poll showed there was a coordinated misinformation campaign on the subject of religion by Oabama’s critics. “I don’t know why people think what they think. […]

In his latest New York Times piece on President Obama‘s unpopularity, Matt Bai continues to ignore the fact that there is an economy, and it isn’t very good: In proposing an economic package this week that includes spending $50 billion on roads, rail lines and other projects, President Obama opened the fall election season by […]

(White House) At Climate Progress, Joe Romm wonders why Barack Obama prioritized health care over climate change, and calls the choice “a blunder of historic proportions.” Kevin Drum comments with his take on the Obama administration’s process for choosing health care over climate: I’m just guessing here, but I’d say that Obama probably prioritized healthcare […]

Riffing off of the news that longtime Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is retiring, Matthew Yglesias briefly reflects “on the slight oddness of the American idea that the next Mayor of Chicago should be some other politician who happens to be from Chicago rather than some other mayor who’s done a good job.” As far […]

For those of us on the train for Senate reform, Elizabeth Drew‘s Politico piece is worth reading, as she offers a very strong — and very convincing — defense of the chamber’s status quo. The short of her argument is that reformers are vastly overstating the extent to which the body is paralyzed or “dysfunctional”; […]

Apparently, racial discrimination doesn’t exist for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals: Last month, for the third time and in the face of a 2006 rebuke from the United States Supreme Court, the federal appeals court in Atlanta said there were no racial overtones when a white supervisor called an adult black man “boy.” “The […]

Yesterday, Gen. David Petraeus condemned the planned book burning by right-wing Christians in Florida as harmful to American interests: Gen. David H. Petraeus on Tuesday denounced plans by a Florida church to burn copies of the Koran this weekend, saying the demonstration could ‘endanger troops’ and damage the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. ‘It is […]

To piggyback off of Tim‘s post, as much as I would love to believe this, it simply isn’t true: “I think this could be a seismic election,” Sen. McCain told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “But we’ve got to give Americans a reason to be for us, rather than just against the Democrats and […]

The big news to come out of Labor Day was President Obama‘s plan for a $50 billion government investment aimed at upgrading roads, rail, and airport runways over the next six years. This is a good idea, and on the whole, should have a net stimulative effect on the economy, though not by much. Of […]