A number of people have given kudos to Michael Grunwald‘s Time magazine piece, “How the Stimulus Is Changing America.” But there’s one piece of this that’s worth taking note of: [Joe] Biden himself always saw the Recovery Act as a test — not only of the new Administration but of federal spending itself. He knew […]
Paul Waldman
Paul Waldman is a weekly columnist and senior writer for The American Prospect. He also writes for the Plum Line blog at The Washington Post and The Week and is the author of Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.
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Leave Mitt Romney Alone!
Mitt Romney has a problem, which is that the portrait about him has already been written. Not only that, it’s the kind that can’t really be proved wrong. Let’s say you’re Sarah Palin, and part of the portrait about you is that you’re an utter ignoramus when it comes to things like policy, or things […]
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Defending a Constitution Under Attack
Shahid Buttar, a civil-rights lawyer and executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, talks about recent constitutional flare-ups.
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More GOP Liberalization.
That former Republican Party chairman and manager of George W. Bush‘s re-election campaign Ken Mehlman revealed that he is gay isn’t a surprise; as many have noted, Mehlman’s identity was widely known in Washington for some time. But what may be surprising is that the response from Republicans has been rather muted. The response from […]
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The GOP Finding Its Voice on Foreign Policy.
Greg Sargent argues that with the controversy over the Cordoba House, “the Cheney-ites are winning the battle over the future direction of GOP foreign policy.” If it’s true, it shouldn’t be too surprising. Within a complex party, particular issues are often ceded to the group that cares about them the most. And apart from a […]
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A Tea Party Backlash Within the GOP?
Is the Tea Party the new religious right? By which I mean, the grassroots group the GOP uses to mobilize voters, then once in office, keeps serving up symbolic expressions of love without much to show in the way of actual policy goodies, while hoping to keep the crazies under wraps. The fact is that […]
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Bloggers, Taxes, and City Budgets.
You may have heard about this crazy story from Philadelphia, in which the city is sending letters to bloggers, demanding that they pay a $300 “business privilege tax” because of their income from blogging. This rang a chord with me, because a few years ago, long after I had moved to D.C., I got a […]
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Chaff Production at All-Time High.
(Flickr/Zawesome) Paul Carr of Techcrunch makes a bold move (particularly for someone who writes for a tech blog) and shuts down all of his social media accounts except for Twitter. And yeah, that kind of defeats the purpose, but the reason for doing this is that he feels that he’s been losing his posterity: social […]
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Return of the Hard Hats.
When I opened my copy of The New York Times this morning, I saw this photo, in which a bunch of burly looking guys in hard hats are protesting the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan. Hard hats — now where have we seen that before? Well, we saw it during the 1960s, when the Nixon […]
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Getting Government out of Your Eggs ‘n Salmonella.
As you’ve no doubt heard, a recent salmonella outbreak in eggs sickened more than 1,300 people and led to a recall of half a billion eggs. Why wasn’t the government doing more to prevent this kind of thing? Well, here’s a clue, in an article from 2007: The federal agency that’s been front and center […]
