Sam Rosenfeld

GOOD CALL! I think Dick Durbin has the right idea in his suggestion for a possible replacement for Alberto Gonzales: The White House yesterday denied reports that a search for a new attorney general had begun, and Bush called Gonzales in an expression of confidence. Yet Democrats did not shy away from discussing the qualifications […]

BUSH: REAGAN REDUX. In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman writes: As the Bush administration sinks deeper into its multiple quagmires, the personality cult the G.O.P. once built around President Bush has given way to nostalgia for the good old days. The current cover of Time magazine shows a weeping Ronald Reagan, and declares that […]

LIVING HISTORY. Glenn Greenwald has some fun discussing President Bush‘s recent luncheon with some neoconservative historians and scholars (and pseudo-scholars). Speaking of historians, a huge swath of the profession has been fighting the president for years over a 2001 executive order that gives presidential administrations (including this one, of course) broad discretion to withhold the […]

ALL THE ATTORNEYS. Just to clarify and revise a bit, Jeff and commenters here both compel me to say that asking for the resignations of all U.S. attorneys at once (as Harriet Miers is said to have contemplated doing) is actually in itself neither unprecedented nor scandalous, particularly following a change in administration or new […]

“NOT EVEN WAITING FOR IGLESIAS’S BODY TO COOL.” Big, big stories in the Times and the Post today detailing the White House’s involvement in the U.S. attorney firings (and the fact that Alberto Gonzolez‘s chief of staff, um, resigned yesterday). Read the Post piece especially, and see the comments from Drum, Kleiman, and Marshall. I’m […]

GUILTY ON FOUR COUNTS. Libby verdict is in. –Sam Rosenfeld

PRODUCTIVE. Over at Beat the Press today, Dean has two posts about productivity — one on misconceptions about the relative levels in U.S. vs. Europe, the other on the U.S.’s recent productivity slowdown — that are worth a look. –Sam Rosenfeld

WANK 2 D XTREME. I’d be inclined to go a bit easy on Richard Cohen re. Al Gore, if only because some of the examples culled by Media Matters could generously be described as Cohen defending Gore in a singularly unhelpful and damaging way. But since Cohen is responsible for the craziest damned Gore/Bush column […]

FIND BETTER EXAMPLES, PLEASE. David Greenberg, who’s a really smart guy and TAP contributor, makes the case for letting Scooter Libby walk in the latest New Republic. Because liberals are “supposed to be champions of the First Amendment and foes of overzealous prosecutors,” he argues, they should have avoided “partaking in some hypocrisy of their […]

INTERFERENCE. Regarding the reports that the United States continues to actively discourage Israel from engaging with Syria, it’s worth re-reading this Jo-Ann Mort piece from late July, “The Roadblock to Damascus.” The roadblock in question was, of course, the United States. –Sam Rosenfeld