Sam Rosenfeld

FALSE SENSE OF INSECURITY? Yesterday’s New York Times Week in Review piece about the state of the war on terrorism does the service of raising a notion and a possibility that no politician has found very useful to acknowledge: [F]ive years of evidence suggests that the terrorist threat within the United States is much more […]

DEBATING THE MIDDLE. If you haven’t yet, check out Dean Baker and Ruy Teixeira‘s contributions to the Rose–Mishel debate on the middle class. (There will be more next week.) Meanwhile, Jon Cohn has a piece today disputing Rose’s take on health care. And for all of you who can’t get enough of this stuff, it […]

“EVERY STINGRAY IS A VERY REAL AND PRESENT DANGER.” It was just last week, in his speech to the American Legion, that Donald Rumsfeld likened appeasement to “feeding a crocodile, hoping it would eat you last.” Then famed crocodile hunter Steve Irwin died — in a tragic, fluke run-in with a stingray. The Corner’s Cliff […]

BROWN HANDS. This ad is being run in the 13th Congressional District of North Carolina by the Republican candidate, a true whackadoo named Vernon Robinson. Please read the text as quoted carefully. It is almost word-for-word the text of the famous “black hands” ad that Jesse Helms threw up at the last minute against Harvey […]

COCOON, THE RETURN. In TNR‘s new Open University blog, Cass Sunstein has a post describing ideological amplification — the tendency of likeminded people to reinforce and intensify ideological positions when dissenting viewpoints aren’t included. David Greenberg follows up, applying the notion explicitly to the blogosphere and mentioning Sunstein’s old book Republic.com, which had warned that […]

FRODO’S FATE. Last week, philosophy doctoral student and ethical werewolf Neil Sinhababu argued against the conception of personhood and moral status advocated by Ramesh Ponnuru in his book The Party of Death. Neil concluded that to adopt Ponnuru’s outlook would be “to shrug at the enslavement of hobbits, the slaughter of kittens, and the destruction […]

THE WAGES OF MACACA. Elsewhere in TAP blogdom, Steve Benen and Brendan Nyhan both have analyses of the latest news regarding George Allen‘s race problems. They’re both worth reading, and also provide me with another chance to bring up this picture: That’s all. –Sam Rosenfeld

MCCAINIACS. On behalf of the rest of American journalism, I’d like to apologize for this. The profession lost its mind in 2000, with very unfortunate consequences. There was the War on Gore, which I witnessed first-hand when the vice president got heckled and booed by some of the people watching him on TV in the […]

YOU, SIR, ARE NO KARL. Just to chime in on the latest macacagate news, it’s worth noting that for all the fuss about Dick Wadhams being the next Karl Rove, he sure seems to have forgotten Rule #1 of campaign damage control: Either apologize completely and fully from the start, or don�t apologize at all. […]

MACACA FRACAS. Over at Midterm Madness, Steve Benen reports that George Allen finally decided to apologize to S.R. Sidarth yesterday — while leaving to his campaign manager the task of firing up the Republican base with a very different take on the whole matter. (Steve also flags a New York Times article that, by using […]