Sam Rosenfeld

HACKERY UNBOUND. You’ll have to search far and wide for more egregiously hackish behavior than that engaged in this week by the chairmen of the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, respectively. These guys are real tributes to their posts. –Sam Rosenfeld

THE REPORT. Keep scrolling through TPM Muckraker for some choice excerpts from and analysis of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee’s final report (PDF) on Jack Abramoff‘s Indian tribe shenanigans. As has been noted, committee chair John McCain had been quite careful in steering this investigation away from intensive looks into the actions of sitting members […]

WEIRD LEDE OF THE DAY. The Hill takes the prize: When Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter stepped into the shower yesterday, it was an elusive immigration overhaul, not a slippery bar of soap, that he most hoped to keep within his grasp. Potent imagery, I suppose. –Sam Rosenfeld

IDEAS, FIRST PRINCIPLES, THE PHILOSOPHY GAP, ETC. To add to the pushback against liberal “ideas” hype, I recommend reading Greg Anrig‘s post as well as Alan Wolfe‘s essay in the latest Washington Monthly. Neither actually make arguments against the transcendent relevance of big ideas to political parties, but they both make a refreshingly obvious point […]

AT LAST, SOME SENSE. So House Republicans have opted to nix any real chance of passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill this year in favor of holding purely political hearings on border security in select regions this summer. That makes some sense. The way the immigration fight (largely among Republicans) has unfolded this year — […]

HIGHLY EXPLICABLE. It’s a small point, but one passage in the aformentioned National Review article made me laugh out loud: If Republicans want credit for spending restraint, they also should have some high-profile program eliminations. Corporate welfare presents obvious targets. It seems inexplicable that Republicans haven�t taken up this issue despite the fact that every […]

ADVICE, GOOD AND BAD. The latest National Review cover story by Kate O’Beirne and Rich Lowry offers a blueprint for Republicans to save their congressional majorities. Much of their advice, I think, is actually (unfortunately) pretty sound, including their forthright endorsement of the renewed GOP efforts to make a lot of noise about security issues […]

THE IRAN OVERTURE. Yesterday, Kevin Drum mentioned a Washington Post article recounting the contents of a secret 2003 letter to the United States from Iranian officials putting a huge slew of issues on the table for direct negotiation (nukes, recognition of Israel, etc.). Drum notes that the Post buried the article. I’ll just note, again, […]

THE DEVIL READS TAP. Dig the plug for our fair magazine in the opening graf of this New York Times article on the new movie version of The Devil Wears Prada. The concerned father described in the piece seems to be operating under a couple of notable misimpressions about relative status and prestige in the […]

MORE NAME THING. This is a bit late, but regarding the wide array of florid names deployed to describe our terrorist enemies, I did just want to note for the record that nobody is more impressive than Marshall Wittman in playing this game. The man puts in effort — a term like “fascist Jihadism” is […]