Sam Rosenfeld

WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? Iraq, health care — I’ll let Matt and Ezra address the “important” issues. Meanwhile, what’s with the smear job The New Republic‘s latest cover illustration pulls on Anna Nicole Smith? Noam Scheiber�s actual article is about a go-getter lawyer named Tommy Goldstein and the democratization of Supreme Court litigation in the last […]

TO MARS? Another possible casualty of Tom DeLay‘s fall: The Bush administration’s baroque moon-then-Mars space exploration program. The mission to Mars, of course, became a fast joke after George W. Bush first unveiled it weeks prior to the 2004 State of the Union address and then failed to mention it in the actual speech, but […]

DELAY’S PALS. It’s worth reading through Mike Allen‘s extended interview with Tom DeLay. The Hammer’s explicit plea, “I’m not whining,” is especially amusing, coming as it does amidst thousands of words worth of burning resentments, bathetic self-pity, and paranoia. This passage, describing the process that led to his decision, caught my eye: I made a […]

THE HAMMER DROPS. Today’s big news, besides my winning the Prospect NCAA office pool, is, of course, Tom DeLay‘s withdrawal from his re-election race and announced plan to step down from office in a matter of weeks. Former aide Tony Rudy‘s guilty plea last week — with Ed Buckham almost sure to be next on […]

DEMOCRATS AND SECURITY. Two more brief notes related to the Democratic security plan. First, the Iraq material is, of course, some pretty thin gruel. The Dems’ position on Iraq involves calling for 2006 to be a “significant year of transition,” even though the party won’t have a chance to actually affect policy until (possibly) 2007 […]

THE VISION THING. Too many people too soon forgot about John Boehner‘s laugh-out-loud hilarious campaign manifesto released back during his House leadership race, in which the Ohio rep. included epigraphs from Winston Churchill and Walt Disney and implored his fellow Republicans to reclaim their souls through a renewed commitment to spewing vacuous platitudes. For a […]

“RED AMERICA”: BLUE AMERICA’S FAULT? Rob Anderson‘s effort to cast liberal elites as the real bad guys in the Ben Domenech scandal does indeed seem more than a bit strained. Anderson speculates that Jim Brady hired Domenech precisely because he was a crude, unqualified caricature of conservative punditry that Brady, fogged by blue state elitism, […]