Sam Rosenfeld

IF IT’S APRIL 25th� It must be Malaria Awareness Day! About one million deaths each year are attributed to malaria, making it the number one killer of children under five years old in Africa. And the estimated 500 million people who contract malaria each year, but survive, exact a heavy burden on already impoverished health […]

POLITICAL BASEBALL. I had a mini-revelation last night while thinking about the way politics is reported and analyzed. It’s just like the way professional baseball is reported! Take this comment by James P. Pinkerton in his Newsday column: So here’s a question: If Bush is falling apart so dramatically that he is in danger of […]

EDWARDS ON DARFUR. John Edwards issued a pretty solid plan for addressing the Darfur crisis yesterday. If enacted, it would mark a significant departure from the current administration’s go-easy approach. (Which, if you hadn’t noticed, is failing miserably.) The Edwards plan is to basically use the full weight of American diplomacy to press Khartoum into […]

NO CONFIDENCE. A Senate staffer just told me that the chamber plans to hold a vote of no confidence on Alberto Gonzales … –Sam Rosenfeld

NO MURROW. Over at the Politico, Roger Simon takes us on a little trip down memory lane back to 1988, when Bernard Shaw dealt a crushing blow to the Dukakis candidacy by asking the Massachusetts governor, with the opening question of his final debate with George H. W. Bush, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped […]

THE DEFICIT-REDUCTION DEBATE. To follow up briefly on Ezra‘s post, whereas Brad DeLong‘s friend refers to Bob Kuttner “trashing Democrats” rather than “arguing about the future of a party” or “thinking about policies” or “discussing issues,” his piece on Robert Rubin does take on (among others) the substantive issue of balanced budgets, their role in […]

UNACCOUNTABLES. In the post below, J. writes: “Because Paul Bremer granted private contractors immunity from Iraqi laws in 2004 and because military laws don’t apply to civilians it is unclear if any laws at all apply to the private mercenaries.” For more on the legal no-man’s-land in which contractors reside, see Tara McKelvey‘s feature story […]

MCCAIN AND THE MEDIA. Greg Sargent points us to the McCain camp’s latest get-your-game-face-on claim about the negative press coverage of his hilarious Baghdad stroll. Says The New York Times, “some recent critical reporting by newspapers and television networks of Mr. McCain�s trip to Baghdad last week has paradoxically been clearly welcomed in the McCain […]

GETTING INTO THE GREEN ZONE. The bombing inside the Iraqi parliament building is worrisome news indeed. As Spencer says, No confirmation yet, but the initial reports from AP suggest it was a suicide bomber. If so — and even if the bomb was planted and detonated remotely — that means someone in a uniform had […]

CRAZY CHENEY. At Foreign Policy‘s blog, Blake Hounshell muses on whether or not Dick Cheney retains the upper hand in intra-Bush administration fights over foreign policy, mentioning today’s Washington Post piece about all these generals’ lack of interest in the awesome new “war czar” post, due to their belief that Cheney retains the reins and […]