Politics
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Cheney Assessed
Josh Marshall: This is an extremely gullible man who has just come off being the driving ideological force in an administration that most people can already see produced more fiascos and titanic, self-inflicted goofs than possibly any in our entire history. By any standard the guy is a monumental failure — and not one whose
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Obama @ Notre Dame II
Ivan Kenneally @ Postmodern Conservative: As I argue in my essay, America is particularly emblematic both of modernity’s debts to Christianity and its frequent attempts to resist any acknowledgment of these debts—the historical disputes over the Lockean or Thomistic nature of the American founding expresses itself in our theoretical disputes regarding the relationship between morality
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A Moderate Defined
Someone who finally understands what's going on when it's at least a year too late. A moderate, because he is always trying to split the difference, because he has no real point of view except as it has been defined reactively by others, the extremists (those who have a consistent, thought-out point of view), is
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Quote of the Day
The most conservative critique of Obama is coming from the “left” of his party – from those concerned to uphold the constitution and the rule of law who are alarmed with his partial adherence to Cheneyesque notions of executive power and secrecy. By commenter AlanDownunder @ Eunomia talking about how conservatives are not really conservatives
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Obama @ Notre Dame
I may have more to say about it when I have more time, but I just wanted to connect it to the insider/outsider theme I've been developing recently. Here's the thing: Obama is great when he's talking to us outsiders. He doesn't seem to be that great when dealing with insiders. Talking about a controversial
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State of the Union
In Frank Capra's 1948 Tracy/Hepburn film, "State of the Union", the charismatic, straight-talking political phenom Grant Matthews, played by Tracy, at the end of a campaign swing comes back to his home town and he's confronted with the fact that those who know him don't recognize him anymore. He was no longer the person they
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Pelosi & Torture
Josh Marshall: The whole point of this storm about Pelosi is that her critics want her to be embarrassed and stop supporting a Truth Commission or any sort of examination of what happened. But she's not. She still says there should be an investigation. Her critics still want the book closed. That says it all.
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The Torture Pictures (Updated)
If it's inevitable that they'll come out, and it is, why would Obama do this one-eighty in refusing to release them knowing that his doing so would alienate almost everybody who really want to get this sordid torture chapter behind us? I don't believe for a moment that the real calculus here is that it
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The Way It Is
Greenwald this morning: The Senate that is refusing to confirm Dawn Johnsen is the same Senate that confirmed Gen. Michael Hayden as CIA Director — with overwhelming Democratic support — even after it was revealed that he oversaw Bush's illegal NSA spying program. It's the same Senate that confirmed Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General —
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“Manufacturing Consent” and Obama’s X-Factor (Updates 1 & 2)
Walter Lippmann coined the term "manufacture of consent" back in the WWI era, and Chomsky wrote a book about it. Lippmann thought that the mass electorate had to be governed by experts or elites who understood the issues in a way that ordinary citizens could not. And he thought that the mass public, because it