Politics
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Culture of Deception
I caught the last half of the Fitzgerald press conference yesterday, and the first thing you have to say is how dramatically he contrasts with Ken Starr. This guy is not a sanctimonious ideologue on a mission from God. He’s not somebody with an axe to grind. He exudes integrity, and he’s the kind of
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Plamegate Endgame
I haven’t had much to say about all this because I thought I would just let it play out. What’s to say that hasn’t been endlessly said? But if it turns out that these thugs get their just desserts, will that be a schadenfreude moment for me? Hardly. I’m worried. It just seems that the
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Taking Your Eye off the Ball
Here’s a followup piece to the "Intexification" post I put up last week. It’s an excerpt from a Lee Drutman post at TomPaine: For those trying to make sense of President Bush’s decision to nominate Harriet Miers to the supreme Court, here’s a question: What do Miers and John Roberts have in common, besides the
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Hillary in ’08?
The conventional wisdom is that she’s the front runner. For me the prospect is appalling, and reinforces why I feel so alienated from the prevailing mentality of the Democratic Party–but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. Anybody want to argue for or against? How do people feel about Gore making a second go of it?
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Dems’ Chances in ‘O6?
Micah in his comment on my "What’s Next?" post today makes me wonder what others think. How many of you think the Dems can reclaim the House in ’06? Are Bush’s dismal approval ratings relevant in local races? Or is the local culture and the strength of the particular candidates more important? Or are things
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What’s Next?
Those of you who have been reading my posts over the last two years know that I am no great defender of the Democrats. I want very badly to support a progressive politics, but I have a hard time seeing the Democrats as the vehicle for achieving that. They are deeply, deeply implicated in the
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Barack Speaks Some Sense.
Here’s an excerpt from a Barack Obama diary at DKos in which he challenges the doctrinaire leftism you typically find there: I am not drawing a facile equivalence here between progressive advocacy groups and right-wing advocacy groups. The consequences of their ideas are vastly different. Fighting on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable is
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The DeLay/Rove Oligarchy Unraveling?
Check out Sidney Blumenthal’s Salon piece today about the end of the Rovean empire, which supplements what I said in my post earlier today. He thinks Rove and DeLay have overreached. Maybe so. But the trend toward a crony capitalist oligarchy is not just about these two thugs. They’ve just been riding the wave, and
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What if Al Gore Invaded Iraq?
Saturday, October 1, 2005 Fischer remarked that, after September 11, the American officials could have come to Europe (meaning France and Germany) and proposed a vast strategic campaign to transform the larger Middle East, beginning with Afghanistan, and proceeding to Iraq, and including a Palestinian-Israeli settlement. If the Americans had proposed such a thing, and