Documents Link Ivins to Anthrax Attacks
Documents released today by the government offer some strong circumstantial evidence linking Army scientist Bruce Ivins to the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people. Army scientist Bruce Ivins had sole custody of highly purified anthrax spores with "certain genetic mutations identical" to the poison that killed five people and rattled the nation in 2001, according to documents unsealed Wednesday in ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on August 6, 2008 15:37
Enforcing Civility in Blog Comments
Alan Jacobs: "Nothing could better justify Ross’s decision to start moderating comments on his blog than the comments on the announcement itself." For those who don't click links, Ross Douthat has announced that, "From now on, one of the Atlantic's crack interns will be going through the comment threads at the end of every business day, deleting any comments that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 17, 2008 06:45
Goldfarb and McCain
Yesterday's announcement that Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb is taking a leave of absence "to serve as deputy communications director of the McCain campaign" has been greeted with surprising interest from bloggers across the political spectrum. Just sampling those in my RSS reader: Radley Balko points out that "Goldfarb has written (falsely, by any reasonable reading of the Constitution, Federalist ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 3, 2008 08:10
Racist Morons
Tim F. offers the "Deep thought of the day" that "any honest discussion of race will inevitably reveal that some people are honestly racist morons." The corollary, of course, is that there will be widespread disagreement on whose these people are. For every Glenn Greenwald reader who thinks the description aptly fits Glenn Reynolds, there will be a Glenn Reynolds ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 24, 2008 11:22
Obama’s Speech: Poisoning the Well
One of the major strains of reaction to Barack Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech is that those who are not persuaded by it are therefore racist or at least unreasoning fools. Poisoning the well in this manner may be an effective rhetorical device but it undercuts the very message of the speech, which is that race remains a very ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 19, 2008 10:21
John McCain ‘Honored’ To Receive Endorsement From Bigot
Yesterday, John McCain announced that he was "honored" to receive the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, a Texas-based preacher who can probably be most charitably described as "pro-Apocalypse". McCain lavished praise on him for being "pro-Israel", but as Sarah Posner (via Matthew Yglesias) points out, what he actually stands for is the destruction of Israel in order to facilitate ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on February 29, 2008 12:14
Judge Orders Kucinich Included in Nevada Debate (UPDATED)
Dennis Kucinich sued to force NBC to include him in MSNBC's Nevada debates and Senior Clark County District Court Judge Charles Thompson has issued an injunction ordering that he be included. NBC promises to appeal. On the merits, I don't see how Kucinich has a case. The basis on which a state judge could issue an order to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on January 15, 2008 07:54
Republicans Love Barack Obama - For Now
George Will closes a subpar (by his standards, at least) column on the silly populism of Mike Huckabee and John Edwards with this praise for Barack Obama: Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee -- ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on January 6, 2008 08:11
Peggy Noonan on John Edwards’ Hair Poofing
Peggy Noonan sizes up the presidential field for "Reasonable Person" qualities and passes all of the major candidates except Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Her reasoning on Clinton is, frankly, unreasonable: Because she's polarizing, she wouldn't be able to rally the nation in a crisis. By that standard, of course, the current president isn't "reasonable," either. This is ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on December 28, 2007 10:56
Demonizing Ahmadinejad
University of Michigan Middle East scholar Juan Cole argues that the demonization of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is misguided and part of a right wing propaganda campaign to agitate for another war. Critics have also cited his statements about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse. He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on September 25, 2007 07:48
