Obama: Disloyal, Ruthless, Cold
Wednesday's column by Maureen Dowd, eviscerating President Obama for his shabby treatment of former White House Counsel Greg Craig and supporter Caroline Kennedy, is getting favorable responses from his supporters in the blogosphere. Only a year after he had helped Barack Obama get elected by eviscerating his close friend, Clinton White House colleague and Yale Law School classmate, Hillary Clinton, Craig ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 26, 2009 09:29
National Debt Hits $12 Trillion, Will Double By 2019
Barack Obama has been president for just under 10 months but he's added two trillion to the national debt and will double it by the end of the decade. CBS' Mark Knoller: This latest milestone in the ever-rising journey of the National Debt comes less than eight months after it hit $11 trillion for the first time. The latest high-point is ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 18, 2009 10:07
Obama Stonewalling Senate Fort Hood Investigation
President Obama is refusing to allow serving police, military, or intelligence officials to testify before the Senate investigation into the Fort Hood massacre. The first public congressional hearing on the Fort Hood attack will not include testimony from any current federal law enforcement, military or intelligence officials because the Obama administration "declined to provide any" such witnesses, according to a Senate ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 17, 2009 10:09
Roger Ailes for President?!
Topping Memeorandum is Mike Allen's wild speculation for Politico about a presidential run by Roger Ailes. Friends and associates are encouraging Fox News chief Roger Ailes to jump into the political arena for real by running for president in 2012, top sources tell POLITICO. "Ailes knows how to frame an issue better than anybody, and that's what we need now," says one ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 23, 2009 17:25
Fineman: Chicago Style Isn’t Working
Howard Fineman piles on to the burgeoning -- if thus far unfounded -- Obama overexposed and Obama fatigue memes with an uncharacteristically harsh column. In addition to contending Obama gives too many speeches with too little substance, her goes further: There is only so much political mileage that can still be had by his reminding the world that he is not George ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 28, 2009 14:53
Heckling the President
In his Daily Beast debut, Alex Massie rises in defense of Joe Wilson's outburst. No, not so much whether Obama was lying in this particular instance but rather the very notion that it's "inappropriate" to heckle the president. The whole piece is worth a read but here's a taste: Trivial though it may seem, this brouhaha highlights a great flaw ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 11, 2009 08:36
Shouting ‘Liar’ in a Crowded Congress
The big news surrounding President Obama's latest heathcare speech is that South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted "You lie!" in response to the claim that illegal immigrants would not be covered under universal coverage: AP ("Obama heckled by GOP during speech to Congress"): The nastiness of August reached from the nation's town halls into the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday as President ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on September 10, 2009 08:02
Congressional Revolution Needed?
Ezra Klein and Steve Benen are recirculating this somewhat interesting chart on political polarization in America by political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. Ezra argues that "this level of polarization makes it virtually impossible to govern in a system that is designed to foil majorities and require a constant three-fifths consensus. It's not good if the country ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 2, 2009 08:08
Krauthammer on Palin
Charles Krauthammer is getting a lot of attention for his observation on Fox' Special Report that Sarah Palin "is not a serious candidate for the presidency." As regular readers know, I think he's right on this score: She had to go home and study and spend a lot of time on issues in which she was not adept last year, and she ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 3, 2009 08:03
Obamas’ Expensive Night Out
The blogosphere is abuzz with news that the Obamas spent the afternoon relaxing in NYC. President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama landed in New York Saturday afternoon, and after taking a helicopter from JFK into Manhattan, drove up the West Side Highway, where the northbound lanes were shut down by police for their visit, past Ground Zero, into the Village for ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 31, 2009 09:01
Ending the Vice Presidency II
Jeremy Lott's attempted response to my response piece on "Ending the Vice Presidency" was, for some odd reason*, rejected altogether by my commenting system. Rather than pasting them into the comments of a post buried in the archives, I've done it below, with my original in blockquotes, followed by his retort in boldface, followed by my rejoinder, if any, in ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 26, 2009 06:59
Ending the Vice Presidency
Sunday's WaPo put together a collection of half-baked ideas by smart folks, designed to generate controversy and discussion more so than shed serious light on policy ideas. Thomas Ricks' suggestion to close the service academies and war colleges got the most attention, overshadowing the abject silliness of Jeremy Lott's column advocating doing away with the vice presidency, an idea not ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 22, 2009 09:13
Economist to Obama: ‘Lead, Dammit’
The editorial board at The Economist (which apparently considers itself a "newspaper" despite coming out weekly in magazine format) praises President Obama for having "already done some commendable things" in the foreign policy arena but charges that, domestically, "His performance has been weaker than those who endorsed his candidacy, including this newspaper, had hoped." They note that, after a euphoric ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 28, 2009 05:49
These Kids Today: Conservative Politics Over?
Paul Waldman fleshes out a theme that many observers have made in passing: The young voters who helped propel Barack Obama to the presidency could create a "permanent" realignment in American politics. In 1984, 59 percent of the nation's Alex P. Keatons voted for Reagan, an extraordinary percentage for a Republican (and just over his proportion of the popular vote ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 17, 2009 14:51
What’s Hillary Clinton’s Role?
In "Hillary Clinton's Job Description," I consider the steady stream of data pointing to an obvious conclusion: there's not much left for new Secretary of State to do. Clinton is a shrewd insider in the games of Washington and one presumes that she considered the possibility that her erstwhile opponent for the presidency was shunting her to State to prevent ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 11, 2009 09:17
