New Yorker Obama Terrorist Cover
The liberal blogs are in a tizzy about the cover of the July 21 New Yorker, an illustration by Barry Blitt which shows the Obamas in terrorist outfits, doing a fist bump with a big portrait of Osama bin Laden over their mantle with an American flag burning in the fireplace: Given that this is the liberal New Yorker and that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 14, 2008 07:18
Tony Snow Dies of Cancer
Tony Snow has died. He was only 53. CNN Breaking: Former White House press secretary Tony Snow has died at the age of 53 after a second battle with cancer. Snow, who had been undergoing chemotherapy treatments for a recurrence of the disease, left his White House job September. 14, 2007, and joined CNN as a conservative commentator. More from ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 12, 2008 07:37
Blog Linking Less Important?
Louis Gray believes the importance of blog linkage is declining, noting that, "I've seen traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search." He offers three likely explanations: 1. People are relying on aggregators to find them new sources of information, including ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 8, 2008 08:17
Iraqi Yellowcake Uranium Moved to Montreal
Saddam's supply of yellowcake has been secretly sold to a Canadian energy firm and flown safely to Montreal. The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program - a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium - reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 7, 2008 07:28
Al Qaeda in Iraq Defeated?
Al Qaeda in Iraq [AQI] is all but defeated, Marie Colvin reports for The Sunday Times. A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10. Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 6, 2008 07:56
Obama = Charismatic = Hitler = Armageddon
Arthur Silber is, as am I, fascinated by the cult of personality surrounding Barack Obama. He notes some anecdotal creepy gushing on a local radio show and then Reactions of this kind to Obama are fairly common. No, they are not this extreme much of the time, but such statements are far from unusual. And many of Obama's less obviously deluded ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 1, 2008 08:19
Obama Has Huge Lead in Another Poll
Barack Obama has a 12-point lead in the latest Bloomberg/LAT poll, giving those of us who thought the 15-point lead in last week's Newsweek poll was an outlier some pause. In a two-man race between the major-party candidates, registered voters chose Obama over McCain by 49% to 37% in the national poll, conducted Thursday through Monday. On a four-man ballot that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 25, 2008 07:27
Age More Important than Race: WaPo-ABC Poll
WaPo fronts a new poll they've commissioned in partnership with ABC News under the headline "3 in 10 Americans Admit to Race Bias Survey Shows Age, Too, May Affect Election Views." While it's somewhat surprising that nearly a third of Americans admit to "at least some feelings of racial prejudice" (30 percent of whites, 34 percent of blacks, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 22, 2008 07:44
Obama Has 15 Point Lead in Newsweek Poll
A Newsweek poll of registered voters shows Barack Obama with a whopping 15-point lead over John McCain, 51 to 36. Newsweek's Michael Hirsh is stoked. Barack finally has his bounce. For weeks many political experts and pollsters have been wondering why the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain had stayed so tight, even after the Illinois senator ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 21, 2008 08:38
Public Financing R.I.P.
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Congress tried to reform our system of financing political campaigns. They attempted to "get the money out of politics." They failed, miserably. So, too, did a long line of successive attempts. John McCain, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, earned the enmity of a large swath of his ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 20, 2008 12:03
Obama’s Prudent Inconsistency
If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Barack Obama is a wise man, indeed. He's changed his mind a lot lately. The latest example is NAFTA. After having campaigned in Ohio and elsewhere on the need to renegotiate our trade agreement with Canada and Mexico and excoriating Hillary Clinton for her long-time support ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 19, 2008 08:37
Barack Obama Channels Bill Cosby
Barack Obama gave a speech at a large black church in Chicago (no, not that one) yesterday. Appropriately enough, given that it was Father's Day, his subject was absent fathers, a subject he with which he has some familiarity. Addressing a packed congregation at one of the city’s largest black churches, Senator Barack Obama on Sunday invoked his own absent ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 16, 2008 07:18
Obama’s Baby Mama
Today's Manufactured Outrage of the Day* is that, on a mid-day Fox News program featuring Megyn Kelly and Michelle Malkin debating the impact of Michelle Obama on the race, the production assistant in charge of writing chyrons dubbed the would-be first Lady "Obama's Baby Mama." Apparently, this is a racial slur which suggests that she and Obama aren't ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 12, 2008 07:37
Obama, The Jewish Lobby, and the Perils of Web 2.0
One of Barack Obama's key advantages in building grassroots support, especially among young people usually not apt to vote, has been his innovative use of the latest Web techniques, including the integration of social networking technologies. Not only did he lap the field in getting "friends" on Facebook and MySpace but he actually hired the guy who invented Facebook ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 9, 2008 07:23
Barack Obama: Unilateralist?
Oliver Kamm makes a rather surprising criticism of Barack Obama: The problem with Obama is that he evinces little interest in the role of America's European allies. There is a paradox here. Obama makes much (as he did in a long essay in Foreign Affairs last year) of the need to "rebuild our ties to our allies in Europe and ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 6, 2008 07:57
