Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
Jonah Goldberg has sparked a minor blogospheric furor for a recent column in which he castigated Barack Obama, John McCain, and others for promoting a compulsory national service program, which he compared to slavery. There’s a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of [...]
Ezra Klein believes a recent NYT Magazine profile of Rush Limbaugh is a “puff piece.” He lists, for example, Rush’s “presidential platform” as published: 1. Open the continental shelf to drilling. Ditto the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax. 3. Privatize Social Security. 4. Give parents school vouchers to break [...]
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 [...]
A bizarre story in the London Telegraph, “Toddlers who dislike spicy food ‘racist,’” is getting some play, thus far only from conservative blogs. The National Children’s Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents [...]
John McCain is promising to balance the budget in his first term: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to promise on Monday that he will balance the federal budget by the end of his first term by curbing wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs, including Social Security, his advisers told Politico. [...] “In the long-term, the [...]
A WaPo editorial takes the Supreme Court to task for a significant error in a recent decision: There was quite a goof in the court’s 5 to 4 decision on June 25 banning the death penalty for those who rape children. The majority determined that capital punishment for child rape was unconstitutional, in part because [...]
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 [...]
Happy Independence Day! I don’t know about my OTB colleagues but I’ll be taking the rest of the day off, honoring the sacrifices made by the Founders by sitting around watching television, grilling and consuming meat products, and drinking beer with family and friends. Some things to keep you occupied until my return: “Putting The [...]
Barack Obama gave a speech yesterday in which he said there was some flexibility in his plan, touted throughout the Democratic primary season, to withdraw combat troops from Iraq within 16 months followed by another speech in which he explained that he meant no such thing. Michael Cooper and Jeff Zeleny have a solid summary [...]
Shaun Mullen wonders “Why Are Right-of-Center Bloggers So Silent On Torture?” He searched high and low and could find no right-of-center bloggers who made any mention at all, for example, of yesterday’s NYT story “China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo.” I’d note that Andrew Sullivan wrote roughly 600 posts on the subject yesterday, including this one, [...]
John McCain has reshuffled his top campaign staff for the second time is a less than a year, elevating Karl Rove protégé Steve Schmidt to the top post. Responding to Republican concerns that his candidacy was faltering, Mr. McCain put a veteran of President Bush’s 2004 campaign in charge of day-to-day operations and stepped away [...]
The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live tonight from 7-8 Eastern. Dave Schuler and will be joining me tonight to talk about diplomacy in Iran, the dumbing of the presidency, the power of Google, and various other topics. Dumbing the Presidency Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Blogs Iranian Nukes [...]
The Manufactured Outrage of the Day comes to us from Joe Stephens and his page A3 piece for today’s Washington Post, “Obama Got Discount on Home Loan.” Shortly after joining the U.S. Senate and while enjoying a surge in income, Barack Obama bought a $1.65 million restored Georgian mansion in an upscale Chicago neighborhood. To [...]
Rush Limbaugh isn’t going to have any trouble affording good cigars, having just re-upped with Clear Channel through 2016 for $400 million, including a $100 million signing bonus. And you thought pro athetes got paid a lot. Said to be Limbaugh’s most lucrative deal ever by far, the new agreement runs through 2016 and includes [...]
Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence, and John Sides have collaborated on a paper, still in late draft stages, entitled “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics.” A PDF of the working copy is available here. Henry reports that, [B]log readers seem to exhibit strong homophily. That is to say, they overwhelmingly choose [...]
Thomas Schaller, the author of Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South, argues that the notion that Barack Obama has a good chance of winning Southern states because he’ll energize black turnout is based on fallacious reasoning. The first myth is that African-American turnout in the South is low. Black voters are [...]
Jim Geraghty is not buying the notion that Wes Clark’s attempts to diminish John McCain’s military service was done without coordination with the Democratic Powers that Be. After statements by a half-dozen high-profile Democrats and Obama surrogates, you cannot persuade me that there is not a concerted effort on the part of Obama Democrats to [...]
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 [...]
John McCain’s Truth Squad, formed a few months ago in order to respond to charges by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth clone Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain, is prominently featuring an actual member of the Swifties as a spokesman, CNN’s Rebecca Sinderbrand reports. One of the members of John McCain’s new Truth Squad — which [...]
Some Obama supporters are apparently taking advantage of Google’s terms of service to silence anti-Obama blogs, Simon Owens of Bloggasm reports. The company automatically shuts down sites upon receipt of TOS violation claims until they’re able to do a human audit, a rather slow process with given little priority on the free BlogSpot service. After [...]
Steve Tuttle takes to the pages of Newsweek to proclaim the ascendency of Appalachia as the decider of the next president. “Hick.” “Hillbilly.” “Redneck.” “Inbred.” “Cracker.” “Ridge Runner.” I heard and self-effacingly used them all when I left the mountains of Appalachia to attend college in the great metropolis of Williamsburg, Va., in the ’80s. [...]
The latest mini-scandal in Campaign 2008 is that the McCains have apparently not done a good job keeping track of their finances. HuffPo has gotten 1420 Diggs at this writing with a story headlined “McCains Defaulted On Home Taxes For Last Four Years, Newsweek Reports.” It promises “a highly embarrassing report.” Newsweek has delivered with [...]
Weekend Caption Jam Linkfest. . . Rodney would’ve preferred Leisure Suit Larry. Wizbang‘s car is being recalled. Wyatt Earp is off to a black-tie event. Willisms is getting a leg up on the competition. Cowboy Blob is taking a little dip Public Pondering only likes one kind of pinball. Right Pundits is looking for one [...]
Ezra Klein awards Snark of the Day honors to Megan Carpentier‘s stunning discovery that babysitters don’t earn a lot of money. Child care professionals are responsible for the health, well-being and development of the fruit of other women’s loins (not mine!) But in exchange for that, the median average salary in 2006 was $17,160. The [...]
McCain-Feingold, the signature legislation of the presumptive Republican nominee for president, took another blow yesterday as the Supreme Court struck down the so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment” in yet another 5-4 decision. “Supporters of reasonable campaign finance regulation are now zero for three in the Roberts court,” said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School [...]
Nick Gvosdev, the outgoing Editor of The National Interest and soon-to-be professor at the Naval War College makes a point that can’t be emphasized enough: “[T]here is no ‘reset’ button in U.S. foreign policy. . . . [N]o matter who the next president is, there are challenges to be faced that will require adaption to [...]
Some creative San Francisco bar patrons want to rename a sewage treatment plant after the, um, sitting president. From the Department of Damned-With-Faint-Praise, a group going by the regal-sounding name of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is planning to ask voters here to change the name of a prize-winning water treatment plant on [...]
Jane Hamsher wants to know, “If You Can’t Use a Computer, How Can You Be President?” I chuckled when I saw the story at memeorandum since, after all, it’s unlikely that any president before Bill Clinton could “use” a computer in any meaningful sense. (Maybe Jimmy Carter, who was a nuclear engineer in a past [...]
That’s how Instapundit refers to James Hansen, apparently the most intemperate of the global warming alarmists (yes, he’s worse than Gore because he’s Gore’s science advisor). Here’s Hansen’s latest proposal: James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on [...]
Ezra Klein jumps on a growing meme the home ownership isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and that the government should stop subsidizing it. He points to Paul Krugman, who argues in today’s NYT that it’s time to rethink our decades-long bipartisan consensus that home ownership should be encouraged. While everyone stresses the advantages [...]
Reporters covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are having an increasingly difficult time of getting stories onto the network news, Brian Stelter reports for the NYT. According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost [...]
George Carlin, a comedian known for his combination of raunchy language and intellectual humor, died of heart failure last evening. He was 71. Carlin was an interesting guy, combining brilliant observational humor with political activism. Like too many comics in the HBO era, though, it often seemed that he was vulgar and outrageous simply because [...]
Bernhard Warner brings an interesting perspective to the fight between the AP and the blogosphere over copyright law. In attempting to bolster the AP’s case, he actually weakens it considerably. To understand where the AP is coming from with this caveman approach to copyright enforcement, you have to understand what it’s like to work for [...]
Weekend Caption Jam Linkfest. . . Rodney is already swinging from the chandelier Wizbang finally has an answer for Michael Moore. Wyatt Earp is moving to Elbonia. Public Pondering is just starting to ‘kozy up. Cowboy Blob thinks we should let her have the dark chocolate… now. Willisms is just a little dinghy. Right Pundits [...]
Reacting to news that, contrary to previous promises, Barack Obama has bowed out of the public financing system so that he can spend unlimited amounts of money (or, at least, as much as he can raise) in his general election battle with John McCain, Steven Taylor observes, The calculus is pretty easy: does one think [...]
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 [...]
Just when it appeared that the Associated Press had come to its senses, they’ve now announced an exorbitant up-front fee for even short quotations of their works, Tim Conneally reports for BetaNews. They’ve created a handy-dandy online form to calculate what we owe them. Hmm. Well, surely, an organization as large as the AP, which [...]
Megan Cerpentier observes that, “despite the stereotype that my taxes should go up under a Democratic tax plan and down under a Republican, it seems that Obama’s tax plan is most likely to lower my tax bills and McCain’s plan will do little or nothing at all for me.” This, because Obama proposes giving self-employed [...]
Mark Glaser calls attention to one of the strange dilemmas of modern life: deciding whom to “friend” on various social media sites like Facebook and MySpace. Is the person a friend, a real friend, or someone who wants to be a friend? Should I add them as a friend because it’s polite, or ignore them [...]
The cover story of the current Atlantic (Monthly) is an interesting piece by Nicholas Carr which asks, Is Google Making Us Stupid? It begins with the standard “the Internet is giving us short attention spans” meme but eventually gives us much more than that. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that [...]
The Associated Press is backing down on its attempt to use the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to stop the Drudge Retort from using short excerpts of its content after a major backlash in the blogosphere. (See Jeff Jarvis, Cernig, Michael Arrington, and others for background.) Saul Hansell reports the AP’s modified stance in today’s NYT: [...]
On a non-political note, there’s this interesting map on what people call a soft drink. Via Gene Expression.
Quite a few commenters are accusing John McCain of flip-flopping because he favored privatization of Social security in 2004 and now adamantly rejects the insinuation that he supports it now: This is a clumsy rhetorical game rather than a policy shift. Then and now, McCain’s position is that Social Security would remain as a government [...]
Weekend Caption Jam Linkfest. . . Rodney can’t decide between the red or blue pill. Wizbang has stumped the stumper. Wyatt Earp wants fries widdat. Public Pondering has a visit from Barbarella. Cowboy Blob has and idea with a Twist. Willisms has the last prisoners from Gitmo Right Pundits is ready for another take. Blonde [...]