I was expecting to have turned on Barack Obama more strongly by now. I knew for the first few weeks—perhaps even a couple months—I’d just be reveling in the thought that George Bush was no longer president. But soon enough, I felt sure, I’d be attacking Obama almost as vigorously for a totally different set […]

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I’ve already written about this at some length, but I see that one of the bogus charges against prospective OIRA director Cass Sunstein is actually holding up his confirmation: Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) has blocked President Obama’s candidate for regulation czar, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, because Sunstein has argued that animals should have the […]

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Now that the sheer bizarreness of it all is wearing off, I’m starting to register how sad the Mark Sanford saga is. For his wife and chidren, obviously—but also for Sanford himself: The e-mails between Sanford and the Other Woman published yesterday don’t suggest some sleazy lothario so much as a man who,  to his […]

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Peter Suderman’s post on why, in the present context, Republicans should be a little less Twitterpated and a little more focused on old-fashioned blogging seems exactly right to me. A better way to circulate soundbites is great, but right now the party needs to work on churning out some actual substantive ideas that it can […]

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I wanted to write some sort of first order reply to Jane O’Grady’s article “Can a Machine Change Your Mind?“—but as I began thinking it over, it became clear that it would end up killing half my day. First of all, I’d have to go back to my library and brush up on my philosophy […]

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I’ll cop to sharing some of Yglesias’ irritation at the treatment of Sonia Sotomayor, and if Republicans are managing to get a rise out of my pallid ass, I can only imagine the kind of damage they’re doing to their brand among, you know, real Latinos.  For one, it is basically impossible for me to […]

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Jim Geraghty sets out to disprove the notion that the GOP is “becoming a regional party.” What he actually proves is that (1) geographical maps are not a terribly helpful way to analyze what’s happening in an institution where membership is allocated by population, and (2) snapshot analysis is not a very good way to […]

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Ramesh Ponnuru on Specter’s party flip: My initial reaction on hearing the news was that after generating a bunch of Democratic House seats, the Club for Growth has now produced its first Democratic senator. I assume that Specter’s votes will now move leftward. There’s probably an Exit, Voice and Loyalty sort of point to make […]

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There are a few basic points I’m not seeing made quite often enough in the ongoing thumbsuck about the future of journalism. I take for granted we all understand that whether “newspapers” survive (either as ink-on-wood-pulp or as institutions) is of no real intrinsic importance; the question is whether vital forms of journalism will get […]

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Well,  good news and bad news, dear readers. The bad news is that, while it’s been  fun and interesting to hop aboard an expanding publication known primarily for its hard tech coverage, and to try to bring their trademark geeky rigor to the task of reporting on tech policy and politics, it also turns out […]

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