Could he really have said this? Seriously? Here’s how George W. Bush recently explained his motivation for writing a book about his time in office, according to the AP: “I’m going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there’s an authoritarian voice saying exactly what […]

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Politico‘s Ben Smith writes about the lingering faction of Birthers still agitating to see Barack Obama’s original birth certificate, despite the total paucity of credible evidence suggesting any reason to doubt that he was, in fact, born in Hawaii. The focus of the story is conservatives’ fear of being associated with these folks: “At some […]

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Via Instapundit comes this gem: What is it with this President? Obama has an obsessive need to find enemies against whom to campaign. Surely a tendency unique in American politics.

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In a piece on the dire position of today’s Republican Party, TPM Cafe reproduces a series of historical graphs showing the large, and in most cases growing, gaps in partisan identification across various demographic groups, with Republicans faring especially poorly among young people. And indeed, if you look at the trend over the last decade […]

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Huh.  So, a while back, I spoke at some length to a Washington Post reporter doing a piece about young conservatives feeling left out in the “Age of Obama,” what with all their peers caught up in Obamania and whatnot. I wasn’t able to be too helpful because—though I noted my many points of disagreement […]

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Late to the ball as usual, but anyone else think this lede was massively misleading? President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration. “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get […]

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I haven’t paid  any more attention to the Blagojevich bruhaha than was totally unavoidable—which still turns out to be quite a bit in DC—but I was nevertheless a little surprised to see the blogosphere’s Google-trained legal scholars reach such rapid consensus on Majority Leader Harry Reid’s threat to refuse to seat Blago appointee Roland Burris. […]

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It’s a week old now, but this Feministe post exhibits a type of category error that crops up in other contexts, so I figure it’s still worth saying a few words about it. The touchstone is this Rolling Stone postmortem of the battle over Caliornia’s Proposition 8, which concludes that the anti-gay amendment could have […]

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So, it doesn’t bother me especially that Caroline Kennedy lacks “political experience.”  Rah-rah democracy and all that, but on the rare cases where we’re going to appoint someone to Congress, it seems like a grand opportunity to pick precisely the kind of person who wouldn’t normally get elected—someone who’s spent their life acquiring experience and […]

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Not generally cross-linking my Ars articles or Law & Disorder blog posts, but since it’s not bylined, figured I’d throw out a pointer to a short piece about Barack Obama’s distributed phonebanking effort, which was the “Campaign Tech of the Year” in the annual Ars Awards. Also, damn, I really haven’t been posting here at […]

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