Politics

Scoring the Biden/Palin Debate

The summer before third grade, I became the oldest kid on my block to ride my bike with training wheels, a subject of increasing ridicule among my peers in Garland, Texas. My dad, attempting to solve the problem as dads are prone to do, decided the best solution was to take off the training wheels and push me down our steep driveway on my bike. Instinct would kick in. I would navigate the incline with increasing confidence, execute a deft 90 degree turn down the alley and ride through the ... (read more)

2008/10/03

Debate Moderator Writing 'Age of Obama' Book

A lot's being made today of the fact that Gwen Ifill, the moderator of Thursday night's vice presidential debate, has a new book coming out on Inauguration Day titled The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. The story's drawn hundreds of comments on the Drudge Retort. Ifill has made no secret of the book, which has been mentioned for months in media reports. On Aug. 21, she wrote an essay for Time magazine that describes her motivation for writing it: ... Obama is just one ... (read more)

2008/10/01

Scoring the First Obama/McCain Debate

This is a pretty traditional debate performance for Obama. Strong on substance. Few mistakes. Little in the way of killer instinct or decapitating lines. McCain, by contrast, is offering an uncommonly strong performance powered, as far as I can tell, by his raging contempt for Obama. -- Ezra Klein I thought both candidates were strong in last night's presidential debate at Ole Miss, but I'd give the edge to Barack Obama because he had more to prove and John McCain showed so much contempt for ... (read more)

2008/09/27

McCain Campaign Goes After Andrew Sullivan

The McCain campaign has been attacking the media all week, a move that seems like idiotic strategy to me. The people who are persuaded by that kind of attack already are voting for McCain. Everybody else will just dismiss it as whining, which is pretty low on the list of presidential verbs. McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb recently leaked two private emails from blogger Andrew Sullivan to the media: 1. "I'm very sorry to say, it's come to this: can you confirm on the record that Trig Palin is ... (read more)

2008/09/24

Sanders: Socialism for Rich, Free Enterprise for Poor

Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, makes a point I haven't heard anywhere else in his response to the bailout plan: We must end the danger posed by companies that are "too big too fail," that is, companies whose failure would cause systemic harm to the U.S. economy. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We need to determine which companies fall in this category and then break them up. Right now, for example, the Bank of America, the nation's largest ... (read more)

2008/09/22

Cady McClain on Sarah Palin

Because I'm still not over the death of All My Children's Dixie Cooney Chandler Martin Bodine Martin, who died in 2007 after eating poisoned peanut butter pancakes meant for her daughter-in-law, I've been keeping up with the personal weblog where her portrayer Cady McClain journals life after death. McClain has a rep for being fairly opinionated, as you can see from her post yesterday about Sarah Palin: ... I think Sarah Palin is the worst thing to come to politics in a long time. Overly ... (read more)

2008/09/19

Ron Paul Absent from Financial Crisis Coverage

I found myself wondering today why Ron Paul has been completely absent from media coverage of the Merrill Lynch sale and Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Paul, more than any other candidate for president this year, made an issue of the government's management of the economy and how he believes we're being led off a cliff. He would no doubt have a lot to say, given his remarks in May against proposed House bills to bail out mortgage lenders: It is neither morally right nor fiscally wise to socialize ... (read more)

2008/09/16

North Carolina Also Bills Rape Victims for Evidence

Wasilla, Alaska, isn't the only place that has charged rape victims for the cost of evidence to prosecute their attackers. Minnesota Public Radio's News Cut blog finds that North Carolina followed the same policy as Sarah Palin's town during her term as mayor: Last winter, the Raleigh News & Observer in North Carolina uncovered a similar policy on a statewide basis. The vast majority of the 3,000 or so emergency room patients examined for sexual assaults each year shoulder some of the cost of a ... (read more)

2008/09/11

Under Palin, Wasilla Charged Rape Victims for Evidence Kits

During the first four years that Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, the town's police department charged women who had been raped with the cost of "rape kits," the $300 to $1,200 exams necessary to collect evidence of the sex assault. A May 20, 2000, article in The Frontiersman, Wasilla's hometown newspaper, provides the details: Wasilla Police Chief Charlie Fannon does not agree with the new legislation, saying the law will require the city and communities to come up with more funds to ... (read more)

2008/09/10

ABC News Can't Be Bothered with Iraq

Here's a nice example of the thimble-deep thinking that passes for political journalism in the mainstream media these days. On ABC News, journalists Jake Tapper and Matt Jaffe mock Joe Biden for giving a substantive answer to a reporter's question about whether he still supports a tripartite solution to divide Iraq into separate Kurd, Shia and Sunni areas. Tapper and Jaffe count the time he took to answer the reporter -- "13 minutes, 20 seconds" -- but they don't offer a single word of ... (read more)