Politics

Grading the War in Iraq

Frontpage Magazine, the right-wing publication founded by David Horowitz, has been conducting a symposium with several experts on how well the Iraq War is going. The discussion, which presumably was staged via e-mail, began with several panelists taking umbrage at Steven Vincent, a war correspondent working in Basra, Iraq, because he gave the war a letter grade of B-minus and Iraqi quality of life an F: Judging the conflict by Saddam's removal -- and thank Allah the monster is gone -- is ... (read more)

2005/08/06

Air America Received Questionable Loans

A co-founder of Air America Radio reportedly loaned the network and himself more than $800,000 from a non-profit charity in New York while serving as its development director. Evan Cohen made the highly questionable loans while a director of the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club, which serves 20,000 children, elderly residents, and people with disabilities. Some loans were directed to Air America as the fledgling liberal talk radio network was launched in March 2004; others went personally to ... (read more)

2005/08/04

Loss in Ohio, Losses in Iraq

The Democratic activists of the Swing State Project, some of whom went to Ohio to work for Congressional candidate Paul Hackett, are celebrating after his surprisingly close loss to Republican Jean Schmidt. There is no doubt about it -- tonight's results represent a tidal wave in Ohio (and perhaps national) politics. In 2004, the Democrat running in OH-02 lost by 44 points. Tonight, the Democrat, Paul Hackett, lost by a mere 4 points -- just 4,000 votes out of over 114,000 cast. This was a lot ... (read more)

2005/08/03

Bush Courts Another Souter

Words I can't recall saying before: I agree with Ann Coulter and Charles Krauthammer. In John Roberts, President Bush has nominated another David Souter, a jurist without a public record that would justify the confidence Republicans are expressing in his approach to the Constitution. Perhaps he'll prove to be a reliable member of the Scalia-Thomas bloc, but evangelical conservatives who returned Bush to the White House for a full assault on Roe v. Wade ought to be wondering why the president ... (read more)

2005/07/28

In the comments to a Workbench entry on an alleged credit card theft, I've been debating Chad Irby on whether customers were notified properly once theft of their card information was suspected. After an exchange in which both of us seemed to become less informed over time, I decided to do something unbloglike. I contacted the site's publisher to ask when they notified customers. ProtestWarrior confirmed that the possible theft was discovered in February, but customers were not told until a ... (read more)

2005/07/23

Markos Moultisas of Daily Kos is a traitor to this country, according to evidence uncovered on RedState about comedian Margaret Cho's dog: A minor point, naming one's dog after a terrorist, and lauding those who do? Yes. But a helpful reminder nonetheless of a phrase worth remembering: they're not antiwar -- just on the other side. Don't tell anyone, but I named a dog after Molly Ivins. ... (read more)

2005/07/17

Juan Cole on Alan Colmes

The best thing about the rise of liberal talk radio is the national forum it provides for voices outside of the tired Mort Kondracke-Eleanor Clift-Howard Fineman circle of D.C. insider talking heads. Two recent examples from the Alan Colmes Radio Show were Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and last night's guest, Middle East history professor and blogger Juan Cole. I've attached a 23-minute podcast covering Cole's interview, which focused on the July 7 London terror attacks and the possibility the ... (read more)

2005/07/16

The Weekly Standard derides the top liberal weblogs as far-left and shrill: What's more, the blogs take numerous positions that would strike all but the most passionate Democratic partisans as patently preposterous. For example, several of the left-wing blogs recently ran an advertisement that referred to West Virginia Senator and former Ku Klux Klan Kleagle Robert Byrd as an "American Hero." The Drudge Retort was one of the liberal blogs that ran the ad, which was bought by the Friends of ... (read more)

2005/07/15

Political Site Slow to Disclose Credit Card Theft

There's an ongoing dispute between the right-wing group ProtestWarrior and a left-wing "hacktivist" accused of breaking in to their servers and accessing the credit card information of 5,000 customers of the group's online store. While that allegation is under investigation (no charges have been filed), ProtestWarrior makes an unusual admission: They discovered the possible theft of customer credit cards in February, but didn't tell any customers until July 5. The reason we haven't made this ... (read more)

2005/07/14

President George H.W. Bush in a 1999 speech: We need more human intelligence. That means we need more protection for the methods we use to gather intelligence and more protection for our sources, particularly our human sources, people that are risking their lives for their country. Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of ... (read more)

2005/07/13

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