Archive for January, 2007

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

Jay Cost On Obama: Partisan Transcendence

Jay Cost looks at the Obama candidacy and attempts to divine what it is that Obama will be selling. He thinks he has the answer: not an avoidance of partisanship, but an attempt to work past (and above) it.
By all accounts, he seems to be a liberal Democrat with the kind of opinions we expect […]

No Comments » - Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Candidates, Election 2008 by Mark

---

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

Give Me One Sane Man Among The Opposition…

…and I’ll give you a Libby juror.  I found the following tidbit interesting:

Among the jurors approved for [the Libby trial’s initial pool of 37 qualified individuals] today was a Labor Department employee who wrote letters opposing the Bush administration .
Despite his political activities, which included letter-writing campaigns for the liberal group MoveOn.org, the young man from the […]

1 Comment » - Posted in PlameGate, Progressive Nonsense / Nutroots® by Mark

---

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

He’s Out

Bill Parcells to declare as presidential candidate? Maybe, he’ll have some free time now.  The Dallas Cowboys coach has announced his retirement.  Such is my disillusionment with pro sports that I scarcely watch a game anymore (I didn’t bother with either conference championship yesterday), but Parcells’ tenure with the Cowboys has to rank as a  […]

No Comments » - Posted in Celebrities / Pop Culture / Sports by Mark

---

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

A Welcome Breath Of Fresh Air

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon is off to a good start.  He is responding quickly to Il-For-Food allegations:
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon has been on the job for less than a month, but with a 26-word announcement Friday he did more to reform that international body than anything ever attempted by predecessor Kofi Annan.
“The […]

No Comments » - Posted in North Korea, UN/Oil-For-Food by Mark

---

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

The Art Of The Smear

Barack Obama obviously has some folks nervous:
Days after Barack Obama jumped into the presidential sweepstakes, he was hit with a thinly sourced story from his past–39 years in his past, to be exact.
The allegation, by a conservative magazine, raised questions about whether the Illinois senator had been schooled in Islamic radicalism when he was all […]

11 Comments » - Posted in Barack Obama, 2008 News, Democratic Candidates by Mark

---

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

The *#*(#@**#* New York Times

Honestly, I don’t know why I torture myself:
President Bush’s refusal to come up with a serious policy on Iraq means that the Democrats will have to goad him toward one.
You’ve got to be kidding…the Democrats and ’serious policy on Iraq’ in the same sentence?  Anyone want to tell me what the Democratic policy on Iraq […]

17 Comments » - Posted in POTUS, Iraq, NY Times/Media Watch by Mark

---

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

The Inside Scoop On The New Bush Plan

Michael Abramowitz and Peter Baker don their Bob Woodward gear and take us through the inside story of the Bush surge:
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had a surprise for President Bush when they sat down with their aides in the Four Seasons Hotel in Amman, Jordan. Firing up a PowerPoint presentation, Maliki and his national […]

No Comments » - Posted in POTUS, Iraq by Mark

---

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

Charmed, I’m Sure

The buffoon Hugo Chavez sends his greetings:
President Hugo Chavez returned to his weekly radio and TV broadcast Sunday, extolling the ideals of socialist thinker Karl Marx and telling U.S. officials to “Go to hell!” for what he called unacceptable meddling in Venezuela’s affairs.
Chavez defended his government’s effort to establish a socialist model and rejected U.S. […]

No Comments » - Posted in Foreign Affairs, Progressive Nonsense / Nutroots® by Mark

---

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

Provocative? You Bet…And Chilling

Former Israeli dove turned hawk Benny Morris (hat tip to Pajamas):
The second holocaust will not be like the first. The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them over months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before the actual killing. […]

1 Comment » - Posted in Israel, Iran, Radical Islam / GWOT by Mark

---

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

Sunday Fun(??)

To some this will be fun, to others like pulling teeth: Andrew Sullivan has embedded an old William Buckley - Noam Chomsky debate that is, at a minimum, quite interesting…

No Comments » - Posted in Progressive Nonsense / Nutroots® by Mark

---

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

Clinton Widens Lead Over Obama…

…while Rudy Giuliani remains the public favorite for the GOP:
On the day that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton officially entered the 2008 presidential sweepstakes, a new Washington Post-ABC News survey shows her with a wide lead over her potential Democratic rivals.
Clinton took 41 percent in a hypothetical primary field against 12 other Democrats, far ahead of Sen. Barack […]

3 Comments » - Posted in Barack Obama, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, John Edwards, Sam Brownback, John Kerry, Mitt Romney, 2008 Polls, Republican Candidates, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Democratic Candidates by Mark

---

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

A Holocaust Historian Takes On Jimmah

The damage done to former President Carter’s reputation and his relationship with the Jewish community by his ill-conceived latest publishing venture is substantial. Perhaps even worse is his post-publication reaction to the controversy. Historian Deborah Lipstadt writes in the Washington Post:
It is hard to criticize an icon. Jimmy Carter’s humanitarian work has saved countless lives. Yet […]

1 Comment » - Posted in Israel, POTUS, Donkeys, Progressive Nonsense / Nutroots® by Mark

---

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

Wait, Wait - I’m In, Too!

It sure seems an awful lot of people decided to bury their campaign announcements under the Hillary juggernaut: add Brownback to the list of those politicians who apparently don’t understand the concept of ‘timing’.
On a day when the political world was consumed with Hillary Clinton, Republican Senator Sam Brownback made his official foray into an […]

No Comments » - Posted in Sam Brownback, 2008 News, Republican Candidates by Mark

---

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

Exquisite Timing

Oh, yeah, he’s in, too:
After years of freelancing his diplomatic skills from the unlikely position as governor of the state of New Mexico, Bill Richardson is taking the first step toward a bid to become president and put his skills to work in the White House.
Richardson plans to announce Sunday that he will soon file […]

3 Comments » - Posted in Bill Richardson, 2008 News, Democratic Candidates by Mark

---

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

Who Said It?

The quote:
“Iraq is the central part of a larger and ultimately longer-term conflict in the Middle East between moderates and extremists, between democrats and dictators, between Iran- and Iraq- [sic - Syria was meant, I presume] sponsored terrorism and the rest of the Middle East. . . . Are we going to surrender to them, surrender that […]

6 Comments » - Posted in Joe Lieberman, Radical Islam / GWOT, Iraq by Mark

---

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

She’s In

Hillary Clinton has confirmed what has been apparent since at least 2003 - she’s running for president:
Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has announced that she is forming an exploratory committee for president, thereby launching a bid to become the first female chief executive of the United States.
“I’m in,” she said on a Web site, hillaryclinton.com. “And […]

3 Comments » - Posted in Hillary Clinton, 2008 News, Democratic Candidates by Mark

---

Friday, January 19th, 2007

More Progress In The Land Of Broken Dreams

I’m certainly hesitant to get my hopes up, but another bit of good news is coming out of Iraq:
But if approved in anything close to its present form, the law would appear to settle a longstanding debate over whether the oil industry and its revenues should be overseen by the central government or the regions […]

3 Comments » - Posted in Iraq by Mark

---

Friday, January 19th, 2007

SCOTUS To Take Up McCain-Feingold Again

There are many quite reasonable people who say that McCain-Feingold is unconstitutional, in that money donated to political causes is, in fact, nothing more or less than protected speech.  As such, the law occasionally comes up for review, and the Supreme Court has agreed to take another go at it:
The Supreme Court today agreed to […]

2 Comments » - Posted in SCOTUS, Elephants, John McCain, Republican Candidates by Mark

---

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Il-For-Food

Not content to let Saddam Hussein carry the mantle of ‘most profligate waster of UN money”, Kim Jung-Il has weighed in with his own little scandal:
Has North Korean leader Kim Jong Il subverted the United Nations Development Program, the $4 billion agency that is the U.N.’s main development arm, and possibly stolen tens of millions […]

2 Comments » - Posted in North Korea, UN/Oil-For-Food by Mark

---

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Krauthammer: Plan B

Despite Condi Rice’s insistance that to discuss a “Plan B” is a sign of lack of commitment, we do have to acknowledge the following realities: (a) I don’t care what the Democrats say, the surge is a reality and they won’t stop it (or even try hard to do so), and (b) the surge may […]

No Comments » - Posted in Condoleezza Rice, Iraq by Mark

---

---

---