Archive for 2008

In honor of Thomas Frank’s new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, here are 12 questions Republicans can’t answer. I’d suggest using them sparingly. Perhaps between pigs-in-a-blanket at a cocktail party. Perhaps in response to the latest label someone tries to slap on Barack Obama (Muslim, Reverend Wright associate, […]

President Bush and the neo-conservatives have argued for some time for waterboarding and intelligence techniques to elicit information from detainees.

The argument Bush uses is very similar to the following: we’ve got to give intelligence experts the tools they need in order to extract information to prevent terrorist attacks.

I have pointed this out before, but recently an aide for John McCain said it for me: a terror incident on U.S. soil “certainly would be a big advantage to him [McCain].”

Charlie Black said this in an interview with Fortune. He since regrets saying this, but it rings true.

If terrorists attacked, people would be more likely to vote Republican. This probably doesn’t strike you as surprising, but think about the implication of this for a second.

It’s getting harder and harder to find actual news amidst the advertisements, but every now and then a few facts slip by. This piece was one of the most interesting I’ve seen in a long time. It has to do with the price of gas. From Bloomberg: “Refiners are managing […]

To learn the most from Scott McClellan’s new book What Happened you don’t even need to buy the book. All you have to do is look at the coverage from the administration, the mainstream media, and the blogosphere. The blogosphere The general reaction from the blogosphere could be summed up […]

In an interesting piece of candid self admittance, John Harris from the Politico, provides an interesting glimpse of how the media operates. Politico’s editors are relentlessly focused on audience traffic. The way to build this traffic is to get links from other websites. The way to get links from other […]

I happened across an interview with Victoria Wulsin in CityBeat this week and was struck by her concise framing of the health care issue. “What we all want is quality,” Wulsin said. Wulsin believes what has gotten lost in the health care debate is the patient. The current administration has […]

Barack Obama has fought quite a primary race so far against Hillary Clinton, coming from more than 20 points down to draw even with Hillary. But some argue that he can’t close the deal. Here is what is happening and a couple ideas on how he closes. Hillary is using […]

This week’s Democratic debate caused a fury on the Internet. During the first 45 minutes, the moderators (Stephanopoulos and Gibson) covered Obama’s “bitter” comments, the Reverend Wright, flag pins on lapels, Hillary’s lying about Bosnia sniper fire, and Obama’s relationship to William Ayers. You would hardly know we were a […]

WEBN is a classic rock station here in Cincinnati that has decorated our town with a lovely series of billboards. The billboards are easily spotted by single black quotes on an otherwise all-white billboard. Here are a few samples: “102.7 WEBN stinks,” Maya Buttreeks from Kenwood “102.7 WEBN is immature,” […]