World

Reihan Salam has a very good column on GOP tactics and oportunities that I heartily recommend. He concludes: The Democrats have offered a series of bloated, heavy-handed bills to tackle real problems facing the economy, and Republicans have been right to take them to task. But they’re now in a position to offer more cost-effective, scalpel-like proposals of their own that can demonstrate their readiness to govern. And besides, Republicans will still be well within their rights to criticize the Democrats for their major missteps in 2009—President Obama spent most of his 2008 presidential campaign running against George W. Bush’s first term. If Republicans choose not to pivot, if they

Courtesy of Erica Grieder: Good evening, Madame Speaker. I’m always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. But I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me last year. It started with the economy. Bailout. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it. We all hated each other’s guts after that. You could see there wasn’t any sense trying to have an intelligent conversation. I was sorry as hell I’d started. But if you’re supposed to sock somebody in

One of the charming things about National Review’s blog The Corner, is that one never knows what will irritate someone next. Then again, almost anything and everything Obama does annoys some of the Corner kids. Today’s example: not going to Mars! For real: Yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration plans to scrap funding for voyages to the moon and to Mars, shows how low President Obama’s horizons truly are.  Oh noes! Jeffrey Anderson continues: You know those great pictures of Earth from outer space, showing our planet suspended against the blackness, a beautiful blue ball? No one has seen that view since the Apollo program ended 38 years ago. No

Well that was long. 70 minutes in fact. And, as the genre demands, there was a considerable gap between Presidential rhetoric and anything that is actually likely to happen. Do you really believe, now that Obama has promised this, that American exports will double in five years? Of course not. Ezra Klein has a useful summary of the laundry list of promises here and the full text is here. Some of those pledges – the call for new nuclear power stations and for more off-shore oil exploration – were co-opted from the Republican playbook but that doesn’t make them any more likely to happen. Nor, despite a reference to doing

Of all the misunderstood phrases popular in Washington, one of the most frequently cited is Teddy Roosevelt’s observation that the Presidency is a bully pulpit. This is often, perhaps even usually, understood as an expression of Presidential power. When the Commander-in-Chief speaks, the country listens and when he decrees that something must be done, Washington and the electorate can be intimidated into signing up for the President’s agenda. But that’s not how Roosevelt meant the term. Bully was one of T.R’s favourite words and he used it simply to mean superb or excellent or grand. The difference matters because it reveals the limits of Presidential power. And as we have

Some observations on the Bay State Shocker: Candidates matter, don’t they? Yes they surely do. Martha Coakley’s campaign was so staggeringly inept, complacent, arrrogant and stupid that she threw away a Senate seat in a state Barack Obama won by 26 points a year ago. Yes, Republicans have won statewide before in MA but this was rather different, was’t it? Have voters become disillusioned with the administration, even in Massachusetts? To some extent they have. But not by 26 points-worth of anger and frustration. A better candidate and a more rigorous campaign almost certainly holds this seat for the Democrats. By contrast, Scott Brown ran an almost perfectly-pitched campaign. So,

As far as I can tell the Chilcot Inquiry has yet to unearth anything that hasn;t been public knowledge for years. Today it’s Jonathan Powell’s turn to confirm Stuff We Already Knew. As Paul Waugh reports: But perhaps more interesting is the detail he gave of the trip to Downing Street by Dick Cheney a month before in March 2002. Little has so far been revealed about this crunch meeting, which may well have coloured Blair’s actions from then on. The Veep, the most senior hawk in the White House at the time, dropped into Number 10 ahead of a tour of Middle East allies on which he wanted to test

Guides, maps and tourist fact-boxes often adopt little pictorial symbols: shorthand icons that signal key facts or recommendations. A tiny canoe, and parasol, for example, indicate boating facilities, plus a beach. But less common have been warning shorthands designed positively to identify an unpleasantness or something to avoid. How about (for instance) an overflowing dustbin with wavy lines above it, for instance, indicating ‘smelly’; earmuffs against a hotel’s name, as a ‘noisy’ warning; or a trouser pocket with a wad of notes sticking out: ‘pickpockets operate here’? Since returning last month from Africa, I’ve been ruminating on the need for at least one new icon, in symbolic form, to be