Good for them: The 30-second [Super Bowl] spot, financed by the conservative religious group Focus on the Family, is said to recount the pregnancy of Pam Tebow, mother of the college football star Tim Tebow. After falling ill during a mission to the Philippines, she ignored a recommendation by doctors to abort her fifth child, who became the 2007 Heisman Trophy winner. The National Organization for Women, NARAL Pro-Choice America and other voices for protecting women’s reproductive freedom have...

Frank Rich makes a compelling case: John McCain epitomizes the unpatriotic opposition. On Wednesday night he could be seen sneering when Obama pointed out that most of the debt vilified by Republicans happened on the watch of a Republican president and Congress that never paid for “two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.” Perhaps I’m missing some of the deep irony of Rich’s observation. Perhaps the description of McCain as unpatriotic is a profoundly subtle...

What I wanted to know was whether Barack Obama really understands me. Sure, we’ve had our differences. He’s a Democrat and I’m a Republican. Admittedly, I’ve criticized the President on several occasions. But maybe I’ve been unfair. Maybe he really understands why I’m concerned and why I don’t always agree. As it turns out, the President nailed my concerns on the head. After announcing his upcoming freeze on government spending, he acknowledged that...

No, there isn’t any WMD in Iraq. But the Army Corps of Engineers believes it has found evidence of a long sought chemical weapons cache buried in my neighborhood during World War I. According to the local paper (PDF): The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has unearthed three broken glass jugs in Spring Valley that might have come from the longsought Sgt. Maurer burial pit, according to a D.C. Department of the Environment official. The pit is believed to hold more than 20 containers of mustard...

A few days ago, I took issue with my esteemed co-blogger for describing objections to the Citizens United ruling as unfathomable. Now let me turn around and challenge the rhetorical fireworks display that President Obama put together. In his weekly radio address, the President declared, This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials...

Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett met with direct resistance from David Gregory when she claimed that the president had turned the economy around: Let’s, let’s just remember where we were a year ago, David. We were losing 700,000 jobs a month. We were in the middle of the worst economic meltdown in our nation’s history. Our financial system was on the brink of collapse. We had the largest federal deficit in our nation’s history. And what’s happened over the last 12...

Matt Yglesias on Ben Bernanke: I note that liberals, in their condescension toward conservatives, sometimes wind up tying themselves into knots about guys like Bernanke. Bernanke is very smart and incredibly accomplished. Many smart liberals think conservatives are dumb. So if Bernanke is so smart, it must be that he’s not really a conservative! But no. Smart conservatives are a very real phenomenon. Damn. I wanted that to remain a secret.

It sounds like a crazy question, but it’s coming from Andrew Exum, formerly an infantry officers and Army Ranger. Exum’s comments are a response to Leon Panetta’s insistence that no one should blame either a CIA officer or a soldier who is killed in the line of duty. Panetta assumes that [it] is beyond the pale to say that Marines or U.S. soldiers died in a firefight due to poor war-fighting skills, but that in fact has happened quite regularly over the course of the wars in Iraq...

I’ll do my best to falsify that prediction, but I think it’s still the most likely outcome. I made this point two months ago. But in light of Scott Brown’s victory, it needs to be made again. However, rather than quoting myself, I’ll quote Bob Woodward, who said it quite well last Sunday on NBC: Lou Cannon, who [was] the White House correspondent for The Washington Post, wrote the–he’s the premiere biographer of Reagan, and after Reagan left two terms, [Cannon]...

Sonny noted earlier that he literally cannot fathom objections to a Supreme Court ruling that strikes down restraints on freedom of speech. I’m no constitutional scholar, but let me try to do some fathoming. The following points are all borrowed directly from Kevin Drum. who comes at this from a liberal Democratic perspective. First, There’s no question that political speech is at the core of the First Amendment. Restricting commercial speech is one thing, but restricting political...

How exactly? Did the President also pose au naturel to pay his way through law school? No, the similarity is political. In his interview Thursday with ABC, Obama explained, The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. Wait a second…does that mean Obama went up to Massachusetts to campaign against the same forces that got him elected in 2008? No. What Obama meant was, People are angry, and they’re frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in...

Congressional Democrats are abandoning ObamaCare like passengers on a sinking Titanic. Liberal writers are deeply ashamed. Kevin Drum writes: I and my readers are mostly the sober, pragmatic sorts. Willing to compromise. Sensitive to political realities. Etc. And even we’re disgusted. I can’t remember ever being as embarrassed to be a Democrat as I am today. I actually give Kevin credit for being sober and pragmatic, so his comments should carry some weight. Naturally, those who are...

The polls close in around an hour. Assume Scott Brown wins. The spin from both sides should be pretty simple. GOP — This was a referendum on Obama. Dems — No, it wasn’t. But just because it’s spin, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. So which side is right, or at least more right? Patrick warns Republicans not to pretend this has something to do with ObamaCare. Coakley ran a truly awful campaign, that’s why she lost. But how do you take Obama out of the equation...

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, on ABC: If Martin Luther King, Jr., were alive, he would march on this White House because he would say, “Don’t escalate the war in Afghanistan. Get on the side of working people, because if you don’t, you’re going to undermine the reform agenda and the possibilities of a great presidency.” What next? Glenn Beck telling us MLK would be a Tea Partier? Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

Remember the New Hampshire primary in 2008? All the polls had Obama as a lock, but Hillary won anyhow, saving her candidacy from an early defeat. I ate some crow myself on that one. Just before the primary, I gloated about my early prediction of Obama as the Democratic nominee. Even in hindsight, it wasn’t terribly clear why Hillary won in New Hampshire. If Coakley pulls an upset, we may never know why she won, either. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

Political fundraising letters are always a great target for blog posts. Most of my political mail is from conservatives, but I still get some liberal envelopes, possibly because of my subscription to the New Republic. This week, I was very flattered to receive a letter from Bill Clinton, who addressed me as “Dear Friend.” One of the most noticeable things about Bill’s letter was what it didn’t mention. Amidst all the lavish praise for President Obama and scorn heaped upon...

Pete Abel is a moderate. But earlier this week, he decided he was going to switch his registration from Independent to Democrat because he’s sick and tired of partisan politics. How does that make sense? Well, if everyone became a Democrat, then the party would be so broad that it would become incoherent (and there would be no Republicans). Basically, Pete had a plan to rid American politics of those awful dinosaurs known as political parties. Yesterday, Pete stepped back from his plan,...

Their crime? Supporting Christian-Muslim solidarity in the aftermath of religious violence. POMED (PDF) reports: The group arrested in Egypt, which includes prominent Coptic Christian and Muslim activists and bloggers, had traveled to the town of Nag Hammadi in southern Egypt to express Christian-Muslim solidarity in the wake of recent violence against Coptic Christians in that town on January 6, the Eve of Coptic Christmas. Upon arrival in Nag Hammadi this morning, Egyptian security services detained...

Recently, I bought a pair of Nixon-Agnew cufflinks, issued to commemorate their second inauguration in 1973. I bought them for the kitsch value and because they were cheap. Regrettably, I don’t really know much about Nixon, beyond the Cliffs Notes I’ve picked up from various books and newspaper articles about other subjects. Until this morning, all I could’ve told you about Helen Gahagan Douglas is that she was the opponent Nixon smeared as the Pink Lady when he ran against her...

Military Times has posted a list of the 16 best military books of the decade. Regrettably, I can only say that I’ve read two-and-a-half of them. The first is The Unforgiving Minute, by my classmate and friend Craig Mullaney, which made the NYT bestseller list. Since I have a small cameo in the book, I must agree that it’s a superb work in all regards. The half book I read is One Bullet Away, by Nate Fick. Not a lot of Ivy League grads become combat Marines. Right now, I’m at...

The NY Times has stirred the pot by asking this question on the front page of its latest Week in Review. Bob Stein suggests this is just a tread-worn conservative talking point with no merit to speak of. Yet strangely, the Times didn’t even bother to ask any actual conservatives whether Obama has gone soft. Instead, prominent liberals provided the necessary grist for the mill: Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on the Daily Beast blog two weeks ago...

The cover of the current issue of the New Republic blares, The Battle for Tora Bora: The Untold Story. It’s a good article, but it’s actually an old story. Some of the details are new, but I think it’s been at least five years since we’ve known that Bin Laden was cornered in the caves of Tora Bora in December of 2001, but the chain of command rejected a request to send in US ground forces. Instead we sent in some Afghan militia and Bin Laden got away. The individual clearly...

…publishes enough cliche polemics to justify the adjective “liberal”. Now, it is certainly true that TNR generates enough heresy to justify its reputation as much more than a liberal meat grinder. That’s why I have a subscription. But TNR also provides enough simplistic GOP-bashing to fortify the perpetually indignant, self-satisfied liberal intellectualism to which so many of its readers subscribe. Case in point: The Rise of Republican Nihilism by Jonathan Chait. Here’s...

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I finally had the chance to watch Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning film, The Pianist. It isn’t the story of Polanski’s own survival, although it seems natural to conclude that Polanski was able to evoke the Holocaust so effectively because he lived through it himself. He lost his mother to Auschwitz and survived in hiding with a Polish family. Before Polanski’s arrest, I didn’t know much about his conviction for sex with a minor....

Four times as many as death threats for Bush? More? For his most passionate supporters, it is only natural to think of this young, charismatic and inspirational leader as another potential JFK, RFK or MLK Jr. (Although I doubt we’ll ever call him BHO.) Yet it was Kevin Drum of all people who noted that according to Secret Service chief Mark Sullivan that the number of threats against the president is “at the same level” as it was during the previous two administrations. The day...