Dear Mr. Vice President, I like you. I really do. I was very happy when your current boss tapped you as his running mate back in ’08. I think you’ve got a good head on your shoulders and that you usually know what you’re talking about, even if it doesn’t always come out well. But… seriously. What’s with telling the Democratic base, your base, to “stop whining“? Sure, I get your point — as inartful as it was. If you put Democrats up against Republicans,...

The other day on Governor’s Island, just off Manhattan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, responding to the controversy surrounding the planned Islamic community center near Ground Zero, a overheated controversy drummed up by conservatives, most of whom are not New Yorkers and yet who want to tell New York what to do (e.g., Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich), gave what I can only describe as a truly brilliant speech on the freedom of religion, the acceptance of cultural difference, and the diversity...

Yesterday at WaPo, E.J. Dionne responded to the Shirley Sherrod fiasco with a blistering indictment of the mainstream media. It’s worth reading in full, but here are a couple of key passages: The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now-trivialized phrase has it, a “teachable moment.” It is a time for action. The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently...

With the Bush tax cuts (on both the wealthy and middle class) set to expire, Democrats have a great opportunity to back Republicans into a corner and to win both politically and on policy, argues Jon Chait: The key factor here is that, just as Republicans got to frame the debate in 2001 by combining the tax cuts into an up or down vote, Democrats can frame the debate now by separating the policies Republicans pretend to care about from the ones they actually care about. Republicans want to have a...

So BP has apparently stopped the oil leak — for now. And not a dead sea turtle too soon. (Seriously, click on this link to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which is posting “daily wildlife collection reports” as part of its oil spill response. It’s sad and depressing and terrifying.) Thanks BP! You’re the best! ********** No, not really. You’re not the best. And the catastrophe isn’t over. Brad Plumer: [T]he Macondo site won’t be fully and permanently...

Argentina’s had a pretty crazy, if not uninteresting, political history — from a military regime in the ’40s, to Juan Perón and “peronism” (and Eva “Evita” Duarte, his famous second wife) in the ’40s and ’50s, to various coups and a succession of short-lived governments in the ’50s and ’60s, to an authoritarian military dictatorship in the ’60s and ’70s following the so-called Revolución Argentina, to Perón again, now...

Did you know that in 2001, around the time Chandra Levy, an intern at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, disappeared and media attention focused on Democratic Rep. Gary Condit, with whom Levy, who was from Condit’s district, had had an affair, there was another serious incident, if one that received far less attention, involving a young woman, one Lori Klausutis, who worked for then-Rep. Joe Scarborough, now a big-shot MSNBC host? I didn’t either, until I read about Markos “Kos”...

I spent the past several days well away from Toronto’s downtown core, well away from the G20 protest areas, well away from the security net that effectively divided the city into two. I used to live downtown, near the University of Toronto, and I still work downtown, in a high-security area, but I now live in the suburbs east of the city. I didn’t ignore what went on, though. I couldn’t. It was all over the news, scenes of a police car on fire, of protesters crowding the streets,...

Last Friday, Canadian-American billionaire Mort Zuckerman posted an opinion piece at his U.S. News and World Report in which he claims — right in the headline — that the “world sees Obama as incompetent and amateur” in the area of foreign policy. In an attempt to support his claim, he cites criticism of Obama on a single issue (nuclear weapons) from French President Nicolas Sarkozy (a man fighting for his political life in a country that thrives on populist anti-Americanism),...

Perhaps you’ve already seen this now-notorious clip of Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-NC) confronted by a student-reporter (and a cameraman) and responding, well, let’s just say, inappropriately: Glenn Greenwald thinks that it’s a clear-cut case of assault — or at least that Etheridge should be arrested and charged with assault (I assume that Glenn does not presume guilt, which would be for a jury to decide). Glenn is backed up by John Amato and John Cole, among others. And the evidence...

I found Obama’s Oval Office speech last night adequate but not nearly enough — adequate in the sense that it got the message across to a broad audience that the president will be tough on BP and will pursue some sort of energy agenda, much needed in these troubling times, not nearly enough in the sense that it didn’t contain nearly enough of a commitment from the president that he will actually pursue meaningful energy/climate legislation. I would have found it disappointing except...

This really isn’t all that surprising: A SUNDAY TIMES investigation has exposed Japan for bribing small nations with cash and prostitutes to gain their support for the mass slaughter of whales. The undercover investigation found officials from six countries were willing to consider selling their votes on the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The revelations come as Japan seeks to break the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling. An IWC meeting that will decide the fate of thousands...

Britain’s Daily Mail is reporting that Sarah Palin may be heading across the pond for a meeting with Margaret Thatcher: Controversial US politician Sarah Palin could soon be on her way to Britain to boost her hopes of challenging Barack Obama in the 2012 US presidential election. Her representatives approached Margaret Thatcher to ask for a meeting as part of a bid to enhance her claim to be the “heir to Ronald Reagan” and prepare to challenge Mr Obama. And Lady Thatcher has agreed...

We’re used to the issue of separatism here in Canada, with Quebec nationalists agitating for separation from the rest of Canada for decades now (despite two referendums with “No” outcomes), but the country dealing with it today is Belgium, which heads to the polls to elect all 150 seats in the Chamber of Representatives and 40 of 71 seats in the Senate. The country faces a number of serious problems, including (as with the rest of Europe) the economy. As the BBC reports, “[d]uring...

Honestly, I just can’t get too worked up about Tuesday’s primary votes. Given how few people actually vote in these elections, I just don’t think they mean nearly as much as the the chattering class of the 24/7 news cycle would have us believe, and I don’t think we can learn all that much from them. For example, does Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s win in Arkansas against a union-backed challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, suggest a broad rejection of efforts to unseat conservative...

I mean the Democratic Party, of course, or at least the Democrats on Capitol Hill. Republicans can push them around by calling them soft on terrorism, but it goes even further than that, as we saw yesterday: House Democrats had to scrap their only substantive bill of the week Thursday after Republicans won a procedural vote that substantively altered the legislation with an anti-porn clause. Democrats had labeled their COMPETES Act — a bill to increase investments in science, research and training...

The right-wing Gateway Pundit blog had an unintentionally funny post up over the weekend, by one Jim Hoft, with the following title: “Leftists Wave Vile, Violent Signs At Sarah Palin in Oregon… Media Silent.” You see, there’s been a good deal of attention, and rightfully so, on the vileness and violence of conservatives, and so the intent here, one supposes, is to show that it’s the left, not the right, that is actually vile and violent — except that the (leftist)...

This sounds very promising: President Obama thinks Republicans will engage in a full battle over his Supreme Court nominee regardless of the person’s ideological leanings, and in some ways “that realization is liberating for the president” to choose whomever he pleases, an administration official told TPMDC. In comments that are at odds with the conventional wisdom about what Obama needs to do to make sure the Senate confirms his nominee to replace John Paul Stevens, a White House...

I’m all for free speech — in fact, I consider myself a firm civil libertarian in this regard — but some “speech” isn’t really speech and shouldn’t be free. Take, for example, the case of videos depicting extreme cruelty to animals: The Supreme Court on Tuesday forcefully struck down a federal law aimed at banning depictions of dog fighting and other violence against animals, saying it violated constitutional guarantees of free speech and created a “criminal...

NYT: President Obama said Monday that he was revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons. But the president said in an interview that he was carving out an exception for “outliers like Iran and North Korea” that have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation. Discussing his approach to nuclear security the day before formally releasing his new strategy, Mr. Obama described...

“In Afghanistan,” headlines the Times, “Obama Presses Karzai to Fight Corruption.” Good luck with that, Mr. President, but I suspect you’d have about as much of a chance for success pressing McConnell and Boehner to fight extremism and obstructionism in the GOP. Honestly, I’m not sure which is in worse shape, Afghanistan or the Republican Party. ********** As for Obama’s “surprise” visit to Afghanistan: [He] rallied the troops in Afghanistan during...

Bruce Bartlett has had a long career in Republican politics. He worked for Ron Paul and Jack Kemp. He was a fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He was a senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House, working for Gary Bauer, later a Treasury official under Bush I. He worked at the Cato Institute. Starting in 1993, he was with the right-wing National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas… until it fired him for being too critical of Bush II. As he puts it himself, he was fired “for writing...

Given Republicans’ emphasis on public opinion lately, falsely claiming that a majority of the American people were against health-care reform (when they were really just against the bill as it wound its way in ugly fashion through Congress, and when much of the opposition to it was coming from the left, which didn’t think it went nearly far enough), I wonder what they’ll say about this new poll showing a significant bounce of support with additional support for more to be done: More...

Well, it’s done. Pretty much. After all that’s happened — after all the right-wing tea-party and town-hall protests, after all the Republican lies about death panels and whatever else they could make up, after all the news media’s ignorant reporting and regurgitation of Republican talking points, after the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, after all the compromises to reach 60 votes in the Senate, after all the whip counting in the House — health-care reform...

Homer: And how is “education” supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home wine-making course and I forgot how to drive? Marge: That’s because you were drunk! Homer: And how. ********** WaPo: Historians on Tuesday criticized proposed revisions to the Texas social studies curriculum, saying that many of the changes are historically inaccurate and that they would affect textbooks...