Calling the president “a master rope-a-doper,” Noam Scheiber has an interesting take on what may have been Obama’s strategy in dealing with the Republicans over the stimulus bill: For weeks now, Obama has soared above the fray — inviting dour-looking Republicans to the White House for cookies and patiently hearing them out on Capitol Hill. Once again, the Republicans have exploited this stance, notching a series of tactical victories, like their unanimous no-vote in the House...

Alex Rodriguez, aka A-Rod, aka A-Fraud, has admitted that he took “a banned substance.” However, he claims that he didn’t know what it was: “I am guilty of being negligent, naïve, not asking all the right questions.” He claims further that he hasn’t taken it, or anything like it, since 2003, when he tested positive (see SI’s story for more). In other words, it wasn’t his fault. He was a just a dupe — “young,” “stupid,”...

I realize that part of what the economy needs is more consumer spending on big-ticket items, and so I understand why Republicans pushed successfully for a $15,000 tax credit for homebuyers to go along with a tax incentive for carbuyers, both now part of the Senate’s stimulus package, but is encouraging more spending at a time when jobs are being lost and the credit market has dried up really such a great idea? I mean, you can give people any sort of incentive you want, but what if they still...

Yesterday, my friend Creature noted that public support for the current economic stimulus plan has fallen to 37 percent, attributing this decline to “the failure of Democrats to get their message out.” Ryan Avent, linking to Steve Benen, made the same point over at Yglesias’s place: “[C]onservatives are winning the public relations battle, and as a result, public support for stimulus is falling.” I agree with this assessment. As bad as things are out there — as...

I used to read Maureen Dowd. Once upon a time. Way back when. I can admit that, can’t I? She was funny, sometimes, and her intertwining of pop culture and pop politics amused me. There was never any depth to her, but it didn’t matter. Reading her Times columns, pithy drivel and all, was a fine way to pass the time — when I had some time, didn’t feel like having to think all that much, and nothing more compelling was available, mainly because I was too lazy to look. And now?...

No, not really. But that’s the view of one Stephen Marche, who in The New Republic a couple of weeks ago wrote that Canada is about to become… the Balkans. Or Italy. Or something: If Canada does collapse — and the parliamentary crisis is pointing us in that direction — the U.S. will end up with something like a Balkans to the North. Canada has become ungovernable, entering a period of Italian-style instability. Marche was perhaps overstating his case for effect, but, regardless,...

On Sunday, the L.A. Times, certainly one of the more credible sources in American journalism, reported that Obama has authorized the CIA to continue to “carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.” Essentially, the report went, Obama was going to maintain the “controversial counter-terrorism tool” completely “intact”: “[T]he Obama administration appears to have determined...

I wrote a Super Bowl post yesterday at my blog that included comments on the game itself. I’ve been a Steelers fan since the mid-’70s, when, as a young boy growing up in Montreal, I fell in love with Bradshaw and Harris and Swann and Stallworth and the Steel Curtain. Even before I came to be a Canadiens fan in hockey, which is more or less mandatory in that city, they were my #1 team. I finally made it to a game in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago. It was like a pilgrimage for me. It...

According to the AP, “U.S. soldiers killed themselves last year at the highest rate on record, the toll rising for a fourth straight year and even surpassing the suicide rate among comparable civilians.” By “highest rate on record,” the AP means since 1980, when “current record-keeping began.” Still, needless to say, this is a horrible development, with at least 128 soldiers killing themselves last year — or 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers. Hopefully the military...

I think it’s hilarious that one of the Bush Administration’s leading proponents of torture — in fact, the very guy, a DoJ official, who wrote the infamous memos that authorized the use of torture — has come out against Obama’s decision to close Gitmo and end the use of torture. That’s right, John Yoo, in an op-ed yesterday in the WSJ, argues that “these actions… will also seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist...

The House of Representatives passed an $819-million economic stimulus package this evening. The vote was 244-188. Only Democrats voted for it. 177 Republicans voted against it. The package includes both spending measures and tax cuts. The American people would get some tax relief, money to save or to spend, perhaps to pay the bills and put food on the table, and money would go to infrastructure projects, for energy and education and health care, to support those who need it, those who have lost their...

McClatchy: The nation’s current recession is likely to be the longest since World War II, and by some measures could be the worst since the Great Depression, a new Congressional Budget Office forecast said Tuesday. Without a major economic stimulus plan, “the shortfall in the nation’s output relative to its potential would be the largest – in terms of both length and depth – since the Depression of the 1930s,” said new CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf in testimony prepared...

(Joe posted earlier today on Kristol’s departure from the Times. Here’s my take, focusing more on his new gig at the Post.) The New York Times, like Time before it, has dumped neocon extraordinaire Bill Kristol following a relatively brief op-ed tenure writing what Steve Benen rightly calls “misguided, predictable, and dull columns.” (Check out Mustang Bobby’s great post from this morning on the occasion of Kristol’s last Times column.) But it looks like we’ll...

Here’s what (still) Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich told the AP a couple of days ago: Dec. 9 to my family, to us, to me, is what Pearl Harbor Day was to the United States. It was a complete surprise, completely unexpected. And just like the United States prevailed in that, we’ll prevail in this. (TNR’s Isaac Chotiner calls it the Quote of the Century. At the very least, it’s our Quote of the Day.) I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to the...

I quote Chait, who quotes Wilkinson: In today’s Washington Post, conservative judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III appeals for an ideological truce in appointments that just happens to coincide with the exact moment Democrats have retaken the nominating power: So the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit is set for a takeover. Popular commentary has it that the court, on which I serve, is a fortress or bastion or citadel of conservatism. Discussion of coming changes suggests more the fruits of...

It was supposed to be Caroline Kennedy, or so it was thought, given how hard she was campaigning for the job, and given her last name, but she suddenly withdrew from contention on Wednesday, reports conflicting, and since then it has been all about the spin. The reason was Uncle Ted’s health, but that wasn’t really a valid reason, given that Uncle Ted has been unwell for some time and that Caroline isn’t exactly his only caregiver (and it’s an excuse that has apparently aroused...

It’s over, at long last. Eight years of a disastrous presidency, one of the worst in history, an embarrassment to the United States, a country I love, with so much harm done both at home and abroad. I’ve thought about writing a post about it all, some sort of summation, but what more is there to say? What more can I add to what others have written? What more can I add to what I have written here, at my place, and elsewhere during my nearly four years as a blogger? It feels like the Bush...

I really don’t think the GOP could do much better than Blackwell, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the RNC. As I put it last week, there may actually be no worthier leader for the Republicans. He’s just about perfect for them, because he is what they are — to the max. For one, we know he’ll do just about anything to win (see Ohio, circa 2004). For two, he’s proven himself to be an unabashed ignoramus — not least when it comes to the right’s #1...

You heard about his dinner with conservatives and his meeting with “liberals”*, but, just as much, one of the more intriguing meetings Obama has had recently was with Lee Hamilton and a group of foreign policy experts, mostly on the Middle East and South Asia, who work outside “the presidential bubble that is rapidly closing around him,” as Laura Rozen put it. It is, needless to say, astonishingly difficult for a president to avoid being trapped in the bubble, but it does...

So Obama, it is being reported, intends to do away with the military’s (and Clinton’s) ridiculous “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, one that allows gays to serve in the military only if they remain in the closet and everyone else remains in the dark. When asked about it directly, soon-to-be Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gave a direct answer: “Yes,” meaning, it will be be gotten rid of. Good enough, right? Well, not for Fox News, which, in reporting the...

So said President Bush in 2005 (when asked about reports of secret CIA prisons). And yet, in truth, the U.S. does torture. So says Susan Crawford, the convening authority of the Guantanamo military commissions, a Gates appointee and Bush administration official: The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,...

Bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie annoy me, she told Esquire, in yet another of her post-election blame-everyone-else-but-me sessions. It is Andrew Sullivan who has been all over the is-she-really-Trig’s-mom story — like the rest of us, he just wants the truth, and Palin has been nothing if not sketchy about the whole affair (hence the lingering suspicions) — but I for one, if I may defend myself, am not an anonymous blogger (that’s my real name up there) and do...

Well, you knew this was coming. As the Times puts it, “the banks need more taxpayer money,” “a lot more money.” Isn’t this partly why so many of us were against the bailout, at least in principle, from the start? It wasn’t just that it’s a bailout of Wall Street instead of Main Street, which is to say, a bailout of the stinking rich, of those who are at the very core of the financial meltdown and who are very much to blame for it, it was that it was never...

I still think Senate Democrats should have said no to Burris. He wasn’t elected. Surely there should be room to block questionable appointees (by soon-to-be impeached governors looking to stick it to anyone and everyone). Could there not have been a special election? Still, now that it’s almost over — that is, now that Burris is set to be sworn in — I suppose I’m with Bowers: Hard to imagine that there will be any objections from Republicans. If anything, they will salivate...

Bush held his final press conference yesterday and was, according to the easygoing NYT, “by turns impassioned and defiant, reflective and light-hearted.” Surely, though, few people were paying attention to this last gasp of a failure of a president, so eager are so many to see him go, with Obama the de facto president ahead of his inauguration, set to undo so much of the failure of his predecessor. But Bush was indeed defiant, or rather self-defensive. He may have “confessed a litany...