Amid the buzz over David Frum’s recent ouster from the American Enterprise Institute, some folks have linked back to this old post on the now-hoary trope that heterodox conservatives are simply angling for invitations to the fabled Georgetown Cocktail Parties. There’s a certain irony here in that Frum himself is no stranger to attacking the […]

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In a recent New Yorker piece bemoaning standard Beltway coverage of politics as all maneuvering and image management, George Packer imagined the same style applied to foreign coverage—intending to highlight how absurd it seems: Speaking at the presidential palace in Kabul, Mr. Karzai showed himself to be at the top of his game. He skillfully […]

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This HuffPo piece strikes me as just about right. Look, I don’t think Sarah Palin is terribly bright, but even I assume that if she can deliver a speech without notes, she can remember four or five bullet-point “priorities” without recourse to a list scrawled on her hand. If, for some reason, she couldn’t, I […]

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Something that’s implicit in a lot of defenses of the Citizens United ruling I’ve seen in the past day is probably worth noting explicitly: The ban on independent corporate/union expendituures for “electioneering communications” that the court struck down was actually quite narrow.  Basically it covered TV and radio advertising, and didn’t touch myriad other forms […]

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I have enough of my own issues to pay attention to, so I’ve been doing my best to scrupulously ignore the running health reform debate, but in this town there are limits to what can be blocked out.  As I understand the current state of play, we will still have a mandate and a “non-discrimination” […]

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I feel like you don’t see quite so many good old fashioned blog rants anymore, so it’s sort of nice to see Freddie DeBoer let one rip over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. The first part is a long criticism of what Ross Douthat’s been up to since taking his gig at the New […]

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Charles Murray chides those who found his analysis of the politics of torture investigations by the Justice Department disturbingly amoral: To those who were dismayed, I’ve got worse news: I think it is permissible to talk about murder and rape in amoral terms. To talk about the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the genocides in Armenia […]

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Dave Weigel highlights a GOP health care “survey” that, even by the standards of these sorts of fake fundraising push-polls seems awfully egregious.  Among other things, it suggests that under Obamacare, Republicans will be singled out for inferior treatment or denied care. What actually jumped out at me, though, was another pair of questions: Do […]

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Megan McArdle approvingly quotes Tyler Cowen on the bailouts: Without the bailouts we would have had many more failed banks, very strong deflationary pressures, a stronger seize-up in credit markets than what we had, and a climate of sheer political and economic panic, leading to greater pressures for bad state interventions than what we now […]

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After a bout of initial confusion, at least some Palinistas have come around to the view that the Alaska governor’s resignation is actually a canny maverick move after all—or at any rate, have gotten in enough time practicing in front of the mirror that they’re able to say so straightfaced. But I find I can’t […]

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