Archive for April, 2009
April 30th, 2009
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 Much has been made in some quarters today about President Obama’s failure to call on anyone from Fox News during his press conference last night.
 The silliest critics have held that Obama is either afraid of reporters from Fox or miffed at the network’s vaunted dedication to fairness and balance.
 Of course, anyone who pays attention to how presidential press conferences actually work knows that even the most illustrious of media hotshots occasionally get passed over at these affairs. For example, The New York Times and the Washington Post both failed to get the nod at a conference just last month.
 Fox News White House reporter Major Garrett (pictured above with the president), who’s been called on at several news conferences this year,  CONFIDED to colleagues last year that it was nonsense to suggest that Obama tries to avoid Fox.
April 30th, 2009
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 Barack Obama is a liberal, and everybody knows it.
 Oh sure, conservatives like to pretend that voters didn’t know what they were getting into when they elected Obama president, but that’s nonsense. It’s the conservatives themselves who don’t understand what’s going on. They still think the “liberal” label scares people. It doesn’t.
 As Timothy Egan explains in THIS PIECE, “Obama is making it safe to be a liberal again – and showing how meaningless such labels can be.”
April 30th, 2009
THIS KIND OF THING makes you wonder what they’re preaching from some pulpits these days.
April 30th, 2009
 Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has not yet announced her political intentions for next year, but a new poll SHOWS that she would do well in a Democratic primary for governor.
 It isn’t that incumbent Gov. Pat Quinn is unpopular. It’s just that Madigan is very popular.
April 30th, 2009
 
 Vice President Joe Biden was on network TV this morning, WARNING against travel on planes or trains in light of the swine flu outbreak.
 Within minutes, Biden faced a firestorm of accusations that he was unduly arousing public panic. See HERE and HERE and HERE.
 THIS GUY is so upset with the vice president that he wants him to resign over the flu gaffe.
 UPDATE: THIS GUY says “Biden may be right to induce a bit of panic.”
April 30th, 2009
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 To purge or not to purge — that is the QUESTION.
 Having lost 15 seats in the U.S. Senate in the past 29 months, and finding that their party is not exactly held in high regard by the general populace (see HERE), Republicans are faced with a choice of trying to broaden their base or continuing to banish moderates from their ranks.
 UPDATE: David Frum is AGAINST the GOP purges, and offers this observation: “By penalizing pro-choice candidates, Republicans are not only making their party increasingly unelectable in the present, they are repelling the very people who might help restore electability in the future.”
 UPDATE II: Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, says he hopes the GOP can “regain our status as a national party” — which suggests that he doesn’t see it as national party in its current condition:
 UPDATE III: Meanwhile, the GOP is launching a NEW EFFORT to “rebrand” the party. Sounds exciting.
April 29th, 2009
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 Remember the CB radio craze of the 1970s? It came and went in the blink of an eye — and the same thing seems likely to happen to Twitter, the social-networking phenomenon.
 My sense from the get-go that Twitter was just a passing fad is vindicated by THIS REPORT.
 With any luck, I’ll get through this life without ever having tweeted — just as I’ve never used a CB radio and never will.
April 29th, 2009
 Republican U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a rising star among the right-wing booboisie, tries here to blame Franklin Roosevelt for the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which was one of the causes of the Great Depression.
 But Bachmann botches the name of the act, calling it “Hoot-Smalley,” and ignores the fact that it was a measure authored by congressional Republicans and signed into law by a Republican president — nearly three years before Roosevelt took office.
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