Poor Newt. The preemptive spanks came early and hard. Even his scrap-the-EPA mantra hasn’t won over Marc Morano, who this morning emailed a blistering missive to everyone in his rolodex. UPDATE: Great post headline from Andrew Sullivan, who provides an excellent round-up of reax, including this killer campaign slogan for Newt: “Gingrich 2012: He will always…Continue Reading…
This headline says it all: Ron Paul hates energy subsidies, doubts climate change, and loves riding his bike
In his rise to power as a Republican congressman, Newt Gingrich developed a reputation as a rhetorical “bombthrower.” And that was before Bill Clinton stepped foot in the White House. By the mid-2000s, the former Speaker of the House (he left Congress in 1999), seemed to grow mellower, and even recast himself as a treehugger. …Continue Reading…
About that futility I was going on about yesterday, Kevin Drum nails it: Are the fever dreams of the right worse than the fever dreams of the left? I’d say they obviously are, but that’s a matter for evidence and argument, not listicles. But nobody on the right is ever going to acknowledge this anyway….Continue Reading…
Steve Walt at Foreign Policy makes his case: One problem, of course, is that causality in a case like this is always murky. When someone arrives at a public event and starts shooting people, how do we determine the relative weight of mental illness, personal experience, opportunity, lax gun-control laws, and the toxic soup of…Continue Reading…
Jon Stewart is obviously striking a nerve. Last week, he rankled liberals. This week, the top exec at Fox News unloads on Stewart: He hates conservative views. He hates conservative thoughts. He hates conservative verbiage. He hates conservatives…He’s crazy. If it wasn’t polarized, he couldn’t make a living. He makes a living by attacking conservatives…Continue Reading…
That’s what David Rothkopf is bemoaning here in Foreign Policy and it’s what outgoing Republican congressman Bob Ingliss is warning about in his comments yesterday at the House Subcommittee hearing on climate change. Rothkopf, perhaps reminded of this movie (that was awful but also dead-on), offers his own metaphor for the virus overtaking parts of…Continue Reading…
There’s just something weird about this China envy that I keep hearing from liberal pundits and intellectuals. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around yesterday’s op-ed by Thomas Friedman, so I’m going to attempt to unpack it. Bear with me. Let’s start with Friedman’s opener: To visit China today as an American is to…Continue Reading…
Or rather it’s the U.S. political system that worries Foreign Policy’s Steve Walt in this post about America’s rocky future. This is a theme that keeps coming up with pundits, especially those (such as Thomas Friedman and Mathew Yglesias) who are frustrated by the lack of policy action on climate change and other big ticket…Continue Reading…
Before I head off for a late summer vacation, I’d like to point out two notable op-eds appearing in today’s NYT. One is by Nicholas Kristof, who, after mentioning opposition to the Islamic center in lower Manhattan, goes on to discuss “earlier waves of intolerance in American history,” not out of hatred or bigotry, but…Continue Reading…