Less than 24 hours after promising to “end the outsized influence of lobbyists” and “do our work openly,” Barack Obama’s White House began quietly inviting lobbyists to join in “a series of conference calls with senior Obama administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address.”
The Hill, which publishes from offices [...]

Perhaps the most outstanding achievement of the speech was getting Chris Matthews to forget that Obama is not an Irishman. Seriously: Chris Matthews said that “I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.” Dude. Seek help. Never mind.
The White House web site has a transcript of the speech along with a convenient guide [...]

Stuff worth reading:
The Columbia Journalism Review’s story on the Russian press and Russian journalists. The story cites the Committee to Protect Journalists ranking of Russia as the third most dangerous country for journalists, behind second-place Algeria and the US-created democratic capitalist paradise of Iraq, and describes the gyrations that reporters and writers for independent newspapers [...]

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg has a story up in his magazine—and simultaneously in Newsweek, as if what he has to say is so important that it had to be said twice—identifying Barack Obama’s “cool, detached temperament” as a drag on his own popularity and that of his party. Weisberg allows as how Scott Brown’s Massachusetts [...]

Former Democratic Leadership Council chairman Bruce Reed takes a predictable lesson for Democrats away from the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts: Run away, run away! He quotes Missouri Senator Claire McKaskill, who reacted to the election by saying that “people out there believe that we are going too far, too fast,” and he opines that [...]

From big-time Village Voice blogger Roy Edroso: Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate.
Plus: IOZ is the Helen Reddy of nihilistic triumphalism.

Blogging requires cat-like reflexes. Some subjects aren’t really time sensitive—the stupidity of the US approach to countering those who wish us ill when clearly no one has, has ever had or will ever have any reason for doing so is never out of style or lacking for an example—but some are and if one doesn’t [...]

Specifically, our freedom to do whatever it is we want to do to them and their part of the world without consequence.
Disclaimer: I don’t support terrorism as an expression of political or ideological frustration, or in any event, but I understand the impulse and one has to admit that as a negotiating technique, it [...]

John Dickerson was responsible for one of the half-dozen or so all-time busiest days on my blog, back in March of 2006. I basically called him a moron, enjoyed brief but universal acclaim for doing so and then felt compelled to apologize a day or two later after he persuaded me that he was, for [...]

Returning once again to Tim Noah, Slate’s point guy on the insurance reform story. A few days ago he wrote a story about the astonishingly brief life cycle of the Medicare buy-in plan, which I remarked on here.
Subsequently, he wrote another story acknowledging that whatever comes out of the Senate will lack all of the [...]

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg wrote a story yesterday, published under the auspices of an occasional column called “The Big Idea,” explaining how Republicans were never serious about health insurance reform. Slate readers are supposed to be an upscale, well-educated lot so one might assume they’re aware that Republicans recently controlled the White House for eight [...]

I hardly ever watch Chris Matthews on MSNBC but recently I’ve made an effort to inoculate myself against the madness by watching him and some of the other ADD media types who populate the various aethereal passages. Much of today’s episode was focused upon Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture—assessments of which varied wildly across the [...]

This place would be a paradise tomorrow if every department had a supervisor with a submachine gun.
   - Jim Jones on Jonestown

At home, the Obama Justice Department is busy trying to insulate the Bush administration at large and torture memo author John Yoo in particular from the US Geneva Conventions obligation to prosecute war criminals [...]

I was watching Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show yesterday when she ran a story about ten senators joining together to devise a health care sop for liberals who at this point are like beggars in the desert asking not for a drink of water but only for someone to waft a canteen under their noses.
Which [...]

I had every best intention of doing little more than to acknowledge that president Obama made some sort of speech about some sort of strategy in some sort of country called Afghanistan, but people keep writing about it and I keep reading about it and, well, you know.
Most recently, I read the reaction from Slate’s [...]

I wasn’t going to comment on the Obama/Bush/Pentagon/GOP/Dahmer plan to add some 30,000 US troops to the 60,000-some already in Afghanistan because it’s a stupid plan, but I went ahead and read the speech and there’s a relevant point I want to make in response.
According to the guy who wrote the recently (2006) updated Army [...]

Ross Douthat has been occupying some of the world’s priciest editorial real estate for a while now, churning out variously incoherent or inane commentary for the New York Times every Monday. He got the job earlier this year when I was lost in a fog so I haven’t paid much attention to him. I think [...]

This blog has seen its ups and downs since October of 2003 debut. It went from approximately no readers in the first year to right around a million readers over the course of 2005, after it became the first blog to field its own semi-regular White House correspondent, the inestimable Eric Brewer, who asked some [...]

I can’t believe anyone believes the CIA when it says that Iran was working toward nuclear weapons for a while but now they’re not. This sounds like they got snookered on the front end and now they’re covering for it. “Oh, shit. They weren’t working on a bomb. What do we do now?” I wonder [...]

I can’t actually believe someone is talking about Peggy Noonan winning a Pulitzer, but apparently my capacity for belief falls short of reality, because they are. They being a former colleague of Noonan’s at the Wall Street Journal, and Brian Williams, the managing editor of NBC Nightly News who is paid more than $10 million [...]

I have a hat that I call my Gilligan hat, which I often wear in tandem with some dark sunglasses. The past week or so people have been staring at me. No, really: it has gotten to the point where I’m checking to see if my fly is open or I’m drooling or bleeding or [...]

Excuse us if we doubt that the housing bubble is solely responsible for Armageddon. And indulge us as we point out that a few weeks ago, when the Dow was sitting above 11,000, we bet that it would soon see the wrong side of 8000, a benchmark toward which it has obligingly slid. (Full disclosure: [...]

I’ve been insisting that the total cost of the financial sector bailout will run $3 trillion or more. Turns out that despite a lack of any expertise other than a deeply held and absolute cynicism about Republican governance and financiers of any stripe, I’m in good company. David Leonhardt is pretty sure we’ll get most [...]

As we continue to remind everyone when we write about Wall Street, we don’t know Diddley about finance. Fortunately most stories about Wall Street have way more to do with stupidity and greed than with finance. We know a little something about stupidity and greed.
It’s customary in the US to set aside a small percentage [...]

The press are beginning to notice that they didn’t notice the flames lapping at the financial nation’s ankles these past several years. This is something of a ritual; and a bit of a peculiar one at that, since newspapers have always been much better at reporting what has already happened than what is about to, [...]

The only fair way to score the debates is to watch them without audio. That way one doesn’t get distracted by what the candidates say, which anyway has only a minor relationship with reality. The important thing is how they looked. Did McCain smirk? Did Obama get that pinched, schoolmarm-ish look? Did either man dip [...]

Due to the theft of my computer I wasn’t able to comment in more or less real time on the much larger if less meaningful to me theft of $700 billion $1 trillion from the US Treasury. Yes, it was an inside job. In fact, everyone is on the inside except me and, maybe, you. [...]

We wrote recently about the regrettable tendency of New York Times finance writers to predict events inversely; when they say something bad might not happen, it inevitably does; when they say something bad might happen within a few weeks, it seems to happen within a few days.
Much of today’s Times business section is given [...]

The New York Times business desk reporters and editors work hard to be objective and calm in their coverage of events. That’s why they’ve been consistently behind the curve lately, and why readers who mistake what amounts to Charge of the Light Brigade bravado as cutting edge financial journalism are similarly dragging ass behind events.
To [...]

In a  blog at TNR last Friday, Eve Fairbanks intercepts a ball dropped by E. J. Graff at slate’s XX factor column, and runs with it. Her topic is the lamentable denouement of the candidate I myself championed, but it’s her capitulation to MSM binary-thinking wherein she betrays her (and by extension the whole [...]

The Washington Post should have a special ethics rule for David Broder: he shouldn’t be allowed to meet anyone, ever, because he simply cannot write anything negative about anyone he has met who didn’t throw a punch at him. Today’s exemplar is the now-indicted senior senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, who, according to Broder, was [...]

“The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want.”
Let’s coin some alternatives. “The main reason al-Qaeda is losing in America is not because there are too few terrorists, [...]

John McCain said in a Thursday interview with the Kansas City Star that Barack Obama is politically to the left of Vermont’s socialist senator, Bernie Sanders. Presumably McCain was referring to the National Journal rankings, which named Obama the most liberal senator based upon his sporadic votes—he missed 35% of them—in 2007.
Even the National [...]

By “nick,” we mean something along the lines of the Grand Canyon or Marianas Trench. It is a nick into which millions of erstwhile homeowners, along with millions more investors—but no policy makers, so far—have tumbled with barely a trace, unless you count the recession they’re leaving in their wake.
As BTC News more or less [...]

Back in 1999, then-Slate political correspondent Jacob Weisberg, now the online journalistic Cream of Wheat site’s editor, penned a story called “Why the Press Loves John McCain“. He opened it with a charmingly self-effacing and abashed confession:
Journalists go weak in the knees around the guy. The few who have attempted to write debunking pieces about [...]

Scott McClellan was the first White House press secretary that once-and-future BTC News White House writer Eric Brewer had the opportunity to question. McClellan’s response was so memorably robotic that Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin devoted the top of his column to it the next day. New York University journalism prof and press critic Jay [...]

The New York Times has a he said/she said story about the potential hazards of second-generation biofuel crops, which generally aren’t edible and hence don’t contribute to famine and associated political difficulties, but are often unfriendly to local ecosystems and domestic crops. On one side of the story are ecologists and others who point to [...]

The National Review was founded by Bill Buckley, a very smart man who reached for the loftiest sources to back up his often hideous but invariably elequently stated views. He’s dead now but he outlived the reputation of his magazine by some years and he’ll be walking the earth again before the magazine regains its [...]

Circumstances in Iraq are insanely complicated, but not generally indecipherable. The major players are known—some well, some not so well—many major occurrences are reported, and a fair number of people who are either in Iraq or know the country well regularly provide commentary and analysis. Yet the US press continue to rely largely on the [...]

That’s a joke, the “adversarial” tag, but a story in the New York Times today helps explain the reason so many people see the press as anti-government. Investigative reporter David Barstow uncovered a White House-approved Pentagon operation to use high-profile television and print military analysts, mostly retired general officers, to help sell the Iraq invasion [...]

I had hoped to provide a detailed breakdown of the various forces operating in Iraq as I understand them, complete with colorful graphics of the sort favored by people testifying to Congress, but that will have to wait until BTC News world headquarters is permanently settled somewhere. (Readers who would like to help advance that [...]

By now you may know that top Bush administration officials, with the knowledge and approval of the president, choreographed torture regimens for terrorism suspects held by the US. You probably haven’t heard much about the reaction from Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
That’s because they haven’t reacted. Like most of the press, Clinton [...]

To say that US troops killed in Iraq are dying for their country is to do them a profound disservice. The invasion and occupation of Iraq were and remain bad for this country by every measure: moral, financial, diplomatic, military. What the troops are dying for is an epic blunder foisted upon them and us [...]

BTC News contributor Eric Brewer, now reporting from the White House for online magazine Raw story, challenged Bush press secretary Dana Perino on the president’s claim that al Qaeda in Iraq might one day appropriate Iraq’s oil and use the funds for their own purposes.
This isn’t a new claim—Bush has made it before, as [...]

A few days ago, New York University journalism professor and press critic Jay Rosen flagged an essay on the perils of journalistic neutrality by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus. The essay was published in Frank: Academics for the Real World, a product of the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service. Frank [...]

George W. Bush has a death grip on the title of Worst US President Ever, but he’s not alone in achieving historic levels of incompetence: his cabinet secretaries are pulling their weight as well.
Take Condoleezza Rice, for instance. As Bush’s national security council chief, she presided over the administration’s total lack of interest in counter-terrorism [...]

John McCain’s campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, has officially become a rolling punch line to the joke of the GOP presidential primaries.
There has simply never been a primary for either major party as ridiculous as the 2008 GOP effort. Mitt Romney, who would easily have won the Phil Gramm award for financial futility [...]

Serge Kovaleski’s New York Times story on Barack Obama’s youthful flirtation with recreational drugs has been in the works for a while. Obama wrote about his drug use in his autobiographical “Dreams of My Father”, and his mention of the subject prompted a brief flurry of stupidity in December culminating in the resignation of a [...]

Many months ago when I was writing something about health care I ran across a blog that had a number of entries on the subject, one of which I used in my piece. That web page and 70-some others are still open in my browser, which in retaliation is now consuming most of my computer’s [...]

In July of last year, New Republic editor Noam Scheiber penned a New York Times op-ed column celebrating the demise of the anti-liberal Democratic Leadership Council as a factor in Democratic politics. Even at the time, reports of their death were greatly exaggerated. As the presidential campaign has unfolded with scenes of Barack Obama and [...]