Wolcott offers some fatherly advice to Wonkette regarding her seventeen simultaneous panel discussion appearances. He’s worried that she’s spread too thin.

For a bunch of high-powered reporters, the club are having the devil of a time reporting on their own event.

And no, I’m not fooling, but I do apologize in advance for asking a question that I knew would merely trigger one of Scott McClellan’s rote little speeches. But I couldn’t help it. I was so stirred by the report that came out yesterday from Bush’s Presidential Commission to Blame Everyone But the White House [...]

The press club are human. They’re not Darth Vader or Richard Perle or other cartoon villains, they’re not stupid and I don’t think they’re terminally insular. They’re just way behind the curve here with very little time to catch up, and I think bloggers would be better served by trying to help them do that than by dismissing them as a bunch of ill-intentioned fossilized renegades from the 19th century.

In the Nation, Sasha Abramsky analyzes the evolution of gun control politics in the Democratic Party. Because the West is a rising political target for Democrats, and that region is pretty pro-gun, many Democrats (camp #1) are suggesting that the party decentralize the issue. In other words, make it a state rather than a national [...]

While large corporations continue to benefit from laws permitting them to go shopping for the most lenient bankruptcy courts in the country, consumers are about to get hammered with a stunningly regressive personal bankruptcy “reform” bill that essentially allows credit card companies and automobile finance companies to place bankrupt consumers in what used to be known as indentured servitude, a condition in which consumers are essentially working for the credit card company for as long as it takes to repay a debt.

According to no less an authority than NPC president Rick Dunham, who apparently told Roll Call Magazine that he intends to ask Guckert why the latter thinks he’s a journalist, not inviting Guckert would be tantamount to censorship.

So it looks like the Republican coalition might be coming apart at the seams. According to the Washington Post, Republicans in Congress are still divided over how to deal with DeLay and Schiavo. Bull Moose notes that the Mods are unhappy, and that people are beginning to realize how corrupt the party is. Ruy Teixeira [...]

Say what you will about McClellan (and of course we won’t lest we lose the opportunity to not get more questions answered), he’s consistent.

While national GOP heavyweights Tom DeLay and John Cornyn are telling judges everywhere what’s good for them, Republicans in Washington state are demonstrating a refreshing faith in the rule of law by suing to set aside the election of Democratic governor Christine Gregoire.

This is why people have to build monuments to death and horror and stupidity: because if you don’t, everyone forgets. When Bush is gone, every street corner in Washington should host a bronzed vignette of Bush awarding George Tenet the Medal of Freedom while some raggedy urchin stands on a pile of uniformed, severed limbs to hawk copies of the Robb-Silberman report to invisible, tall onlookers.

No this is not a biblical rant. It is a post in response to Bruce Bartlett’s “Feed the Beast” editorial in the NYT. In his op-ed Bartlett suggests that we adopt the Value-Added Tax (VAT), a sales tax at each stage of production which is common in Europe. His reasoning? The “Starve the Beast” strategy [...]

The party of personal responsibility is never personally responsible for anything.

This morning I attended the National Press Club’s panel discussion on “Who is a journalist?” starring Jeff Gannon, aka James Guckert, and Ana Marie Cox, aka Wonkette. Also on the panel were bloggers Matt Yglesias and Garrett Graff, while the mainstream media were represented by the National Journal’s John Stanton and the Baltimore Sun’s [...]

Delay’s remarks were taped because he was busy draping himself in the dead skin of the anti-war, anti-death penalty Pope John Paul II, something which we can expect the president to do as well.

During the four-day search for Chen, the police broke down at least one door in the building, arrested a man who had a suspicious BBQ sauce stain on his shirt and inadvertently announced that Chen is an illegal immigrant.

lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Supreme Court Justice Anthony] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

According to Brooks, an abiding love of philosophy provides those closed door GOP head-banging sessions with an ambience reminiscent of a 1920’s Cambridge dinner party. WWWD: What Would Wittgenstein Do?

In regard to the previous post by Weldon on Brooks…..
Okay I’ll bite. I’ll pretend that conservatives are really reading the books that Brooks claim they are (Anaximander? Please.). I’ll pretend that this isn’t just some lame effort to give conservatism intellectual respectability, or that it’s some trick to get liberals to paint themselves as elitists [...]

Okay, I have been told that the Berube piece was a spoof. Now if I was the cowardly sort, I’d delete my previous post. But I will go ahead and take my lumps. Gulp, here goes… if that was satire, my apologies to David Brooks. See, that wasn’t so bad (where’s my seppuku….).
In my defense, [...]

” … nearly two years and hundreds of dead and maimed soldiers later, many troops are still riding dangerous roads in Iraq without adequate armor on their vehicles.”

I drove up to Vermont last weekend for my father’s birthday. On my way home Monday, driving south from Middlebury toward Albany, I turned on the car radio and listened for a couple of hours to a right-wing barrage directed against the American Constitution and the American judiciary.
First up was Phyllis Schlafly, 80-year-old author of [...]

I am just aghast at what conservatives are saying about Alexander Hamilton. Phyllis Shafley and others are claiming that Hamilton believed the judiciary should be the weakest of the three branches, by implication intending the courts to be passive in the face of the other two branches or popular opinion.
Which is the reverse of what [...]

Yes, it’s true: Tom DeLay has the cojones to equate the Contract on America with the Magna Carta, The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
When the The Contract with America was issued in September of 1994, it presented clearly defined positions on issues of concern to the American people. It was a written commitment that [...]

Press critic Tom Engelhardt’s invaluable Tom Dispatchblog is featuring a story or two written by his students in the UC Berkeley journalism graduate school. The first comes from Lisa Lambert, who takes on the subject of morality among the ultra-religious right. Read the piece and try to imagine it appearing in any of the [...]

We on the left used to be a bit obsessed with George Bush. Myself included. But now, almost without realizing it, the President is becoming a marginalized figure. Bill Frist is leading the charge to eliminate the filibuster (and impose a theocracy on the United States). Tom Delay is (barely) holding on despite an [...]

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has quietly scuttled the State Department’s annual terrorism survey, whichreportedly indicates that 2004 was the worst year ever in terms of terrorism incidents. And the count excludes Iraq.

The old folks were right: that there rock’n’roll will fry your brain.
“Remember the Alamo! Shoot ‘em!” he screamed to applause. “To show you how radical I am, I want carjackers dead. I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want child molesters dead. I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. [...]

Matt Yglesias’ post pointed me to an essay by William Galston in the Washington Monthly. Galston is an interesting figure to me because he is both a respectable philosopher (although I think he gets Rawls completely wrong) and is active in liberal Democratic politics. In that he, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is something of [...]

Rice, typically, finds the problem not to be Bolton’s behavior but the people who are talking about Bolton’s behavior.