The State Department has just released a statement from Secretary Clinton on the passing of Richard Holbrooke. After the fold … Read More
Diplomacy is a paradoxically insular world. And most of the nation’s foreign affairs get little treatment in the headlines. So I imagine that more than a few readers are wondering why we’re giving such major treatment to the death of an Obama administration official who many of you probably have never heard of or perhaps only in passing.
As the obituaries note, Holbrooke was key figure in US diplomacy for almost half a century. One fun fact: he authored a substantial portion of the Pentagon Papers. What may or may not come through as clearly was the size of the personality and the doggedness — a fact that likely kept him from the top job of Secretary of State in this and last Democratic administration. Read More
Kicking off his reelection campaign, Michael Steele says the GOP establishment doesn’t like him because “I’m a street guy.” Watch the video.
Joe Miller takes his legal odyssey against Lisa Murkowski to the Alaska Supreme Court.
YouTube now has a new category of inappropriate videos it allows users to flag for removal: “promotes terrorism.”
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer signaled this morning that House Democrats will fall in line and allow the Obama tax cut plan to pass.
Mitt Romney, the only Republican currently besting President Obama in the TPM Poll Average of hypothetical 2012 matchups, proposes replacing unemployment benefits with “individual unemployment savings accounts.”
Time was you could rely on birthers to fight the good fight to the bitter end. No amount of reason or common sense would stand in their way. They were crazy and they liked it that way. No longer, I’m afraid.
Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, an Army surgeon, seemed like the kind of birther you could rely on. We’ve been following his story closely for months. He refused his deployment on the grounds that any orders originating with President Obama were unlawful. He was prepared to throw his Army career away and risk jail time to prove that Obama was not eligible to be President. Threatened with court-martial, he didn’t back down. His plan, eventually thwarted by a military judge, was to use the court-martial proceedings to conduct discovery on Obama’s birth/origin.
A true patriot of The Crazy, this one. Hard core.
Until now. Read More
This is one of several reasons why the 2012 GOP primary process is going to be really entertaining. Mitt Romney had a dignity crushing series of losses in 2008. I’ve heard it suggested, plausibly, that the GOP’s change away from winner-take-all primaries could help him in 2012. But I still think the nature of his loss in 2008 does not bode well for him in 2012.
In any case, there are two more big liabilities on his ledger: 1st, he changes his ideology about every cycle and his actual policies predilections seem much more moderate than what flies in today’s GOP. In other words, it’s hard for him to shake the perception that he’s a weather vane who doesn’t have any real political principles. 2nd, and more devastating, the terror of ‘Obamacare’ is based on the legislation Mitt pushed through in Massachusetts. It’s his signature piece of legislation. And going into 2012, that’s a big, big problem.
To overcome those liabilities, Mitt has to do everything in his power to avoid a scenario in which he’s the ‘moderate guy’ in the 2012 primary season against some other person who ends up as the Tea Party / hard right standard bearer, whether that’s Palin or maybe Huckabee or whoever else. And so you have him at every point needing to stake out the most hard right position available — in this case, proposing that we get rid of our system of unemployment insurance since, in his telling, unemployment insurance promotes laziness.
All that said, while I’d bet against Romney beating President Obama in 2012, he’s probably the only one of the current crop who even stands a serious chance.