Wanted: GOP Leaders
It's amusing enough that when the RNC launched its "avant garde, technically" web site this morning the link for "Future Leaders" led to a blank page. More amusing still is that now that they've fixed it, the page has this to offer: Who are the future leaders of the Republican Party? You are - you, the people who make America work.
About That AHIP Study...
It's never a good sign when the firm you hired to conduct a policy analysis is publicly blaming you for its misleading nature barely a day later.
Bank Shot
I don't pretend to be an expert in the voter dynamics of the New Jersey governor's race.
The Election Before the Election
Political circumstances can change unexpectedly, of course, but at the moment the Democrats seem very likely to lose seats in the 2010 midterms, and possibly quite a few of them. What's a little harder to predict is what will happen in the 2010 Republican primaries, where the number of insurgent, tea-party-propelled challenges to establishment candidates continues to multiply.
The Movie Review: ‘A Serious Man’
The wittiest scene in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2001 film The Man Who Wasn’t There is one in which a fast-talking defense attorney, Freddy Riedenschneider (marvelously played by Tony Shalhoub), invokes Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as grounds for a not-guilty verdict in a murder case: We can’t know what really happened.… Because the more you look, the less you know. But the beauty of it is, we don't gotta know! We just gotta show that, goddamnit, they don't know. Reasonable doubt. Science. The atom. You explain it to me.
Dead Letter, Ctd.
For any interested in witnessing the willfully slipshod and malevolent manner in which the state of Texas applies the death penalty, "Nightline" has done a follow-up segment to David Grann's New Yorker piece on the wrongful execution of Cameron Todd Willingham.
Karl Rove, Lifelong Gay-Baiter
In the course of discussing with Sam Tanenhaus his book The Death of Conservatism (an expansion of this essay he wrote for TNR), Reihan Salam claims in passing Karl Rove never imagined that opposition to same-sex marriage would cement a permanent Republican majority. It was a distraction that I'm sure he found distasteful. Andrew Sullivan pounces Rove thought this was a distraction? From his realignment? Does Reihan recall the kind of politics Rove cut his teeth on in the South?
The None-of-the-Above Election
How might Jon Corzine--whose numbers even in more recent, favorable polls hover around 40 percent--still manage to be reelected as New Jersey governor? Nate Silver explains: Here's what this boils down to: there are probably a finite number of people willing to get out of bed and vote for Jon Corzine on November 3rd. And it's a number, moreover, that wouldn't ordinarily be enough to allow a candidate to carry the state.
Fixing the Bible
Die-hard social conservatives in the United States often explain that their ideology is merely a result of taking at face value the words of the Bible. So, it's an interesting inversion to see the folks at Conservapedia literally re-editing the latter to better conform with the former. A few of the guidelines they intend to follow: 1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias 4.
The Bloodlust State, Ctd.
Every time it seems that Texas's application of the death penalty cannot become a greater moral disgrace, officials in the state find a way to outdo themselves.
