The New Republic

Lest you think the 9/12 marchers were a bunch of crazies (as the photographic evidence certainly seems to suggest), Jonah Goldberg has this rebuttal: READ MORE >>

I doubt it. But that's the price you pay, I guess, if you're a white guy representing a majority-black Congressional district--even if, as Cohen says of himself, he votes "like a 45-year-old black woman." That said, the black politician currently trying to unseat Cohen, former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, looks like he might be taking the race-baiting to a whole new level (which is quite an accomplishment when you consider that Cohen's opponent in 2008 tried to link him to the KKK). From today's NYT: READ MORE >>

Nicely explained by Lacy K. Ford, the chair of the University of South Carolina history department, on the NYT's Room for Debate blog. The rage of Wilson and other South Carolina Republicans is what happens when the majority party in a one-party state realizes it's the minority party in the rest of the nation: READ MORE >>

I'm baffled by Andy Card's stated desire to run for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. The chances of a Republican winning that race are slim; the chances of a Republican who's been a denizen of D.C. for two decades and who's presumably best known to Massachusetts voters as George W. Bush's chief of staff winning that race are none. READ MORE >>

Riffing on Norman Podhoretz's new book Why Are Jews Liberal?, Robert Stacy McCain offers these thoughts on what he calls the "town-and-country divide" in American politics: Think of Reagan, riding horses and clearning brush at his ranch -- it is an image that appeals to the "country" side of the town-and-country divide, embodying as it does the antique ideal of the American frontier homesteader. READ MORE >>

The Center for Public Integrity has just put out a useful report showing that John Murtha's pattern of earmarking Pentagon dollars to defense contractors who give lots of money--or are represented by lobbyists who give lots of money--to his campaigns is pretty much par for the course on the defense appropriations subcommittee: READ MORE >>

TPM's Eric Kleefeld reports that Mark Foley, the former Florida Congressman who resigned in 2006 over  lewd electronic messages he sent to teenage House pages, is re-entering public life, courtesy of a West Palm Beach A.M. radio station that has hired him to do a public affairs show. Kleefeld seems to think this is a bad move on the radio station's part: READ MORE >>

It might just be the forthcoming Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman. According to The Hill, Frank admits in the book that his ultimate political ambition is to serve as HUD Secretary, which would make him America's only left-handed, gay, Jewish cabinet member. READ MORE >>

In Slate, Daniel Brook kicks off a multi-part series on Mohamed Atta's strangely ignored master's thesis in urban planning from the Hamburg University of Technology. The thesis was about the Syrian city of Aleppo, and Atta's plan to strip one of its neighborhoods of Western influences. Not surprisingly, Atta's Aleppo wasn't very female-friendly: READ MORE >>

Good news: Joe Kennedy has decided not to run for Senate. Even if you put aside all the Chavez stuff, there was something profoundly undemocratic about the Kennedys treating that Senate seat as a family heirloom. READ MORE >>