Even the Conservative Dan Drezner University of Chicago Political Science professor Dan Drezner, a smart guy even if he is conservative, writes in the current issue of The New Republic about Bush’s naked sell-outs on the principles of free trade–when it bolsters his position in swing states: Evaluating the Bush administration’s international economic policy is […]

The Racial Side of Texas Redistricting Politics in the South generally has a strong racial element. In spite of that, so far I’ve mostly viewed the Texas Eleven’s Ten’s fight as a battle over control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Today in Salon, Michelle Goldberg reports on the racial dimension of the DeLay/Rove/Perry plan. […]

Abandon the Alamo? How often does a state senator raise 1/11th of $1 million in a matter of weeks? I’m very dissapointed in Texas Senaor John Whitmire. Here’s Whitmire, explaining his return to Texas, likely facilitating a quorum that will allow DeLay’s inter-Census redustricting to go through:: Whitmire said remaining in New Mexico was counterproductive. […]

Sunset Magic An editorial in the Washington Post’s business section, by Newsweek’s Wall Street editor Allan Sloan, compares the purported $1.4 trillion 10-year deficit (which assumes that all sunsets actually do sunset) to the much more likely outcome in which Congress extends or makes permanent the various tax cuts currently scheduled to expire between 2008 […]

John Kerry I didn’t hear the whole speech, but CNN played excerpts from the parts of Kerry’s speech where he scathingly attacked Bush’s execution of the war in Iraq. At least in the excerpts, Kerry didn’t pull any punches. At one point, Kerry said that half of the names on the Vietnam Memorial were there […]

Bad News? I just overhead a reporter on CNN citing poll results indicating that 2/3 of Americans polled could not name a single Democratic presidential candidate. I’m not sure I believe that figure, but that’s what they said. If true, it’s moderately bad news I suppose. However, a larger portion of the half of Americans […]

Rice Watch Day 42 It’s been a while, so long that I almost abandoned the watch. Friday’s Slate has an interesting piece, Condi’s Phony History: Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq, attacking the credibility of Rice’s comparison of Germany and Japan’s reconstruction to Iraq’s (“The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of […]

Bush Quotes Forbes has a collection of Bush quotes about September 11th, starting on 9/11 and continuing to last week. For example, this quote: Sept 17, 2001 – “When I was a kid I remember … the ‘wanted’ poster. It said, ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive.’ All I want and America wants is to see them […]

Open Source Politics Kevin A. Hayden of ReachM High emailed me about a new 44 blogger blog called Open Source Politics. I’m traveling, so I haven’t had time to check it out yet, but with 44 bloggers there should be a steady stream of new content. It sounds like an interesting project, though there does […]

A Warning, Not a Manual Someone in the Office of Presidential Infallibility apparently doesn’t grasp the point of Orwell’s 1984. To wit, the revisionist insertion of “major” before the phrase “combat operations”; Rice’s incessant statement of facts that were known to be true before 1991 as if they were true in 2003; the “Program” program […]