Uncompetitive and Unmonitored Josh Marshall has a lovely follow up to Kash’s earlier post on the likely impact of the administration reducing competition for reconstruction contracts in Iraq (illustrative example of this effect: importing gasoline from Kuwait costs $2.64/gallon). Here’s the news from Marshall: When Congress voted the $87 billion for military expenditures and reconstruction […]

Medicare, continued Reader and commenter Greg refers me to this important story on Medicare in the Boston Globe. It’s an oped by two professors, Jacob S. Hacker, assistant professor of political science at Yale and Theodore R. Marmor, professor at Yale School of Management. There’s a lot of good stuff in the piece, some of […]

Best Lefty Blogs Wampum is now taking nominations for the “Koufax Awards,” a set of awards for various outstanding achievements in the field of excellence by lefty blogs. In most of the categories, the competition is likely to be fierce (but friendly). Best Blog: Likely to be a close race between Atrios, Marshall, CalPundit, and […]

Real or Parody? I really can’t tell. Read No More Mr. Nice Blog’s for an (alleged) exchange between Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton on the subject of her being the nominee and see if you can tell whether it’s a parody or if Russert is that much of a moron. AB P.S. Sure, I could […]

Thoughts on Campaign Finance I used to be a huge supporter of campaign finance reform. I love the ideal of reducing the influence of money in politics, and the unseemly quid pro quos that it engenders. But I’m starting to wonder. So far, the efforts to temper the importance of money in the political process […]

Be Famous! Not really, but you can be famous for fifteen minutes, or more accurately, famous for fifteen people. For various vacation and job-related reasons, Kash will be posting rarely from around 12/25 to 1/8 and I won’t be able to post much during the first week in January. But you can. My first guest-blogging […]

If You Thought Ari Fleischer Was Good Susan, in her run-down of the candidates, has an idea for an even better press secretary, though I’d replace “Dean” with “any Democratic President”: Al Sharpton. Rev, I like your style. I really do. But I wish you’d answer questions directly, it’s really annoying. However, my fondest wish […]

A New Transfer from US Taxpayers to Corporate America This newly announced transfer is more subtle than some of the Bush administration’s many, many actions that have transferred wealth from US taxpayers to a few select corporations – and thus to those few individuals who own and run them – but it’s a transfer nonetheless. […]

Campaign Finance Reform Upheld The Supreme Court just issued a ruling upholding the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that was passed in 2002. So now it’s official: the ban on soft money stands. Who is celebrating more today, Democrats or Republicans? I think it’s an open question — but it may well be Republicans. Democrats have […]

Playing Hardball with Bush Hardball is the only game that the Bush administration is interested in playing, both domestically and internationally. It played it again yesterday, with the news that countries that didn’t support the Iraq invasion will be punished by being declared ineligible to bid on reconstruction contracts. The Europeans are catching on, though. […]