Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

THREAT-LEVEL-GATE©: Bob Woodward’s Awful Hope-Y’All-Won’t-Notice-Ryan-Lizza’s-Report Ploy

Bob Woodward, the legendary Watergate reporter turned reliable chronicler of insider accounts of political events, has made a series of bizarre assertions over the past week. — Matthew Yglesias, Bob Woodward Trolls the World, Slate, today Yglesias then summarizes last weekend’s exciting Woodward-related events, and then updates us: Things moved into the absurd Wednesday night […]

Why Does Washington Post Columnist David Ignatius Say Obama Should Have Allowed Default On The National Debt in Aug. 2011? He Doesn’t Say Why, So Someone Should Ask Him.

To me, one of the big mysteries of the sequester blame game is why some in the punditry keep echoing John Boehner’s proud Obama-proposed-the-sequester line, without pointing out what the only alternative was.  The most baldly ridiculous of articles in that narrow genre is Washington Post columnist–and, I suspect, not coincidentally, Bob Woodward colleague–David Ignatius’s […]

Offer Woodward a Buyout, Mr. Graham. And This Time Force Him to Take It. [UPDATED]

In followup to this post of mine from earlier today, I want to point out Ezra Klein’s post from last night titled “On the sequester, the American people ‘moved the goalposts’.” It begins: I don’t agree with my colleague Bob Woodward, who says the Obama administration is “moving the goalposts” when they insist on a […]

Bob Woodward’s Seriously Stupid Conflation of “The Sequester” and “A Deal to REPLACE the Sequester”

Good lord.  So much ado about one high-profile journalist’s (deliberate or inadvertent; I can’t tell which) semantics ploy.   Stellar New York Times White House correspondent Jackie Calmes, in a lengthy article on the provenance of the sequester, explains the controversy: As this weekend arrived, Republicans were circulating a column by [Bob] Woodward published online […]