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Rush Limbaugh Thinks American Voters Are Fools When He Attacks the Obama Plan
Tweet Share on Facebook January 27, 2009 Comment (40)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Rush Limbaugh thinks the American voters are shortsighted, blindly selfish fools.
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The Washington Times Sells George W. Bush Legacy Junk
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2009 Comment (106)By Sam Dealey, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The following E-mail, appropriately enough, showed up in my junk box today:
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Looking for Loopholes in the Obama Administration Lobbyist Ban--Saving the Sinners
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2009 Comment (3)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
These questions are making the rounds in Washington right now: Can sinners repent and be saved? Can they, through penitent labors for an appropriate amount of time in purgatory, redeem their mortal souls and once again be welcome in the heavenly host? Is this a resurgence by the religious right? No—just the wonderings of those damned souls we in Obama's Washington call Democratic lobbyists.
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The U.N. Shares Blame for Darfur Atrocities
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2009 Comment (94)By Sam Dealey, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
As the war in Darfur approaches its sixth anniversary, there's a tendency to heap all the blame for the region's calamities on the Sudanese government. If something bad happens, this thinking goes, then the guilt must wholly and indubitably rest with the government—no further reflection needed. Most of the time that's probably true. But at times the Sudanese government also serves as a convenient scapegoat for the missteps of the international community. A case in point is a newly released whitewash report from the United Nations and its peacekeeping force (UNAMID) about an attack on a Darfur refugee camp last August.
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The Barack Obama Inaugural and Courtesy to George W. Bush
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2009 Comment (4)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I commented last week on the notion that Barack Obama was mean—or at least insufficiently courteous—to his immediate predecessor in his inaugural address. (Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, for example, dings Obama for this, among other perceived failings with the speech.)
But as the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg points out (and as a quick look at previous inaugurals bears out), obligatory expressions of thanks to one's predecessor are a relatively new, post-Watergate phenomenon.
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Welcome George H.W. Bush Speechwriter Mary Kate Cary to Thomas Jefferson Street
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2009 CommentBy Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I am delighted today to welcome Mary Kate Cary to the Thomas Jefferson Street blogging team. Mary Kate's first post went live a little while ago, a look at how Barack Obama's attempt to master the Internet is in keeping with leaders like Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and Reagan in terms of adapting presidential communications to the media of the times. Mary Kate knows a thing or two about White House communications, as she was a presidential speechwriter during the George H. W. Bush administration and has been making her living since then ghostwriting for various political and corporate figures. Web connoisseurs might remember her most recently commentating on the inaugural address on the New York Times's website.
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Political Bloodlines of Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator From New York
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2009 Comment (4)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Gov. David Paterson's appointment of 20th District Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand to the Senate is an interesting one. She has political genes: Her grandmother Polly Noonan was evidently a very close friend (presumably mistress) of Erastus Corning 2d, who was mayor of Albany from 1942 until his death in 1983. Ben Smith has something on her Albany political connections. Steve Weisman's review of a biography of Corning has more. Corning was quite a political character: great-grandson of the similarly named founder of the New York Central Railroad, son of an Albany political fixer, an ally of Daniel O'Connell, who was head of the Albany Democratic machine from the early 1919 until his death in 1977. Here, Paul Grondahl, the author of that biography, gets his readers at least thinking about the possibility that Corning was the biological father of Gillibrand's mother—and points out that Gillibrand's father was also close to Corning.
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President Barack Obama Masters the New Online Media
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2009 Comment (2)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
All presidents are a product of their time—and communicate using the media of their time. In the days before microphones and amplifiers, Abraham Lincoln spoke to small groups gathered on battlefields. He knew, however, that the rest of America would read his words in newspapers, and wrote his speeches not for the listening ear but for the reading eye. As a result, the power and clarity of his words survive—despite the lack of any video clips, podcasts, CDs, or DVDs of Lincoln delivering his speeches. Instead, we read them engraved in stone on monuments and courthouses.
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Kate Winslet Nominated for an Oscar? Life Imitates Fiction
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2009 Comment (25)By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Are they having a laugh—those august members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?
How else could they nominate Kate Winslet for an Oscar for her performance as a concentration camp guard in the movie The Reader?
It is not that Winslet cannot act. But it was Winslet, on the funny (and lately departed) sitcom Extras who played (?) a self-absorbed star who takes a role in a World War II movie because Nazi flicks score big at awards time.
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Time to Eliminate the Penny
Tweet Share on Facebook January 26, 2009 Comment (15)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Harvard economist Greg Mankiw makes the case. While we're at it, let's get rid of the $1 bill too, and replace it with a coin. Both changes would save a lot of money: The penny costs the government more than a penny to manufacture, and dollar coins would last a lot longer than dollar bills. But the main reason for getting rid of pennies is, as Mankiw writes, that they waste time. As for the dollar bill, in few countries today is there paper currency in general circulation for $1 or less. You don't see one-pound notes in Britain (much less 50p) or one-euro notes in Europe, or one-peso notes in Mexico. Dollar bills are inconvenient; they stuff up wallets; they should go. But the Crane paper company has lots of advocates, including Sen. Edward Kennedy, with influence in this administration and this Congress. On the other hand, Arizona has long been the leading copper state, so the penny could conceivably go.
