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Will the Financial Crisis Get Worse?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 13, 2008 Comment (2)Let's hope he's wrong this time: Nouriel Roubini, the famous forecaster of the economic pit we're in now, says the worst is ahead of, not behind us.
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Allow Gay Marriage
Tweet Share on Facebook November 13, 2008 Comment (30)Keith Olbermann had a fine commentary the other night, on the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which denied gay couples to right to marry.
I had hoped to link today to a piece I wrote in 2004, as a columnist for the Denver Post, sharing my own thoughts on gay marriage. I wrote it after President Bush announced his support for a constitutional amendment, advanced by members of the Colorado delegation in Congress, limiting marriage to a man and a woman.
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Can Democrats Get to 60 by Winning Senate Races in Alaska, Minnesota, and Georgia?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 13, 2008 Comment (11)In my column written the day after the election, I wrote that the Democrats had fallen short of the 60 seats they need to stop a filibuster in the Senate. I may have spoken too soon. In Alaska, Democrat Mark Begich has taken the lead over Republican incumbent Ted Stevens in the early counting of absentee, early, and challenged votes. At last count, Begich was 814 votes ahead. Begich had a big lead in those tallies—evidence of the effectiveness of the Obama campaign, which was targeting Alaska until John McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate. But the counting may not entirely favor Democrats. Not until next week will ballots from Anchorage be counted, and Anchorage typically is more Republican than the rest of the state.
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Democrats Owe Howard Dean a Big Thank You
Tweet Share on Facebook November 13, 2008 Comment (25)Howard Dean is stepping down as Democratic National chairman. He has been criticized as a poor fundraiser and was not entrusted with many major tasks by the Obama campaign this fall. But Dean's 50 state campaign plan—building a Democratic Party in every state—turned out to have been a real winner for the party. It helped to expand the field for the Obama campaign and helped make many Democrats competitive—and successful—in states that George W. Bush carried by considerable margins in 2000 and 2004. Dean also kept in close touch with the mostly left-wing "netroots" that supplied so much of the energy for Democrats in 2006 and this year. Dean apparently feels that the DNC position will be less important with a Democratic president in office, and that is surely the case. But I think Democrats owe a big round of thanks to Howard Dean for a job well done.
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Barack Obama a 1-Term President? Not So Fast
Tweet Share on Facebook November 12, 2008 Comment (28)My colleague James Pethokoukis makes the case for why Barack Obama will be a one-term president.
I beg to differ. First and foremost, it's waaaaayyyyyy too early to even consider the question. Two years into the Obama administration, different story.
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My Response on the Mainstream Media vs. Sarah Palin Controversy
Tweet Share on Facebook November 12, 2008 Comment (44)There has been some controversy over comments I made in a question-and-answer session after a speech I delivered to a meeting of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges. In my speeches, as in my writing, I try to avoid making comments that will be needlessly offensive to people, out of courtesy. I was trying to make the point (indisputable, I think) that many in the mainstream media were hostile to Sarah Palin because of her positions on cultural issues, which I feel include her (and her husband's) decision to give birth to rather than abort their Down syndrome child. I had in mind also the point, made not just by me but by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, that many news organizations seemed to be devoting much more effort to uncovering politically damaging information about Palin than they were in the case of Barack Obama. In making my point, I used hyperbolic language that crossed the line between courteous and discourteous, and for that I'm sorry.
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Fox News and Media Bias
Tweet Share on Facebook November 12, 2008 Comment (20)In a gloating, open letter to Roger Ailes today, Harold Meyerson, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, thanks the president of Fox News for the network's "consistent misrepresentation of the news." In Meyerson's view, the "right-wing fantasies" peddled by Fox News are so laughable that they have rolled back conservatism.
Now, I'm not a particular fan of U.S. television news—Fox News included. For the most part, the industry caters to the lowest common denominator, emphasizing tabloid, shallow reporting and anchor star-making rather than hard for-your-own-good news. Far better is the European model, exemplified by the Beeb, al Jazeera International, Euro News, and Sky.
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'Frost/Nixon' Review: The Bush Era Is Ending, but the Age of Nixon Endures
Tweet Share on Facebook November 12, 2008 Comment (3)There's something resonant about watching a play about Richard Nixon in a performing arts center named for John Kennedy that abuts the Watergate complex.
It's especially resonant watching it as the Bush presidency draws to a close. Seeing Frost/Nixon last night at the Kennedy Center, it was impossible to watch certain scenes—especially the climax where the disgraced chief executive announces, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal"—without hearing echoes of contemporary arguments.
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In Defense of Sarah Palin
Tweet Share on Facebook November 12, 2008 Comment (31)Sarah Palin has been the target of a lot of cheap shots in the past 10 days.
Certainly, she was not qualified to be a septuagenarian heartbeat away from the presidency. The long and rugged American presidential campaign has the virtue of revealing such shortcomings, and it did.
But it's not just me being gallant, or contrarian, to wonder at the blithe way that the press is promoting anonymous Republican dime-droppers about her fancy clothes, or debate prep. It's a failing of Internet news that, these days, nasty tidbits appear to flow straight from "a source" into general circulation—seemingly without much verification.
Stories about Palin's considerable (albeit raw) political skills and accomplishments, meanwhile, are running against the powerful tide of conventional wisdom.
Today's papers, for instance, carried a story from Alaska, about scientific advancements that could provide Americans in the lower 48 with massive amounts of natural gas—a relatively clean and environmentally preferable energy source. Indeed, by one estimate, the new process could provide enough natural gas to the lower 48 states to heat 100 million homes for 10 years.
It will take a while to develop the new gas fields, and in that time, a pipeline will have to be built to convey the fuel to the rest of us.
Fortunately, a pipeline is in the works. But it is not until the final paragraph of the story in today's Washington Post that we learn that this would be the pipeline now scheduled to be built because of the foresight and diligence and negotiating skills of Alaska's governor—Sarah Palin.
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Barack Obama’s Cabinet Choices Could Insult Women
Tweet Share on Facebook November 12, 2008 Comment (59)If the following widely circulated flow chart (posted by my colleague Paul Bedard and making its way around Washington at gigabyte speed) is anything close to true, many women who voted for Barack Obama as president are destined for disappointment. The chart indicates that there are two female top choices for Obama cabinet positions: Penny Pritzker at Commerce and Janet Napolitano at Justice. Neither position would indicate progress for women, as there have been women in both posts in the past. IMHO, Obama owes it to women and women of color, whose votes he secured in historic proportions, to put them in cabinet posts they've not yet held, such as Treasury and Defense.
If, and again it's a big if, this flow chart of unknown origins does reflect the Obama plan, women ought to be taking to the streets in fury. George W. Bush, no friend of women, according to most progressive women, has had seven women serving for part or all of his second term as president. They were:
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