Okay, that was a little rude. The subject of my latest outburst is a posting in The National Interest (the “Buzz” column, to be precise) by Zachery Keck, providing a synopsis of a recent symposium held by the Center for the National Interest. Among the speakers was Robert Kaplan, a Senior Fellow at the Center…
Search Results for: mitt romney
Margaret Hartmann, Margaret Hartmann!
New York magazine’s Margaret Hartmann gets my cheer of the week for noting the resurgence of “Mittmentum” as my man Mitt makes it known that he’s unimpressed by the emerging Republican field for 2016, something that he’s been doing on a monthly basis since last summer. Back then, Mitt allowed as how he might run…
James Pethokoukis is shocked, shocked to discover that Republicans aren’t really interested in entitlement reform
James Pethokoukis is that rarity of rarities, a sensible conservative who is actually sensible. Even harder to believe, Jim actually hangs his hat at the American Enterprise Institute, aka “Fruitcake Central.” But his most recent post, titled, with supreme intellectual dishonesty, “Is the GOP changing its stance on entitlement reform?”, Jim demonstrates he can lie…
Why is Obama so unpopular?
It’s official: President Obama is the people’s choice for the worst president since WWII. And his popularity is dropping faster than runoff in the Dead Sea.1 The first part is easy to explain. Any Democratic president is going to be picked as the “worst” president because Republicans hate Democratic presidents so much. Some fringe Republicans…
N. Gregory Mankiw, aka Jivemaster Greg
Over at New York, Jonathan Chait points me over to the New York Times, where Harvard big-shot Gregory Mankiw is holding forth on the wonders of Robert Downy, Jr., noting that Bob’s latest performance as “Iron Man” was so abfab that the $50 mil Downy got up front for the film doesn’t upset people—“ when…
Double Down, Dude! Double Down!
Jim/Joe/Bob/Jimmy Joe Bob couldn’t believe it! Obama/Mitt/Newt/Attila the Hun wasn’t backing off! He was doubling down! Yes, people double down a lot in Double Down, the not so hot off the presses tome du jour from Mark Halperin and John Heilmann rehashing the 2012 presidential election. The book received mixed reviews when it was published…
Paul Ryan’s total phonus-balonus budget (which doesn’t even exist!)
I should probably stop using so many parentheses and exclamation points in my heads, but when they fit they fit, you know what I mean? Actually, the fact that there isn’t going to be any grand budget deal growing out of the Tea Party’s “shut it down” fiasco is becoming so obvious that I scarcely…
Vote for the Would-Be Murderer, not the Murderer?
Well, it’s a theory. As Glenn Greenwald points out, President Obama has fair claim to be absolutely the worst civil liberties President the U.S.A. has ever seen. The odds are, Romney would be better! That’s a valid inference, even if we simply consider the election a random draw. But, wait, there’s more!—the old “Nixon goes…
Barack Obama: The Smell of Failure
There are a couple of interesting write-ups on the web interviewing a couple of well-known, undecided, unrelated voters—Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, and 24-year-old pre-k teacher and “wage gap” questioner Katherine Fenton. What’s particularly interesting is that both these intelligent, well-informed people 1) don’t really know very much about politics and 2) though…
Bruce Bartlett, refuting vapor
Bruce Bartlett, everyone’s favorite truth-telling Reaganite, does the unnecessary, and does it well, here, explaining why, even if everything went “right” in Mitt Romney’s tax “plan”—which is to say, if one could divide by zero and count up to infinity in a couple of hours—it would have no more than a minimal impact on the…