President Obama wept while announcing his new executive actions that will supposedly protect Americans from guns, demonstrating that honest emotion is often the poorest of guides to both good politics and good policy, a lesson that today’s liberals are notably loath to learn. There was a time when liberals were smart about gun control. They…
Search Results for: tax reform
Romney 2016: The Dream That Will Not Die
In glittering prose, Mark Halperin tells of a glittering evening, a gathering of GOP moneybags who listen as 2016 hopefuls Chris Christie, Rand Paul, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Kelly Ayotte all sing for their supper, with official noncandidate Mitt Romney serving as cohost, along with NY Jets owner Woody Johnson. Each of the hopefuls…
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…
Manhattan Institute dude gets War on Poverty half right, most of the time
Scott Winship, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, home of the cop-loving, Sarah Palin-hating Heather MacDonald* and various other assorted right-leaning, tea-sipping double-domes, has a piece in the current Politico magazine that, shockingly concludes, “despite the alarm of the current debate about America’s poor, the country has actually reduced poverty more than we often appreciate—and…
Eff-Dee Deification: A (continuing) Democratic Disease
The severe embarrassment on the “Left” by the Obama Administration’s disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act has taken a variety of forms, from the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” approach advocated by Joan Walsh at Salon, aka “The first rule about the Affordable Care Act is ‘Don’t talk about Affordable Care Act’; “The second rule…
An Embarrassment of Libertarians
Over at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf wonders, politely, why the fuck the libertarians get all the weirdos, riffing on Rand Paul’s aide and co-author, Jack Hunter, in a piece titled “Rand Paul’s Aide: A Dunce on the Confederacy.” Full-bore libertarian Matt Welch expresses similar thoughts at Reason, under the snappy title “Rand Paul Co-Author Jack…
“Why Are Corporate Titans So Clueless at Politics?” How about “Why Are Corporate Titans So Clueless at Economics?”?
Over at Bloomberg, Christopher Flavelle asks the excellent question “Why Are Corporate Titans So Clueless at Politics?” Chris covered a recent Business Roundtable shindig, and here’s what he has to say: The Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of the largest U.S. companies, held a lunch for reporters this week on what’s wrong…
Tim Geithner, not that innocent, not that competent
Tim Geithner is gone, and good riddance. I was quite surprised when Matthew Yglesias, who’s usually to my left, wrote Tim an all but gushy send off, “Five Smart Things Tim Geithner Said on his Way out the Door.” Let’s take a look at two of them: The most frustrating part of this work, but…
Peter King, Wonderly Wroth
Well, the New Year is starting off right for me, providing the wonderful spectacle of portly Peter King, the IRA-lovin’ Republican from Noo Yawk, unloading on his fellow Republicans, House Speaker John Boehner in particular, for dissin’ the Northeast and not bothering to provide the promised $60 billion in Sandy relief cash. One could actually…
David Weigel: Newt Gingrich, totally not a racist, though I went out of my way to provoke people into calling him one. Shame on them!
This is the gist of Dave’s posting, explaining, or, rather, explaining away, an earlier posting that I and others picked up on, in which a feisty Newt Gingrich told a New Hampshire crowd: “I will go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.” Well,…