Archive for October, 2009

One Republican candidate who wants to be California’s next governor is Steve Poizner, whose economic prescriptions for healing the state’s fiscal maladies are like a quack doctor who “bleeds” his patient by attaching leeches. Poizner’s PR people came up with a catchy “10-10-10″ slogan. He throws up three arbitrary numbers to brand his economic “plan”… »

“Deficits don’t matter.” When Vice President Dick Cheney uttered this famous line he was making a political judgment, not an economic one. In 2001, when the newly selected President George W. Bush and his posse rode into Washington they immediately began in earnest the chicanery, lying and recklessness that we came to expect throughout the… »

During the initial 24-hour news cycle following the announcement that the President of the United States had won the Nobel Peace Prize we heard all manner of demeaning, diminishing, and ridiculing of the President and the prize. Beltway pundits David Brooks and Ruth Marcus appearing on Jim Lehrer’s News Hour both bashed President Obama and… »

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s “National Defending the American Dream Summit” held last weekend at the Marriott Crystal Gateway Hotel in Arlington, Virginia was an assemblage whose only distinguishing feature was its astonishing homogeneity both in thought and in demography. While channel surfing through C-SPAN I caught a full camera pan where the unbearable whiteness… »

Sam Tanenhaus, a senior editor for the New York Times, has written a useful book about modern conservatism and its discontents. It is a short intellectual history tracing the pedigree of ideas that have informed conservative (and liberal) thought over the past couple of centuries focusing mainly on the last fifty years. Tanenhaus breezily sifts… »