[ Posted Tuesday, April 15th, 2014 – 16:41 UTC ]
If life were but a metaphor, the headlines would now be reading: "Train Does Not Wreck, Pulls Into Station 7 Minutes Early." Of course, I am speaking of Obamacare, a subject which Republicans have all but reduced (in their own minds, at least) to a mumbling mantra: "trainwreck... trainwreck... trainwreck." But as more and more good news appears, the real story (with apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of course) is "the train which did not wreck in the night."
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[ Posted Friday, April 11th, 2014 – 17:14 UTC ]
This was a big deal. It is worth remembering. Johnson used the popularity he inherited after John F. Kennedy was assassinated to get this crucial law passed. Back then, it wasn't a clear "Democrats versus Republicans" split on the issue of civil rights, it was more geographic. Southern Democrats were the ones fighting the hardest against such legislation. Johnson is reported to have said after signing the bill that he had "lost the South for a generation" for the Democrats by doing so.
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[ Posted Tuesday, April 8th, 2014 – 16:10 UTC ]
I say all this as a preface to commenting on a television program I watched (well, most of it) last night. Needless to say, commenting on pop culture isn't my strong point, and is in fact a rare occurrence in these pages. But I was so struck by what I saw that I felt it merited mentioning.
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[ Posted Monday, April 7th, 2014 – 17:29 UTC ]
We are in the midst of a political battle over the Obamacare numbers right now, so it seemed like a good time to examine what they all mean, in an attempt to interject some clarity into a very confusing debate. The numbers will change over time, as will (no doubt) the claims made from both sides of the debate; but without a little context the numbers by themselves don't actually say much. And as time goes by, one particular number will become the most important of all the data -- and this number just got better today (more on this at the end).
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[ Posted Friday, April 4th, 2014 – 17:04 UTC ]
Today we're turning over the whole talking points section to the president, because he certainly deserves a victory lap after announcing this week that -- against all odds, and against all the slings and arrows of misfortune -- 7.1 million people signed up for health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges.
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[ Posted Thursday, April 3rd, 2014 – 16:36 UTC ]
The reason for this recycling is our version of President Obama's "spiking the football" this week, in his announcement that Obamacare had astoundingly met the original Congressional Budget Office goal of signing up over seven million people in the first open enrollment period. Call it Obama bragging about Obamacare's "vital statistics." What we're going to do today is review the last nine months of our own predictions on not just Obamacare but the politics of Obamacare, heading into the 2014 midterm election season. If you don't want to read all these excerpts, here's a short version that could fit on Twitter: The politics of Obamacare are now going to pivot to real data instead of Republican doom-and-gloom horror stories.
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[ Posted Wednesday, April 2nd, 2014 – 16:44 UTC ]
President Obama's job approval polling was down a bit last month, ending three months of positive news. He didn't slip back much, but the reversal does bring up a serious question: is Obama stuck in a "new normal" of job approval numbers in the low-40s range? We'll take a look at possible answers to this in a moment, but first let's take a look at the new monthly chart.
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[ Posted Tuesday, April 1st, 2014 – 17:16 UTC ]
Today -- the first of April -- Vladimir Putin announced that Russia has officially reabsorbed Alaska. "The Russian territory which has been mistaken referred to as 'the state of Alaska' has now been returned to its rightful and legal owner, Russia. It would be foolish for anyone to ever refer to the Russian Alyaska again as being any part of the United States."
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[ Posted Friday, March 28th, 2014 – 17:46 UTC ]
The Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases where corporations are requiring certain women to wear a scarlet "A" on their uniforms... um, no wait... that can't be right... let me check my notes....
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[ Posted Wednesday, March 26th, 2014 – 17:14 UTC ]
Earlier this week, I wrote an extensive book review of former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger's The Burglary (2014, Alfred A. Knopf). This book chronicles a break-in at the Media, Pennsylvania, branch office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1971, and the subsequent release to the public of files proving the F.B.I. was spending something like 40 percent of its time spying on and harassing political groups and individuals that J. Edgar Hoover didn't approve of. The burglars, who operated under the name "Citizens' Commission to Investigate the F.B.I.," were never caught, despite a five-year F.B.I. manhunt involving more than 200 agents. None of the burglars had ever even been publicly identified before Medsger's book was published.
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