Has John Dowd ever had a client who wasn't guilty, guilty, guilty? (See also: disgraced Arizona ex-Gov. Fife Symington.) And the famous Dowd Report on Rose managed to make its morally leprous subject look upstanding by comparison. What a mouthpiece.

Posted at October 6, 2008 3:29 PM in response to McCain Lawyer: McCain Did Nothing Wrong Amid Keating Five Scandal

Also, and FWIW: in this instance, Pegler was talking through his hat, since he never lived in any place less populous than his native Minneapolis, which was far from a small town even when he was growing up there 100 years ago.

Posted at September 10, 2008 2:44 PM in response to Palin Quoted Writer Who Once Lamented Failure To Assassinate FDR

One of the many differences between McC and BHO: BHO never gives a speech that was obviously written by somebody who's smarter than he is.

Posted at August 26, 2008 12:54 PM in response to McCain: Obama Has Confidence In Himself But Not In His Country

I say again, very patiently: why is nothing known about Scheunemann pre-1986? Birthdate and place, education, marital status: all are secret. It's like David Addington three years ago, right down to the beard.

Is there something he wants to hide? Will McC's people not provide the info? Are you not asking for it?

Posted at July 28, 2008 8:36 PM in response to McCain Adviser's Horrifying Iraq Track Record: Will the Press Notice?

Just guessing, but I suspect opposition to abortion rights is the linchpin of Douthat's party loyalty. Yoked to this moral committment, he'll play the reasonable moderate Repub role on other issues until the party tires of him or he tires of an ineffectual career and exits the political sphere.

Enjoy his movie reviews, though.

Posted at July 16, 2008 2:32 PM in response to All The President's Moneymen

"If only the coaches, like Congress, had to be elected every two years."

Yes, Gibbs was a mistake, but PLEASE don't encourage Snyder in his all too obvious Steinbrenner/Angelos tendencies. Remember Marty Schottenheimer?

Posted at November 12, 2007 9:32 AM in response to Redskins Update

Welcome, Prof. Krugman. Huge fan here; however, concerning that statistic from Larry Bartels: 1952 was a pretty good year for Repubs, given that they had a war hero to run interference for them.(*) How would the non-Southern white male vote in 2004 compare with a year -- say, 1960 -- when the popular vote was more evenly divided?

(*) Scenario for a better alternative history novel than The Plot Against America:

(1) Sen. Taft, not Ike, wins the 1952 nomination (as he almost did) . . .

(2) . . . and chooses Gen. MacArthur as his VP (as he promised he would), then . . .

(3) . . . wins the election (as he probably would have, though more narrowly than Ike) . . .

(3) . . . but dies of cancer in July 1953 (as he did) . . .

(4) . . . Presto! President MacArthur, smack in the middle of the McCarthy era.

Add 400 pages and simmer over a low flame . . .

Posted at October 29, 2007 11:49 AM in response to The awful truth, and the better future

Seeing the Norquist byline, I for some reason imagined I was about to read Norquist's writing, rather than Norquist copying someone else's homework. Silly me.

Posted at September 20, 2007 2:34 PM in response to The Case of Colorado

Bud Selig: His decision will be announced at the 59th second of the 59th minute of the eleventh hour. As long as no money is on the line, this is a man who would rather split the difference than eat. Remember the 2002 All-Star Game.

"I don't see how the Republicans resist nominating Romney.": And yet, resist they do. He's outspent everyone, but his numbers do not rise. He's running third in some polls, fourth in most, far behind Giuliani (and soon, Ol' Fred) in all. The proper comparison is not to American Motors, but to (not Gerald) Ford: Romney's an Edsel. Despite some objective advantages over competing products, Repubs aren't buying him -- and won't.

Posted at July 16, 2007 7:44 AM in response to Miscellaneous

"Rachel served as a Senior Consultant to Booz Allen Hamilton, where she worked on information-sharing across the military, intelligence, and law enforcement communities, homeland security, and trade and security issues."
-- author's bio, above

"The project started in 2003 with a $2 million contract to help the new Department of Homeland Security quickly get an intelligence operation up and running.

"Over the next year, the cost of the no-bid arrangement with consultant Booz Allen Hamilton soared by millions of dollars per month, as the firm provided analysts, administrators and other contract employees to the department's Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection offices.

"By December 2004, payments to Booz Allen had exceeded $30 million -- 15 times the contract's original value. When department lawyers examined the deal, they found it was "grossly beyond the scope" of the original contract, and they said the arrangement violated government procurement rules. The lawyers advised the department to immediately stop making payments through the contract and allow other companies to compete for the work.

"But the competition did not take place for more than a year. During that time, the payments to Booz Allen more than doubled again under a second no-bid arrangement, to $73 million, according to internal documents, e-mail and interviews.

"The arrangements with the McLean consulting firm, one of the nation's largest government contractors, illustrate a transformation in the way the federal government often gets its work done: by relying on private, sometimes costly consultants to fill staffing shortfalls in federal agencies . . ."
-- Washington Post, today

Posted at June 28, 2007 4:50 PM in response to Business as Usual--or a Lever for Change?