Blog

Southern Outlier

10.22.2009

Anyone familiar with sentiment in the region is aware that Barack Obama isn’t very popular among white voters in the Deep South. The Obama-Biden ticket did worse than Kerry-Edwards ’04 among white voters in much of that area, despite the Democratic breakthroughs in nearby North Carolina and Virginia. But the scope of the continuing unpopularity…

In Praise of Dissenters

10.21.2009

Historian Matthew Dallek has a piece in today’s Politico extolling the virtues of dissenting from one’s party. Exhibit A: Sen. Olympia Snowe (ME), whose vote in favor of the Senate Finance Committee’s health bill has proven crucial to giving health reform a much-needed boost in the late innings. Snowe has drawn fire from the right…

CO Dems Urge Up-or-Down Vote on Public Option

10.21.2009

The prospects for health reform’s passage have certainly brightened over the last few weeks. Yesterday bought a new push in the direction of reform. A trio of Colorado Democrats — Gov. Bill Ritter, Sen. Michael Bennett, and Sen. Mark Udall — released an open letter to U.S. senators urging them to reject a filibuster and…

The Right’s War Against Volunteerism

10.20.2009

Of all the hobbyhorses that the right has jumped on this year, perhaps one of the strangest is their crusade against volunteerism. Their latest salvo against community service comes against iParticipate, a week-long initiative by the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a Hollywood charitable group, to promote volunteerism in storylines and public service announcements in over 100…

“Performance Parking” in DC’s Backyard

10.20.2009

Variable pricing — charging different prices at different times — usually gets referenced in public policy debates as congestion pricing or cordon pricing: a fee to drive in a certain area during rush hour. As is often the case in urban planning, Singapore has been on the cutting edge of this, first trying it out…

Is NATO Dead?

10.20.2009

Anne Applebaum theorizes in the Washington Post that NATO is essentially useless: There is almost no sense anywhere that the war in Afghanistan is an international operation, or that the stakes and goals are international, or that the soldiers on the ground represent anything other than their own national flags and national armed forces. … The…

Defusing the Debt Bomb

10.20.2009

When it comes to federal spending, America faces a dilemma that St. Augustine might have appreciated. It was the young Augustine who prayed that God would make him chaste, only not now. Likewise, Washington must rein in its galloping deficits and debt, but not now — not when nearly 10 percent of Americans are jobless,…

Doubts About the Army’s Recruitment Numbers

10.19.2009

Is the Army using a shell game to give a false impression of its recruiting success? That’s a dangerous accusation, but a critical issue. In light of President Obama’s promise on the campaign trail to increase the end-strength of the military by 92,000 troops (65,000 for the Army alone), the Army’s numbers should accurately reflect how…

Why Baucus May Have Played It Right

10.19.2009

From Roll Call today comes the latest episode in the tired series known as The Party of “No”: Senate Republicans, acknowledging they lack the votes to block a health care reform bill outright, have implemented a comprehensive political strategy to delay, define and derail. With Democratic leaders and White House officials holed up in Senate…

“Green Shoots” on Climate Change?

10.15.2009

With the entire U.S. political world engaged in handicapping the likely outcome of the health care reform debate, while others focus on the Obama administration’s impending decision on strategy and troop levels for Afghanistan, there hasn’t been much attention paid outside advocacy groups to prospects for action on climate change legislation (passed, as you might…

Don’t Assume Too Much About Afghanistan

10.13.2009

My high school homeroom teacher, Mr. Grescovich, had some twenty homemade signs up in his classroom that extolled various life lessons. They were all home-made; and therein lay their charm. Since I went to what was then an all-boys school, Mr. G. got away with some mild profanity with which the Jesuits took no issue.…

Blocking Out the Nobel Noise

10.13.2009

According to Gallup’s daily tracking poll, President Obama’s job approval rating has seen a nice little bounce in the wake of the Nobel Peace Prize announcement last Friday. From a term-low 50% approval rating a week ago, Obama’s rating now sits at 56%. That uptick certainly seems to defy the conventional wisdom among the chattering classes…