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Monday, May 4, 2009.
The MSM is sick. John Edwards runs an entire presidential campaign based in large part on his character as shown by his loyalty to his brave, ill wife, etc.--when in reality he's cheating on her, practically setting up a second family--and the press doesn't care (or, rather, pretends in public that it doesn't care, lest its readers get interested). But a year later some prosecutor comes up with a tedious, hard-to-define potential campaign violation, and it's katy-bar-the door! ... P.S.: Not that there isn't plenty of after-action reporting to do. I'd be interested in knowing how this memorable blog post came to be, for example. ... And: What did Joe Trippi know and when did he know it? ... Follow the honey! ... 5/5 Update: I've now talked with Trippi, who signed on as a top Edwards strategist in 2007. He says he didn't know until the "second National Enquirer story," meaning the July, 2008 account of Edwards getting caught visiting his mistress (and her child) at the Beverly Hilton. (That's pretty late!) When the Enquirer first alleged the affair October, 2007, Trippi says, "I said, 'What the hell's this?" and was told "'C'mon, It's the Enquirer. Aliens. ...'" He says he also discounted the story because he didn't think John "would do that to Elizabeth." ... Trippi says "I never got brought in" to the Edwards team's elaborate damage control efforts. "[Deputy campaign manager] Jonathan Prince and other people were dealing with it. ... I was on the road a lot." Trippi notes that he arrived after Rielle Hunter was no longer making her "webisodes" for the campaign, and he might not have been taken into the confidence of those who'd been there longer. "I was the Dean guy." ... That's what he says. ... More: See Ben Smith's piece in Politico, which discusses Edwards aides' reaction to the (accurate, it turned out) rumor. ... 4:25 P.M.
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While some Obama supporters deride "Tea Party" tax protests on the grounds that Obama hasn't increased taxes on the bottom "95 percent of working families" yet, the diligent Matt Yglesias is already trying to figure out which ones to raise. ... 4:02 P.M.
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Short Cabinet: A possible expansive corollary to the 27th Law of Journalism, which says that when an MSM reporter gives an example of something that is supposed to be funny it won't be funny: The rule may also apply to any line singled out of a piece of writing as especially good. Here's Thomas Mallon reviewing Buckley Dearest (I mean, Chris Buckley's Losing Mum and Pup) for the New York Times:
But the writing, like the book's subjects, is generally top-drawer. To take but one example: the elder George Bush "may be a New England Yankee blue blood, but he has the tear ducts of a Sicilian grandmother." The yield of such lines is exceptionally high, and it's fair to say that the particular talent required to produce them is one of the few that William F. Buckley lacked. [E.A.]
OK. If you say so. ... 4:00 P.M.
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Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Mazda has joined the ranks of Pixar cars and chosen an unfortunate new corporate face. Is it smiling or hurling? ... 11:04 P.M.
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Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Gird Your Loins: David Frum and Bill Bradley offer hard nosed, savvy explanations of why picking Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State makes sense for Obama. He looks magnanimous. He'll find out her secrets--then he has the goods on her. He can fire her. She'll work for him. Bill will be controlled. Now she'll have real trouble paying Mark Penn's bill! ...
Sorry, I'm not buying it. It seems simple to me: She can't do him much damage from the Senate, where she doesn't rank. She can do him a lot of damage through self-interested leaking from the State Department. (Here's Exhibit Z, if you needed it, from Elizabeth Drew.) If he fires her she can then run against him and make more trouble.
Even smart, well-advised people make mistakes. I think it's a mistake. Or else there is some other factor at work that we don't know about (e.g., Hillary has the real birth certificate! Joking!)... [How do you know her aides will keep leaking? That's just CW. The CW said Joe Biden would be a walking gaffe machine, remember--ed Joe Biden was a walking gaffe machine. Remember] 10:24 P.M.
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Jonathan Chait argues that Clinton made a political mistake by running up a budget surplus in his second term--because "all you ended up doing was just giving more money for George Bush to devote to tax cuts for the rich." I've never understood this argument. It would have been better if the money had been pissed away on veteran's programs, civil service salary hikes, agriculture subsidies and money for the failing education bureaucracy? In Democrats wouldn't have enacted universal health insurance in Clinton's second term after all. (The GOP controlled Congress.) They would have just larded up existing programs--programs that are then almost impossible to cut. Now, at least, the Obama administration has the option of raising money for health care by raising the taxes on the rich back to where they were before. If Chait's advice had been followed, Obama wouldn't have that option (because taxes on the rich would never have gone down). ... It's hard to raise taxes, but it's easier to raise taxes starting from a lower base. And it's easier to raise taxes than to try to finance health care by cutting government programs with powerful constituencies. ... A fuller version of this argument can be found here. ... P.S.: I'm not saying Bush's distribution of tax cuts was the right one. I'm saying that running up a surplus from 1996 to 2001 and then spending the surplus on tax cuts of some sort was way better for Democrats than not running a surplus in the first place (because the money was spent on the sorts of Democratic "priorities" that would have been funded at the time). Politics isn't a football game where Dems gain yards by spending on their "priorities" and GOPs gain yards by helping the rich. Some Dem "priorities" get in the way of other Dem "priorities." Some GOP "victories" set the stage for later Democratic achievements. ... 7:10 P.M.
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