The 2012 election provided plenty of reasons to celebrate, Barack Obama’s re-election only one of them. A record number of women in the Senate. The first openly gay Senator. A House of Representatives with more Latinos, more Asian-Americans, three new openly gay members…. Also worth celebrating: the stunning dedication of voters, some of whom stood […]
election 2012
Posted inNews & Opinion
It’s Barack Obama, for the win
Good night for Dems overall, with Slaughter and O’Brien both winning hotly-contested races.
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NEWS BLOG: The Ryan Choice
Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan has certainly livened things up. And for a while on Saturday, I agreed with the commentators saying it’s a good choice: good for the country. Their reasoning: now we can have a national debate over substance. But after spending much of yesterday reading about Ryan and thinking about what […]
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NEWS BLOG: The lies politicians tell
Do Democrats and Republicans really have this little respect for voters? The exaggerations, lies, and slurs seem to get worse by the day. Mitt Romney’s recent insistence that President Obama plans to “gut” the welfare-to-work program is absurd. As the Times noted this morning, several Republican governors have asked for the waivers that the Obama […]
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NEWS BLOG: Romney, release your darn tax records
Mitt Romney and his Republican backers are trying to pass his tax-records shell games off as transparency. This is the same party whose members have been passing legislation requiring multiple forms of photo identification to vote, but don’t want us to know the financial history of their candidate. Romney has not broken any laws by […]
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NEWS BLOG: Health care ruling causes GOP messege scramble
One of the most interesting outcomes of the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act is how unusually off message the GOP has been. Their talking points have been like marbles rolling in all directions. While talking about Governor Mitt Romney’s promise to repeal the ACA, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal referred to the law […]
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NEWS BLOG: Obama and Romney campaigns shouldn’t trivialize the presidential race
Oh, the irony. In a lengthy piece, a couple of writers for Politico are bemoaning the smallness of the 2012 presidential race, which they say is due to Twitter and the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news cycle. Politico embodies aspects of what a Columbia Journalism Review article calls the “hamster wheel approach” to news. But at least […]
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NEWS BLOG: The presidential campaign and our war on terror in Yemen
If you haven’t read Ibrahim Mothana’s “How Drones Help Al Qaeda” in today’s New York Times, do so. Mothana is an activist and writer in Yemen, and in his Times article, he argues that the Obama administration’s use of drones in Yemen is doing far more harm than good. It is, Mothana writes, “leading to […]
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Romney joins Trump’s reality show
Nearly everyone predicted that the silly season that engulfed the Republican primary would end once it was clear that Mitt Romney would be the GOP nominee for president. But Romney’s duet with real estate celebrity Donald Trump tells us otherwise. Trump has returned with another episode of birther babble. He has been saying on television […]
