TPM’s Greg Sargent inadvertently blurts out the truth: Now that the Dem primary is officially over, it’s safe for the Obama campaign to let economics adviser Austan Goolsbee (remember NAFTA-gate?) start publicly making the case for Obama’s economic policies. And so, today on a conference call today with reporters, Goolsbee was front and center as a chief surrogate for Obama, who’s battling it out with John McCain today over their
June 9, 2008
June 9, 2008
James Johnson: The tip of Obama’s subprime iceberg [Karl]
The Wall Street Journal has a piece (nicely paraphrased at the New York Sun for non-subscribers to the WSJ ) on the ties between a prominent adviser to Barack Obama and the CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp., a company at the center of the subprime lending debacle: James Johnson, one of three people tapped by Mr. Obama recently to oversee the search for his running mate, took at least five
June 9, 2008
Jay Rockefeller, still politicizing intelligence [Karl]
The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt renders a valuable service by wading through last week’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report which ostensibly flogs the “Bush Lied” theme, but in fact reports that Pres. Bush’s statements on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, chemical weapons, biological weapons, production capability and mobile laboratories, weapons of mass destruction overall, ballistic missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda were all substantiated by the
June 9, 2008
Provocateurism, 4
This ought to cause a fuss. Following up on an examination the progressive bona fides of prominent “raceologist” E.A. Ross, a “quintessential reform Darwinist” whose convictions about the innate differences among the races were widely defended by progressive elites (and mainstream publications like the NYT), and whose subsequent work at the University of Nebraska, along with Roscoe Pound, on “sociological jurisprudence” anchors modern liberalism’s “living constitution,” Goldberg transitions into a
June 9, 2008
Codgers may cause Constitutional crisis! [Karl]
Veteran political analyst Stuart Rothenberg agrees with my prior assessments that this year’s electoral map is unlikely to vary much from those of 2000 and 2004, but also notes the danger to Barack Obama of potential defections by downscale, older white voters: Even minimal defections from this group should cause concern among Democratic strategists, since the party has been able to count on this constituency in the past. In 2000,
June 9, 2008
The Chicago Way: Mr. Hyde Park [Karl]
The meteoric rise of Barack Obama will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed. And it has people trying to better understand The Chicago Way. It brought Andrew Ferguson to explore Hyde Park, which Obama called home for most of adult life (before investing in a property in the Kenwood neighborhood with Tony Rezko). Although Ferguson paints an accurate picture of how isolated Hyde Park
Peter Fonda comments on folk legend Bob Dylan’s tepid “endorsement” of Barack Obama
Fonda: “One time, Hopper and I were scouting locations in Yuma, and this young, sundrenched chick in a tattered Hopi poncho shuffles up to us and is like, ‘hey, man. Can you maybe spare some change?’ “– And Hopper, without missing a beat, looks her in the eye and says, ‘No. But what I can offer you is some hope.” Totally deadpan. Then, after a beat, ‘ –On the other