The Smithian

April 4th, 2013

This isn’t a plan to ‘replace Obamacare.’ It’s a plan to do the opposite of replacing Obamacare. It’s as if I said I had a plan to fix the house by replacing the leaky roof, and you said you had a plan to fix the house by getting rid of the roof…Obamacare is, at its heart, a policy to make sure most every legal resident of the United States has access to comprehensive, affordable health care. In order to achieve that goal, it helps poorer Americans pay for insurance and regulates the products offered by insurers to make sure they’re worth paying for. The eight-point program [the Republican] Domenech lays out is not an alternative approach to achieving the same goal. It’s actually an effort to achieve an almost perfectly opposite goal.

Ezra Klein at the Washington Post

March 12th, 2013

thesmithian

There was an attitude among editors: Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?

Tom Ricks, former military reporter, the Washington Post.

November 8th, 2012

thesmithian

‘…saw The Washington Post…this morning, something about Boehner opening the door to a deal…he did no such thing. He softened the rhetoric…but if you decode his substantive words, he said nothing new.’

…The people knew very well that Barack Obama wanted higher taxes on better-off Americans, and they voted for him by a not overwhelming but comfortable margin. Boehner knows this. But he knows he doesn’t have the votes to remain speaker if he acts like Barack Obama is a human being and the president of the United States. That’s the problem. The House GOP caucus.

more.

June 20th, 2012

thesmithian

‘Outside the Montana GOP convention in Missoula stood an outhouse labeled “Obama Presidential Library…”

…and painted as though it had been shot full of holes, according to the local paper. Inside, a fake birth certificate for “Barack Hussein Obama” was stamped with an expletive referring to bovine droppings. A message in the structure gave fake phone numbers for Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi “For a Good Time.” The state party chairman, Will Deschamps, said that the structure was not in “real good taste. We do have a president of the United States, and we have to honor that.” But he also dismissed the matter as a “sideshow” and “not something I’m going to agonize over.” But the outhouse is not a sideshow. It is something we should all be agonizing over.

the writer ties this kind of thing to the idea that

…Heckling the president in the middle of a Rose Garden speech isn’t holding the president to account. It is belittling the presidency, and it smells just as bad as an outhouse in the Missoula summer.

more at the Washington Post.

May 30th, 2012

thesmithian

'...Women wrote 20 percent of op-eds in the nation’s leading newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal—between September 15 and December 7, 2011, according to a byline survey conducted by Taryn Yaeger of The OpEd Project, an organization that aims to diversify public debate...And women were practically absent in the debate of many hard news subjects, with their opinions accounting for 11 percent of commentaries on the economy, 13 percent on international politics, 14 percent on social action and 16 percent on security. Perhaps just as striking, women produced just over half—53 percent—of commentaries on “women’s issues.”'

March 13th, 2012

thesmithian

Zoom

The Washington Post is haunted by its history. Dominated by towering figures…and the reporters who pursued the Watergate scandal, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the mythology of the Post was always grander than the reality. No other newspaper enjoyed quite the hype the Post did during its heyday. And few papers are as defined by their city as the Post has been defined by Washington—“Washington” meaning both the nation’s capital and a metropolis in its own right.

more.

The Washington Post is haunted by its history. Dominated by towering figures…and the reporters who pursued the Watergate scandal, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the mythology of the Post was always grander than the reality. No other newspaper enjoyed quite the hype the Post did during its heyday. And few papers are as defined by their city as the Post has been defined by Washington—“Washington” meaning both the nation’s capital and a metropolis in its own right.

more.

January 14th, 2012

thesmithian

While The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and the New York Daily News have close to male-female parity…Time magazine has nine men and only one woman, Newsweek/The Daily Beast has six men and three women, The Atlantic has seven men and two women, New York magazine has six men and one woman, and The Economist went for broke, with an all-male team of five. At The Boston Globe (seven men, three women) and Reuters (eight men, three women), the ratio is more than two to one.

on the web, things look similar:

The Huffington Post has eleven men and only two women; Politico has twelve male reporters and six women on the campaign trail, Talking Points Memo has five men and one woman, and Slate and The Daily both have all-male teams.

more, plus a list of 2012 campaign reporters, here.

While The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and the New York Daily News have close to male-female parity…Time magazine has nine men and only one woman, Newsweek/The Daily Beast has six men and three women, The Atlantic has seven men and two women, New York magazine has six men and one woman, and The Economist went for broke, with an all-male team of five. At The Boston Globe (seven men, three women) and Reuters (eight men, three women), the ratio is more than two to one.

on the web, things look similar:

The Huffington Post has eleven men and only two women; Politico has twelve male reporters and six women on the campaign trail, Talking Points Memo has five men and one woman, and Slate and The Daily both have all-male teams.

more, plus a list of 2012 campaign reporters, here.

February 21st, 2011

thesmithian

'He’s going to have a clear ride through to the Democratic nomination, because no one is going to oppose him or challenge him. He’s going to start out with a billion dollars, no opponent, so he can save his money to the last four months. He’s got a huge social network and he has the power of the incumbency. People underestimate how sweet it is flying on Air Force One with all the trappings of the presidency...[Republicans] could, in fact, end up with a demolition derby. Whoever emerges will come out bloody, bruised and broke.' —Mike Huckabee, in an interview with "The Washington Post"

January 16th, 2011

thesmithian

I disagree with many of the president’s policies, but I believe he is a patriot sincerely intent on using his time in office to advance our country’s cause. I reject accusations that his policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America or opposed to its founding ideals. And I reject accusations that Americans who vigorously oppose his policies are less intelligent, compassionate or just than those who support them…Our political discourse should be more civil than it currently is, and we all, myself included, bear some responsibility for it not being so.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ), today, in The Washington Post. More about McCain’s comments, here.

January 7th, 2011

thesmithian

'...Ever since the first genuine race pseudo-scandal, Barack Obama suggesting the the Cambridge Police acted "stupidly" in arresting Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own home -- Republicans sensed an opportunity in exploiting the anxieties of white voters. So it's no surprise that formula -- blowing a minor incident out of proportion to suggest the president has, as Glenn Beck put it, "a deep-seated hatred for white people," has been replicated over and over again ever since.'—Adam Serwer from his "Pursuing Racial Division" at "The Washington Post"

November 24th, 2010

thesmithian

Like the late Herb Caen in San Francisco, he’s an old-school journalist doing an old-school job: the Metro columnist writing about, and for, the city’s downtrodden. For decades, that was a generally quiet, low-impact job. But following a mayoral campaign that pitted rich against poor in dramatic new ways this fall, Milloy’s knack for reducing post-modern problems to their race-and-class roots has suddenly made him a controversial, buzz-generating columnist—the man that the supposedly liberal class of newcomers to D.C.’s gentrifying neighborhoods love to hate.

long profile of DC columnist Courtland MIlloy. It’s odd that he’s described as

A handsome, straight-featured black man

but i’m quibbling, right?

more, here. plus a piece on how “loathsome” he is, here. to be honest, i haven’t read much of him.

October 27th, 2010

thesmithian

Israel to get its own ‘Tea Party’ movement [via "the Jerusalem Post]

Version promises to be just as patriotic, provocative and antagonistic to Obama as American version

but since we’ve now been told

a new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.

what do ‘tea’ parties really mean, as they form in other parts of the world? more “astroturf” campaigns?

…a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some Astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all. Others catalyse and direct real mobilisations. The Tea Party belongs in the second category. It is mostly composed of passionate, well-meaning people who think they are fighting elite power, unaware that they have been organised by the very interests they believe they are confronting. We now have powerful evidence that the movement was established and has been guided with the help of money from billionaires and big business. Much of this money, as well as much of the strategy and staffing, were provided by two brothers who run what they call “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.”