The conventional wisdom insists that President Obama has all the leverage right now over the Republicans in their negotiation for a “grand bargain” to close the budget deficit. Bolstered by his smashing election victory, gains by the Democrats in both houses of Congress and a changing popular mood, this would seem like the ideal moment Read More
For three consecutive days last week, I woke up before 9 a.m. without the use of an alarm. This has never happened before. It’s not because I’m bright-eyed and looking to seize a brand-new day’s worth of opportunities, but because I’m an addict. A filthy, filthy blood-eyed, rot-tooth addict, and the new shipment just came in. CSPAN’s coverage of Congress comically attempting to do something important begins at the crack of dawn, and I hate to miss even a second of it. Read More
This afternoon, Time magazine held its annual lunch and panel for it’s prestigious person of the year issue. We went in with our money on Occupy Wall Street, but most of our other journo diners seemed to take it as a given that the honor would be bestowed on Steve Jobs.
It was an impressive panel led by Time‘s Rich Stengel: NBC’s Brian Williams, Anita Hill, Jesse Eisenberg, Mario Batali, Seth Meyers, and Grover Norquist, president of the advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform. Read More
National Republicans are making a morbid political bet. It goes something like this: If there’s a deadly terrorist incident in the next three years, we win – big.
Their almost uniformly hysterical response to President Obama’s decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 terrorists to New York to face charges in federal Read More
Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist likes what he hears from Representative Anthony Weiner about eliminating earmarks in Congress.
“[Having earmarks] changes the nature of who a congressman is. All of a sudden, he is a favor factory,” Norquist told me.
He noted that there is legislation in Congress to curb the use of Read More
It was Monday morning, a few hours into the Fox Business Network’s first day on the air, and the new channel’s stocks editor, Liz MacDonald, was mugging for the cameras in front of a stand of trees somewhere in the vicinity of CNBC’s headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
“There’s a lot of government-looking Read More
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Every year, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist hosts two can’t-miss events that bookend the Conservative Political Action Conference, the premier gathering of the nation’s right-leaning politicians, pundits and activists. One is a pre-conference poker party. The other is a beer-fueled late-night bash at his Capitol Hill townhouse.
Usually, that event doesn’t hit its stride until Read More
Grover Norquist, the small-government advocate who helped engineer the conservative revolution in the 1990′s, has a novel take on why erstwhile liberals like Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney might be embraced by social conservatives.
“People are up for conversions, for changes, for growing,” he told me in an interview this week. “People love former alcoholics Read More
Naïve citizens may be surprised to learn that some of the most morally upright of our fellow Americans, at least by their own estimation, are also among the most enthusiastic endorsers of the practice of torture. Even more startling than their zeal to abuse detainees—many of whom are innocent of any offense—is their eagerness to Read More
Naïve citizens may be surprised to learn that some of the most morally upright of our fellow Americans, at least by their own estimation, are also among the most enthusiastic endorsers of the practice of torture. Even more startling than their zeal to abuse detainees—many of whom are innocent of any offense—is their eagerness to Read More
