Scaramucci Does the Fandango
Everyone is assuming new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci is a neophyte who doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s actually much worse than that.
Lawlessness, Without Purpose Or Effect
A brief summary of the “executive summary” of the Senate’s report on the CIA detention and interrogation program.
Linky Friday #57
Burt Likko fills in for Will Truman for this week’s aggregation of dozens of links to themed web randomness!
Shutdown’s Winners
Who wins when the government shuts down?
Reliving The Nightmare: The Washington Post Revisits The Grand Bargain
A new blockbuster report from The Washington Post serves as yet another retrospective on the failed Grand Bargain debt-ceiling negotiations of last summer, despite this being a period of our history that most Americans likely only dimly and hesitantly recall. For most of us, the memory of these few weeks sits in the section of…
Sailing Away to Irrelevance: Rush Limbaugh & The Right’s Self-Destructive Dependency on The Media Machine
Nine months ago, Jaybird asked readers and contributors alike to take a stab at predicting the outcome of the then-burgeoning 2012 Presidential Campaign. My answer then stands today. (BTW, a big hat tip to the GOP for self-destructively going out of their way to make me look like fishing Kreskin.): The economy will be slightly…
Dealing With Political Blind Spots
Ezra Klein had a great rundown yesterday on a psychological phenomenon called motivated skepticism: On the simplest level, American politics presents us with an incentives problem: McConnell — like most minority leaders — is an avowedly reflexive opponent of the president’s reelection. The president’s reelection campaign depends on an improved economy. That a rational actor working…
