Big Brother is watching. And reading. And ... ?

Yesterday, Jay Carney held a news briefing in which he repeatedly claimed that the White House really has no idea what happens in executive branch agencies, which certainly stoked all sorts of confidence in Barack Obama’s executive abilities.  At one point, when asked about whether the Department of Justice might have seized records of other [...]

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In a D+4 poll.

Hope you like this NPR/Democracy Corps poll, because it may be the last national poll we see for a while.  With Hurricane Sandy battering the upper Northeast, polling in the region will be impossible until at least the weekend, and possibly through Election Day.  Without access to that part of the electorate, national polls will [...]

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Cut it off from the federal trough

NPR, PBS and other public broadcasting outlets are asking taxpayers to fork over $445 million in funding for the next fiscal year. But not if Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) have anything to say about it. The conservative lawmakers want to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the steward of the [...]

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Your tax dollars at work.

Old and busted: The economy is picking up steam under Obama and that’s great news.  New hotness: The economy is slow … and that’s great news!  After this morning’s GDP report from the Department of Commerce, NPR offered the counterfactual headline you’d only see during a Democratic administration:   Wait, someone at NPR must have [...]

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Everybody's favorite actor.

Woo hoo! I’m so pumped for this podcast. Know why? Because Jim Treacher is going to have a field day with it! His “Daily Words of Wisdom from Alec Baldwin’s Twitter feed” is already one of my favorite features of TheDCMorning. Mostly, though, I just love all the accumulated evidence of NPR’s unassailably “fair and [...]

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Firewall!

Gee, ya think?  More than seven months after NPR accepted a grant from Open Society Foundation for its Impact on Government project without naming left-wing activist George Soros as the source, its ombudsperson Alicia Shepard finally got around to addressing the issue of credibility, despite the immediate negative reaction to the decision.   Shepard spoke [...]

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"The Main Street Fairness Act."

Illinois has budget problems. It also has a job problem. So as blue-state governments are wont to do, Illinois’s political class took on the “how could we possibly make things worse?” challenge and… successfully made things worse, imposing an internet sales tax on online retailers that has not only cost the state jobs, but ultimately [...]

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Endgame.

It’s not a Democratic ploy, either. House Republican sources, including David Dreier, are telling NRO that it looks like a done deal. No surprise, given the reports about the red-meat wrinkles having been ironed out. Fox News says Reid’s set to speak on the Senate floor soon. Presumably all that’s left is for each side [...]

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Inches.

So let’s see. The Democrats wouldn’t pass a budget for the entire fiscal year when they controlled Congress because, well, they’re gutless and didn’t want another tough vote before the midterms. Then the House GOP took over and tried to pass one for what remained of the fiscal year, but Reid blocked it in the [...]

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Hmmm.

Hard to believe given that Israel’s favorable rating in Egypt not long ago was 3/92, but the two results aren’t strictly contradictory. Memories of previous wars may be long and patience with the pace of internal democratization may be short. Egyptians might simply have concluded that they have more important things to worry about right [...]

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Exit lines

Picked up the latest hit off the rumor mill from James Joyner, along with about two hundred people on Twitter all at once. Details are sketchy right now but NPR’s David Folkenflik reports that Glenn Beck is ending his weekday show on Fox when his contract ends in December but will perform “special projects” for [...]

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Hmmm.

Three possibilities. One: It’s all lies, concocted to weaken Boehner’s hand at a critical moment in negotiations. Two: It’s true, and is being leaked by Boehner’s allies in the caucus to warn the base that they might be steering us off a cliff before Paul Ryan’s epic budget has had a fair shake publicly. Three: [...]

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Strategy.

With the White House preparing to go to the mattresses with a government shutdown and Senate Democrats still refusing to put together any kind of budget, House Republicans have offered a one-week continuing resolution to buy extra mediation time.  Appropriations Chair Hal Rogers released the plan yesterday, which comes up with a hefty cut in [...]

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Huh?

Don’t get me wrong — if David Petraeus really wants to trade in his uniform to be the chief second in command in the American intelligence community, he’s earned the privilege of choosing his next assignment.  The general who redefined asymmetrical warfare for the US military and successfully applied counterinsurgency strategies in two difficult wars [...]

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Underdogs.

Tip-off’s at 9:20 ET on CBS; celebrate or agonize below as you see fit. I think of this not so much as a game as one of those rare news events where the world unites to try to will a happy outcome into being. The moon landing, the rescue of the Chilean miners, and now [...]

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Impasse.

Boehner could probably get away with dropping the PP rider from the House budget bill if Reid was prepared to agree to a number close to $61 billion in cuts. But to meet roughly only halfway, at or around $33 billion, and still drop some of the red meat like defunding PP that the base [...]

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Tea time?

“Nearly half of all Americans have an unfavorable view of the Tea Party movement, putting it in the same company as the Democratic and Republican parties, according to a new national poll… “The people questioned for the poll who say they have an unfavorable view of the Tea Party is 47%, up four points from [...]

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Not quite "watching the watchers."

Media criticism has been the bread and butter of the blogosphere from its opening days, especially for conservatives who pushed back against the liberal bias of the mainstream media.  The scope of those efforts have run the gamut from fact-checking news pieces to exposing biases of top-ranking executives, such as Eason Jordan at CNN.  Media [...]

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Obama is awesome.

Via Jonah Goldberg, mordant robot theater on a slow Friday afternoon. It was posted to YouTube on March 22, the day before Howard Dean introduced America to the “Democratic wars are okay” school of foreign policy. The most obvious difference between Libya and Iraq, needless to say, is who’s doing the dictator-toppling on the ground. [...]

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Plus, the NPR attack on Michelle's family.

After being fired from NPR for expressing a controversial opinion on Fox News — along with a suggestion that he had mental problems — Juan Williams remained supportive of federal funding for public broadcasting.  What Vivian Schiller couldn’t do, apparently House Democrats could.  After the DCCC sent out a fundraising letter based on Democratic support [...]

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Relief?

Terrific news, albeit with plenty of caveats. “This is very important information,” says Hiroshima-based researcher Evan Douple, who has been studying the health of atomic bomb survivors for decades. Douple says the new radiation levels, shown to him by NPR, “should be reassuring. At these levels so far, I don’t think a study would be [...]

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That one won't hunt, Senators.

Do you ever wonder if Democrats might want to ask Harry Reid to stop defending federal spending, at least where cameras can catch his arguments? Last week, Reid tried salvaging money for the National Endowment for the Humanities by pointing out the danger from “mean-spirited” Republican spending reductions to, er, cowboy poetry. Yesterday, Reid teams [...]

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Plus: New power line reaches Japanese nuke plant.

When he’s right, he’s right, which is why I keep droning on about Obama using the bully pulpit to give the public a reality check about radiation. If you follow the news closely enough to know that a nuclear-related horror has befallen Japan but not closely enough to know about sub-lethal levels, wind dispersal, etc, [...]

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Aw.

It’s a nice sop to a conservative base that’s not thrilled with the bite-sized budget deals they’ve seen so far, but it’s going nowhere in the Senate. That’s why they did this as a separate bill, in fact, instead of sticking it in the three-week budget bill that passed a few days ago. Reid and [...]

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3 pm ET.

Today on The Ed Morrissey Show (3 pm ET), Kerry Picket of the Washington Times returns to give us the skinny from Capitol Hill.  Republicans passed a ban on funding NPR; will that make it to the Oval Office for Barack Obama’s promised veto?  In the second half, Steve Everley joins us to discuss the [...]

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