Efficiency.

The Obama administration is once again reviving a years-long and recurring effort to reform the way the United States delivers food aid abroad, but unfortunately, it’s a very uphill battle against some highly specially interested parties and the Congresspeople who represent them. Right now, the federal government spends just shy of a couple billion dollars [...]

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Hostages.

The Washington Post editorial board, Jan. 16, 2013: The editorial is entitled, “Progress in the Senate,” and praises tweaks made to Senate filibuster rules by Sens. Reid and McConnell while also noting the need for further reform. Among reform options, making senators who wish to filibuster actually perform a traditional, talking filibuster: The Senate’s leaders [...]

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"Pressure is growing..."

On Saturday, a CBS News website article merely pointed to a Washington Post report on the FBI probe of Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) expanding to include allegations of engaging in prostitution.  Today on CBS This Morning, the story gets the full video treatment, including an independent confirmation of the Post’s reporting. Jan Crawford reports that [...]

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Getting toxic?

It started off as a sex scandal, and it’s coming back around again.  The Washington Post reported last night that the FBI has expanded its probe of Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) beyond the interventions on behalf of big donor Salomon Melgen and his business interests, and into allegations that Menendez frequented prostitutes while traveling with [...]

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The political pinch.

So far, the trial balloon coming out of the White House to replace Leon Panetta with Chuck Hagel seems to be losing steam.  It came under immediate criticism not from Barack Obama’s Republican opponents but from prominent Jewish Democrats at a presidential Hanukah party.  Yesterday, the Weekly Standard reported on statements from Senate Democrats looking [...]

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In more ways than one.

Barack Obama keeps claiming that he wants a “balanced” approach to deficit reform, but the editors of the Washington Post have a little difficulty trying to figure out what he means by “balanced” — since his proposals have had a 4:1 ratio of tax hikes to spending cuts.  The Post also notes that Obama has [...]

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Static vs dynamic analysis.

Remember the difference between static and dynamic tax analysis?  The former posits that tax changes produces no change in market behavior, so that hiking taxes by 10% gets you 10% more in revenue.  The latter assumes that changes in tax codes forces markets to adapt, so that rate hikes risk lowering revenues, and lowering rates [...]

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Glass house?

It’s not too often that one sees a major newspaper attacking another in a different market.  In today’s New York Times, though, media critic David Carr criticizes the management at the Washington Post in both the manner and substance of their change at the top of the editorial structure.  In doing so, Carr uses anonymous [...]

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Security.

Something else to add to your list of things that Darrell Issa is supposed to reserve judgment about until after the election. Among the information contained in these docs: The names of Libyan security contractors who protected the embassy and whose lives are, as you might expect, now in grave danger. But that’s not the [...]

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No kidding.

Distrust of the national news media continues to grow, pollsters such as Gallup and Pew report, and yet we don’t see too much introspection on the part of these media outlets.  New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane concluded that the newspaper suffered from institutional bias to the point where it has become a “progressive [...]

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Oh my.

B-b-b-but Madeleine Albright says she can’t understand why any woman would vote for Mitt Romney. Seriously, guys, I want to believe. I do. But … I don’t. Yet. Just 47 percent of registered voters in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll see Obama favorably overall, down 7 percentage points from his recent peak in April, [...]

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Back to the future!

The always accurate and never disputed people at Wikipedia tell us that “fact checking” has been around since the early 20th century. “By the 1930s a fact checking department became a symbol of establishment among publications.” Even with the number of outrageous abuses of the practice in recent months, it still seemed to be a [...]

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Boomerang.

An important addendum to Ed’s CBS/NYT number-crunch from lefty Greg Sargent: The breakdown sent over by CBS: * In Florida, 48 percent of seniors say Romney would do a better job on Medicare, versus 44 percent who say that about Obama (the Ryan pick was supposed to be particularly problematic in this state). * In [...]

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Plus, Part III of Questions Harry Reid Won't Answer.

You’re probably asking yourself, “Only four?”  That’s as high as the scale goes for Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who takes a rather dispassionate view of the McCarthyite tactics of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one of the highest-ranking Democrats in government.  Instead of ripping Reid for his ethics, Kessler tries to reverse-engineer Mitt Romney’s [...]

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Downhill?

Conn Carroll’s post is kryptonite to an eeyore, but I owe you guys some sunshine after yesterday’s raincloud about Romney’s chances after the debates. Note the big “if” built in here. Worse for Obama, the latest fundraising numbers show he will not be able to outspend Romney forever. Romney and the Republican National Committee raised [...]

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So... what's your point, exactly?

Ughh. It sickens me that our country’s leaders are thusly engaged in such damaging, cheap populism. The Washington Post just wheeled out a new report, detailing how “Romney’s Bain Capital invested in companies that moved jobs overseas.” Am I imagining it, or is anybody else detecting a gentle hint that we’re supposed to believe that [...]

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Data.

Tomorrow’s the big speech where he plans to ask for more time to turn things around because there have been all sorts of headwinds and Hopenchange takes time and that damned George W. Bush did everything wrong and yadda yadda yadda. Think indies will go for it after this month’s terrible jobs report? New from [...]

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Pinocchios and projection.

Newspapers and other media sources insist that their mission is to keep Americans well-informed and cognizant of the facts.  Those tasks fall to editors, who are supposed to exercise discretion and judgment on articles that appear in their publication.  The Washington Post even employs a well-read fact checker, Glenn Kessler, who receives both praise and [...]

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Hmmmm.

Does The One still have this sort of influence even among his base? C’mon. I know he’s “the Lightbringer” or whatever, but no one’s morals are changing overnight just because Obama finally mustered the meager political courage needed to drop his ancient charade on SSM. Or are they? Overall, 53 percent of Americans say gay [...]

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Bullies.

A top Democrat on Sunday defended Mitt Romney’s character, saying that despite recent reports that Romney was a bully as a young man attending prep school, he believes that has little to do with the man Romney is today. “There’s not a single thing that I know about Mitt Romney in his adult life which [...]

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Over to you, WaPo.

The family of the eight-years-deceased alleged victim of a cruel prank by a teenaged Mitt Romney reacted angrily to the Washington Post story yesterday — but not for the reasons one might imagine.  Calling the Washington Post story “factually inaccurate,” the sisters of the late John Lauber lashed out at the Post for using him [...]

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Candor.

Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton recently defended the WaPo’s decision to run a major story on page A3, rather than the front page. The story — which revealed that Obamacare will actually add to the deficit rather than subtract from it, as the administration has claimed since before the passage of the massive health care [...]

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Change.

Pity poor Glenn Greenwald, who thought the left’s opposition to Bush’s counterterror policies was based on something more profound than crude partisan tribalism. Why he thought that, I don’t know: The writing was on the wall when the anti-war movement started dying even as Obama geared up for a surge of tens of thousands of [...]

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"I wish I hadn't said it that way..."

Allapundit covered this story after it first broke, and the entire thing looked like a slow motion train wreck from the beginning. During an appearance on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson broke out some jaw dropping comments regarding a story about Rick Santorum and his family following the death of one [...]

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