Crooks and Liars (Free subscription) | 07/24/2008
And he’s supposed to be a lefty pundit. Sometimes I think we need to clean out the whole crew. As for his substantive views, they do (now) closely resemble Bush’s. Yet the upside to a candidate who changes his philosophical orientation as often as McCain is that he could always switch back. While I certainly wouldn’t [...]
The Corner (Free subscription) | 07/23/2008 | Politics
Jonathan Chait has posted this on the website of TNR: Atlantic writer and gritty third base coach Ross Douthat uncovers [a] staggering case of hackery. Hoover Institution Fellow and sometime economic advisor to prominent Republicans John Cogan has produced a chart purporting to bolster the common conservative argument that domestic spending has exploded during George W. Bush's presidency. In a laudatory...
AMERICAblog (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008 | Politics
UPDATE: The video was uploaded a few minutes ago, so if you're getting an error trying to view it, give it a few minutes and come back. Today, in what has to be one of the more desperate, unfounded and outrageous claims coming from McCain, he just said on national television that "it seems to me that Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign." Watch the video -- and...
Obsidian Wings (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
by hilzoy Yesterday, Jonathan Chait (who I normally like) wrote a piece about John McCain in which he said: "McCain is pretty easy to take. His demagoguery comes with an awkward forced smile, which doesn't make it more forgivable but...
The Liberal Blog Network (Free subscription) | 07/21/2008 | Politics
This Wachovia analysis about the housing market sounds a lot more realistic to me. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have suggested over the past year that an end is in sight. But with each prediction, things have grown worse. For many homeowners, the deep housing slump feels like a drop off a skyscraper. Every time another 15 floors have passed, there seems...
The Liberal Blog Network (Free subscription) | 07/21/2008
In the annals of political writing, you would be hard-pressed to find a more ridiculous piece of dreck than the latest column by The New Republic Senior Editor Jonathan Chait on "Why a McCain Presidency Wouldn’t Be So Bad." And if the title alone doesn’t convince you of that, consider the reasons Chait gives, because despite recognizing that McCain has flip-flopped on every issue large and small in...
Jay Currie (Free subscription) | 07/21/2008
Pour yourself the late Sunday night coffee or glass of wine, get comfortable, and go and read Jonathan Chait’s brilliant deconstruction of one of the left’s saddest cases: Canada’s own Naomi Klein. But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with [...]
Dispatches from the Culture Wars (Free subscription) | yesterday
Justin Logan at the Cato blog quotes Jonathan Chait's critique of Naomi Klein's absurdly simplistic use of the term "neo-conservative": [Klein] pays shockingly (but, given her premises, unsurprisingly) little attention to right-wing ideas. She recognizes that neoconservatism sits at the heart of the Iraq war project, but she does not seem to know what neoconservatism is; and she makes no effort to...
Balloon Juice (Free subscription) | yesterday | Politics
Had a couple martinis, came home, checked out the Corner, and saw this gem from K-Lo: If Obama could go to Germany and give a speech in English and be not only understood but well-received, why does he say we all need to learn another language? You simply can not spoof these guys.
The Corner (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
Yesterday, NRO ran a shortened version of an article Rich Lowry and I wrote on how McCain could win. A few of the comments on it seemed worth responding to. Jonathan Chait takes issue with our argument that the flip-flop argument against Obama could backfire by undercutting the case that Obama is an out-of-the-mainstream leftist. The data, he points out, shows that enthusiasm for Obama among young...
Lerterland (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
And über-fashionable leftist author Naomi Klein does not, according to Jonathan Chait's dismantling of The Shock Doctrine : Klein's relentless materialism is not the only thing driving her to see conservatives merely as corporate puppets. She pays shockingly (but, given her premises, unsurprisingly) little attention to right-wing ideas. She recognizes that neoconservatism sits at the heart of the Iraq...
BrothersJudd Blog (Free subscription) | 07/21/2008
Dead Left : a review of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism By Naomi Klein (Jonathan Chait, July 30, 2008, New Republic) Her achievement, and it is no small feat, has been to revive economicism--and more grandiosely, materialism--as the central locus of left-wing politics. From the time of Marx, and through the Depression, the left concerned itself primarily with economic inequality....
The Hollywood Liberal (Free subscription) | 07/21/2008
Conventional wisdom watch: McCain edition Conventional wisdom wellspring even-the-liberal Jonathan “war is good for children and other living things” Chait of the New Republic still sorta wants to have a beer with John McCain. Well, de gustibus and whatevs. He also says a McCain presidency would be the end of the Rove era. Lie is [...]
Economist's View (Free subscription) | 07/21/2008 | Politics
Glenn Hubbard says the Fed can't do it alone: We're Asking Too Much of the Fed, by R. Glenn Hubbard, Commentary, WSJ: The combination of eye-popping headline inflation of 5% year over year and dramatic expansions of the Federal Reserve's...
Firedoglake (Free subscription) | 07/20/2008
Conventional wisdom wellspring even-the-liberal Jonathan "war is good for children and other living things" Chait of the New Republic still sorta wants to have a beer with John McCain. Well, de gustibus and whatevs. He also says a McCain presidency would be the end of the Rove era. Lie is a harsh word. Perhaps he's already started on the beer.
