Category: General

I’m off to Montreal today to check in with McGill University’s big Model UN exercise for students from around the United States and Canada. Will comment on South Carolina later.

One of the more amusing twists in the Obama-Clinton battle at the moment is how they are both trying to campaign in Florida without technically doing so. While watching the Democratic debates the other night in South Carolina from Washington, DC, I saw my first Obama TV ads.

There’s a story that would be less disturbing if not true that George H.W. Bush asked a number of close advisers to send him their lists of who should be on his ticket as VP. Dan Quayle — for whom Bill Kristol was chief of staff — was No. 2 on most of these lists….

Bushlandia, carnival centerpiece in Torres Verdes, Portugal; photo credit: Skip Kaltenheuser Washington, DC is a town that takes itself way too seriously. It depends on Jon Stewart for an injection of levity. Skip Kaltenheuser, a chronicler of carnivals around the world, has just written up his proposal to bring Carnival to Washington.

This note below was sent by a field worker for the Edwards campaign in Nevada. It was sent to close friends (not to me) and seems like an honest take by this individual — rather than something affected by spin other than a slight bias perhaps that one must expect towards his own candidate.

I don’t know what you are up to today, but if you’d like to have lunch with us at New America, I’ve asked for one of the nation’s leading iconic civil rights figures, Leonard Weinglass, to talk to us about his experiences and perspective representing the “Cuban Five” — five Cuban nationals who were caught…

A government that spies on its citizens, on Americans, without oversight is not democracy; it is tyranny. And yet this is what the Bush administration continues to try and do.

This is a bit of an experiment, but the New America Foundation is trying a live web feed for some of our events — including this big economic forum tomorrow. We’ll be starting promptly at 8 am EST and ending at 9:30 am.

The Fed just dropped the fed funds rate by 75 basis points — the largest such Fed move since 1982 and the market barely noticed. No matter what the issues were yesterday, it is clear that the economy — domestic and global — is now the biggest political issue today and tomorrow. . .

When the Fed drops the fed funds rate by 75 basis points and the market doesn’t react. . .well, that’s really, really scary. I’ve talked with a number of economists this morning who are stunned by the lack of market reaction to the interest rate drop.