You didn’t even need to pick up a copy of the New York Post this morning to know the paper’s oh-so-predictable verdict on President Obama’s speech at West Point. In fact you didn’t even have to watch the paper’s stable mates at Fox last night to know what was coming. Because it’s been coming for months. For his legion of well-heeled and widely-distributed critics, the bottom line is simply, if it’s coming out of Obama’s mouth or Obama’s White House it is, by definition, bad, misguided, and probably un-American. Their …

So the cat is out of the bag and now the even the White House is worried about New York Governor David Paterson’s incredible deflating poll problem. But the way it’s playing out is not how the President, nor the people who put him up to this, expected.
Back up to this past winter when Paterson’s amateur-hour handling of his pick to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate left just about everyone slack-jawed. He managed to piss of anyone connected to the Kennedys (not an insignificant body of people especially in …

It was inescapable from the very start of Barack Obama’s campaign waaaaay back in January 2007 that race and racism would play a big part in whatever came to pass. And of course it did and it has and it still is and it always will. Now the New York Times — or to be fair one of her columnists — has finally said what is pretty apparent: An awful lot of the screaming incoherent rage ostensibly directed at Obama’s actions is actually just plain racism.
Maureen Dowd put it this …

OK so if the pundits left, right, and center are to be believed Barack Obama’s 7-month-old Presidency is in trouble and his speech to Congress on health care was his last best chance to keep the ship afloat. We’ll let you decide if that’s a bit hyperbolic (see: Bill Clinton health care failure 1994, reelection 1996 or George W. Bush “Education President” 2001, Iraq War legacy-killer 2008).
The big speech on the hill is getting plenty of (digital) ink but it was not Obama’s most important speech on Wednesday. That came …

It’s nothing new. Humans seem to prefer faith to facts. And I’m not talking about religion.
Howard Kurtz got lots of (liberal) blog links early this week with an article about the health care “debate” and how facts have been relegated to the sidelines. Kurtz now reports that it was Monday’s most commented piece on the paper’s website as people poured forth their vitriol from both sides of the health care aisle.
Kurtz’s main point was pretty simple: Despite the fact that many reporters demonstrably proved that the death panels myth was …

If  Barack Obama has an Achille’s Heel (if? who doesn’t…) it is almost certainly his arrogance. Most of the time he keeps it in check, or at least does a reasonably good job of masking it. When it peeks through he is generally quick to recognize the potential damage (“You’re nice enough, Hillary”). But this time his arrogance may once again cost Americans the chance at having the health care system as good as every other industrialized country in the world.
The arguments about the relative merits of various plans, the …

No one ever accused Rupert Murdoch media properties of being fair and balanced least of all his money-losing Democrat-hating baby the New York Post. Still Friday’s Michael Starr article on Oprah Winfrey’s ratings declines is a truly remarkable effort in keeping the boss happy at all costs.
Starr writes about the long slow decline in Oprah’s ratings for her afternoon syndicated talk show. He notes early on that the show’s numbers are “down by nearly a third, 32 percent, records show” before jumping into the speculation pool for a quick dip …

After three days of perfectly predictable Senate hearings, Sonia Sotomayor has emerged entirely unscathed and well on her way towards becoming the third women to ever sit on the US Supreme Court. The post-Bork dance was scripted for all sides well in advance and just about everybody turned in a serviceable performance with a few noteworthy exceptions:
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota)
It was practically his first day as a Senator (he got a late start courtesy of the razor-thin margin of victory last fall and the ensuing lawsuits) but Al Franken jumped …

The trick’s as old as the five-day workweek. Dump your worst news on Friday afternoon after 5. It’ll end up in Saturday’s papers (the lowest readership of the week) and will get brief mention on the network newscasts (which have few viewers on Fridays — especially in the summer). Sadly the “we’re gonna change the way Washington works” Obama Administration knows the game too well.
And so at 5:18 Friday afternoon the Washington Post broke the story: The White House will decree by executive fiat that the President may hold terrorism suspects. …

There are two somewhat competing storylines that have been floating around the edges of the news coming out of Iran and both demonstrate how little we learn from history — and how little we know about Iran.
Several prominent analysts have argued that the vote in Iran was NOT substantially rigged and that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the choice of the majority of Iranians voting last weekend. Their arguments come down to this: Westerners viewed this election through a narrow lens that fails to capture the ethnic and cultural dynamics of …