John Amato at Crooks & Liars has a really fantastic post about the media narrative on Hillary - first they crack the puzzle on how to anoint Obama as the presumptive nominee:
The media have figured out how to end the Democratic race. Declaring it over doesn’t work. Urging Hillary Clinton to drop out doesn’t work. Putting Barack Obama on the cover of Time as the nominee doesn’t work.
Read more »
Another dispatch from LP’s Indiana correspondent:
Aside from the Democrat primaries, the major talking point in the U.S. this week is whether the United States is losing ground in the global economy. This is different to the question of whether or not the U.S. economy is in recession (or ’slowdown’ as GWB prefers to put it), but is rather about whether the U.S. is losing the competitive race against the emergent economies of East Asia and the Middle East, and indeed to Europe. Read more »
LP’s Indiana correspondent, QUT academic Terry Flew writes:
Bloomington, Indiana is where I am at the moment, at the University of Indiana. It is best known as the home of Albert Kinsey, John Cougar Mellencamp, and the ‘Hoosiers’, a basketball team about whom a film was made in 1986 starring Gene Hackman as a coach and Dennis Hopper as a drunk. Read more »
I haven’t finished watching tonight’s Four Corners, which I taped so I could watch Big Brother (don’t worry, I’ve already condemned myself) and Good News Week, but it struck me as being somewhat more of an interesting take than I’d anticipated. Read more »
In the consistently depressing American presidential primaries (depressing anyway for anyone who doesn’t want to see the Rovean attack lines the GOP will use continually roadtested by Democrats that is) the latest furore revolves around some remarks Barack Obama made at a San Francisco fundraiser about blue collar voters - in states like Pennsylvania (or the rustbelt bits thereof as opposed to the swank bits of Philly and the college kid concentrations etc etc). Read more »
It must have seemed a bright idea at the time to get Noel Pearson to write an article for The Monthly on Obama. Trouble is - Pearson may or may not know anything about American politics, but almost his entire article is a discussion of Obama seen through the prism of a book written by Shelby Steele. Read more »
LP’s Indiana correspondent is having a busy night in Bloomington! Here’s Terry’s latest dispatch on the Indiana and North Carolina Democratic primaries. Read more »
… probably a bit of an egotist, but there’s a very interesting take on Barack Obama’s former pastor at Salon, where Sarah Posner interviews religious studies scholar Jonathan L. Walton. Read more »
Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania by 10 points, enough to keep her increasingly destructive campaign alive.
What’s making me really angry is this sort of thing:
Read more »I’m teaching later this arvo, so I don’t have time to do any analysis, but I thought people might like a discussion starter on the Petraeus report to Congress on the progress of teh Surge. I do think recent events have only reinforced the validity of this conclusion: Read more »
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