Kevin Drum

WINDFALL PROFITS….Over at Time, Justin Fox takes a crack at justifying a windfall profits tax on oil companies: These are oil companies we’re talking about, and their business involves extracting a nonrenewable resource — part of our shared patrimony, thus — out of the ground and selling it. They have also acquired for themselves all […]

SADDAM AND AL-QAEDA….In his new book, Ron Suskind writes that the White House once ordered the CIA to forge a letter showing a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda: According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil […]

ENERGY PIMPING….From the LA Times this afternoon: Democrat Barack Obama called today for tapping the nation’s strategic oil reserves to help drive down gasoline prices, a shift from his previous position on the issue. The reversal is the second refinement in Obama’s energy policy…. Every single story I’ve read about Obama’s energy speech today has […]

UP IS DOWN….I know I complain about this all the time, and I’ll probably keep right on doing it. Here’s Catherine Rampell in the New York Times today: Higher Prices Outpace June Spending by Consumers Consumer spending increased in June, but those gains were outpaced by rising prices, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Monday. […]

LAUGHING IT OFF….Bob Somerby is upset at the lefty blogosphere’s reaction to the Britney/Paris ad aired by John McCain last week: Instead of laughing at the ad and saying it showed that McCain is a fly-weight, we did what we most love to do — we started a fight about race, casting ourselves as the […]

CHARACTER WITNESS….What’s the difference between “Zhonghua” and “Zhongguo”? Answer: the first one means that Taiwan shows up for the Beijing Olympics, and the second one means it doesn’t. Beijing’s fascinating game of linguistic chicken is explained here.

POLITICS ON THE WEB….I’m not sure Ezra’s right about this. On the surface, it does seem devastating to the future of political reporting on the web that The Politico gets 60% of its advertising revenue from its print edition, which publishes three days a week and has a circulation of 27,000, and only 40% from […]

POCKET….Here’s the latest Obama ad pushing back on John McCain’s oil policy. Basic message: McCain takes lots of money from oil interests, while Obama wants to tax their windfall profits in order to fund a $1,000 rebate to hardworking taxpayers. So is the ad any good? It depends. The windfall profits tax is a dumb […]

AFGHANISTAN….As we begin to withdraw troops from Iraq, should we increase our military presence in Afghanistan? Two writers, coming at the issue from very different perspectives, say no. First up is Rory Stewart, who runs an NGO in Kabul called the Turquoise Mountain, writing in Time: Western troops can win any conventional battle against ill-armed […]

QUOTE OF THE DAY….Andrew Sullivan on the depressing but all too predictable arc of the John McCain campaign: They really played the arugula card? For all McCain’s personal qualities, we’re learning that the machine behind the GOP simply re-makes the campaign in its own Coulterite image. Instead of actually fighting on the core questions — […]