Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 63

Ted Stevens | Michael Tomasky

The very sad death of former Alaska Republican senator Ted Stevens in an airplane accident in remote Alaska highlights for me the unique perils of life in that state, namely that the land is so rough, the roads and rail systems so (necessarily) inadequate, that there are many places in the state that are accessible only by airplane.

A culture has thus developed in which many people own small planes, and they fly them in all kinds of weather. I remember my visit there, in 1985 I think. We now h...

I report, you decide | Michael Tomasky

Exhibit A, a HuffPo summary of the new Esquire piece about Newt Gingrich, featuring the first-ever interview with Newt's second wife (he's on his third), who recounts the following conversation:

He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.

He'd just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he'd given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.

The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, "How do you give that speech...

What is Robert Gibbs thinking? | Michael Tomasky

If you read a steady diet of liberal blogs, you're going to be seeing a lot about this one today and tomorrow. This was Robert Gibbs, speaking to the Hill:

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy."

The press...

South and the third world | Michael Tomasky

With regard to my "snarky" and "elitist" final graf of the previous post, it strikes me that maybe it's a good idea to look at certain measures of social health on a comparative basis, examining regions of the US and other countries in the world. Maybe we'll do this on an ongoing basis.

Let's start with one obvious index of social well being, infant mortality rates. The international numbers below are from the UN Population Division, the state numbers from the Kaiser Foundation.

As the map on t...

Soaking the super-rich | Michael Tomasky

Should LeBron James and LeBron James's dentist pay the same tax rate?

Jim Surowiecki of the New Yorker puts on the table a question I've raised here for some time, that of the top marginal tax rate for very high-income Americans. He writes:

Even within the top one per cent, income is getting more concentrated: the top 0.1 per cent of earners have seen their share of national income triple over the same period. All by themselves, they now earn as much as the bottom hundred and twenty million...

Soaking the super-rich

Jim Surowiecki of the New Yorker puts on the table a question I've raised here for some time, that of the top marginal tax rate for very high-income Americans. He writes:

Even within the top one per cent, income is getting more concentrated: the top 0.1 per cent of earners have seen their share of national income triple over the same period. All by themselves, they now earn as much as the bottom hundred and twenty million people. So at the same time that the rich have been pulling away from...

Tony Judt | Michael Tomasky

You have probably heard that Tony Judt (pronounced Jutt) passed away over the weekend. He was one of America's leading intellectuals and had suffered for two years from the horrible Lou Gehrig's disease, which left him a quadriplegic. He was just 62.

The New York Review of Books, where he wrote frequently, has assembled some of his writings for it in one handy place, which you can visit here. I commend to you also our own Ed Pilkington's profile of him in the dear old G. from earlier this...

Integrity and Zakaria | Michael Tomasky

Up to this past weekend, I'd always taken the view that the high point of Fareed Zakaria's career was the time he was in the photo spread in Marie Claire with current UN ambassador Susan Rice, Atlantic editor James Bennett and your humble correspondent. I'm not joking that this actually happened, although I am of course joking about the high point business.

Fareed is a very distinguished fellow, but all the more so now that he has returned a prize, and the $10,000 that came with it, that the A...

I must inform you that you are a minority | Michael Tomasky

Some of our conservative regulars have commented on the post below to the effect that the Senate is working just fine because Obama and the D's are trying to do too much too fast and the Murkan people are agin' it and so the Senate is just doing the job it's meant to do. Mitch McConnell said this to David Broder as well recently.

Our friend ngavc cited David Frum, who wrote:

Like all presidents who win a big national election, Barack Obama wanted to whip as many measures through Congress as...

The Malcolm X Republicans | Michael Tomasky

The political scientist Jonathan Bernstein, writing at the New Republic site last week, made a point about the Senate and Supreme Court nominations that hadn't occurred to me and caught me in my tracks:

Meanwhile, the real question here is what will happen in 2011-2012. As I said, five Republican Senators -- Collins, Graham, Lugar, Snowe, and the retiring Judd Gregg -- defected [voting for Elena Kagan:]; Ben Nelson also defected [voting against:], but said he would vote for cloture. The obvious...