Follow BeltwayBlips on Twitter
Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
Daily Kos —
... William Kristol: Let's get real. The public likes big government, and anyone running as a small-government conservative is kidding themselves. Of course, we're a center-right country [except when it comes to, you know, reality.] ...
Bill Kristol Copulates With David Brooks In the New York Times
RedState: Conservative News and Community —
They could have at least gotten a room, but no, they wanted to let us all watch.
After multiple columns of David Brooks smacking lips to turn off conservatives, Bill Kristol rises to the challenge this morning. It is the same drum beat. Conservatives should shut up about small government.
So talk of small government may be music to conservative ears, but it’s not to the public as a whole. This isn’t to say the public is fond of big-government liberalism. It’s just that what’s politically vulnerable about big-government liberalism is more the liberalism than the big government. (Besides, the public knows that government’s not ...
Bill Kristol Plays Footsie With David Brooks In the New York Times
RedState: Conservative News and Community —
They could have at least gotten a room, but no, they wanted to let us all watch.
After multiple columns of David Brooks smacking lips to turn off conservatives, Bill Kristol rises to the challenge this morning. It is the same drum beat. Conservatives should shut up about small government.
So talk of small government may be music to conservative ears, but it’s not to the public as a whole. This isn’t to say the public is fond of big-government liberalism. It’s just that what’s politically vulnerable about big-government liberalism is more the liberalism than the big government. (Besides, the public knows that government’s not ...
Kristol on small-government talk
Political Animal —
KRISTOL ON SMALL-GOVERNMENT TALK.... Bill Kristol's contract with the New York Times must be on the verge of running out, because his column today isn't completely ridiculous. In fact, it emphasizes a fairly obvious point that sometimes goes overlooked. As Kristol sees it, Barack Obama is poised to take office and respond to the worsening financial crisis with an ambitious rescue plan. Kristol encourages conservatives to oppose the "supersized helping of big-government liberalism." Whatever. But Kristol goes on to note that how the right approaches their ...
The Daily Grind
Weekly Standard Blog —
Kristol: Conservatives should be careful how they argue against big-government liberalism.
Bill Richardson joins the birth certificate debate? "Obama is an immigrant."
Dennis Kucinich really wants in on the Team of Rivals: "I was as rivalish or more so than a lot of the so-called rivals he's chosen."
William "Cold Cash" Jefferson felled by the first Vietnamese-American elected to Congress. Meet Joseph Cao. The NYT predictably blames white voters for Jefferson's loss, ignoring Cao's compelling life story and ...
Progressive Breakfast: "Build Baby Build" Calls Grow Louder
LiberalOasis : The Blog —
... broadband infrastructure that would connect every household and business in the country, which, according to the report, would “provide adequate broadband connectivity for several decades.
...
An investment on rebuilding America’s school can begin with $20 billion for deferred maintenance. The Economic Policy Institute estimates this would generate close to 250,000 skilled maintenance jobs with nearly $6 billion for materials and supplies.
NYT's Bill Kristol (via Tbogg) goes for the false choice: "If you think some ...
MIDDAY ROUNDUP
News —
MIDDAY ROUNDUP President-elect Barack Obama’s success in GOP congressional districts is evidence that Democrats still have room to grow, liberal bloggers say today, while an article arguing conservatives abandon small-government rhetoric brings blowback on the right. Meanwhile, blogs on both sides contemplate whether Obama’s appointees should tack more to the left, if at all. The increased number of Republican congressional districts won by Obama this past November is a sign that the 50-state strategy works, and could help solidify Democrats’ growth, should Obama succeed in office, Shinigami writes at Swing State Project. Despite the small number of ...
Big-Government Conservative, After Helping Big-Government Conservatism Fail, Advocates Big-Government Conservatism
Hit & Run —
Bill Kristol, in today's New York Times: [C]onservatives should think twice before charging into battle against Obama under the banner of "small-government conservatism." It's a banner many Republicans and conservatives have rediscovered since the election and have been waving around energetically. Jeb Bush, now considering a Senate run in 2010, even went so far as to tell Politico last month, "There should not be such a thing as a big-government Republican." Really? Jeb Bush was a successful and popular ...
Re: All Democrats Now
The Corner on National Review Online —
... ] Michael, I took Bill Kristol to be making more of a tactical point: that conservatives need to make their case on the grounds of what they are for rather than what they are against, because the argument against small government in the abstract doesn t really appeal to enough voters. That s not to say that we should accept or encourage the growth of government, but that its size can t be the essence of our case to the public. Rather, the uses to which it is put and the abuses to which it gives rise should more commonly be what we argue about. He ...
alicublog — ... to Billy Kristol's otherwise useless column about the limits of small-government conservatism (which I have to assume presages a new starve-the-beast movement, since everyone knows Kristol is always ...
Obama’s Plan For America
Nice Deb —
... Seems like some pretty ambitious, big government goals have been put forth here, doesn’t it? I suppose we should all just go with the flow, as Bill Kristol recently wrote: ...
Robert L. Borosage: Post Partisan Progressives
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com —
... that "investment in key infrastructure is consistent with Reagan principles," and that investment in "renewable energy will be key in our future." William Kristol suggests "small government Republicans" are virtually extinct, and suggests that Republicans support a "huge public works stimulus plan," only insist on directing the dollars to the "underfunded defense procurement rather than to fanciful green technologies." (Now that's a winning agenda: apparently spending about as much as the rest of the world combined on our military isn't enough.) ...
The Top Dozen Insights of Conservatives, 2008
TPMCafe —
... will be to say that if only Republicans had stayed truer to the faith, especially on fiscal discipline, none of this would have happened. Earmarks unquestionably contributed to the culture of corruption that has so bedeviled Republicans in recent years. But fighting them became an overriding obsession of some conservatives and of McCain, as if opposing earmarks alone -- 1 percent of federal spending -- would constitute a winning economic agenda.
William Kristol, The Weekly Standard and The New York Times ...
Inauguration Day, 2009: A Day of Mourning
Antiwar.com Original —
... as their "devotion" to "military might." As the economic crisis deepens, military Keynesianism will bring the two parties together, as Flynn foresaw, because "militarism is the one great glamorous public-works project upon which a variety of elements in the community can be brought into agreement." The propaganda of fear will become an economic necessity:"Inevitably, having surrendered to militarism as an economic device, we will do what other countries have done: we will keep alive the fears of our people of the aggressive ambitions of other countries and we will ourselves ...
Putin to the West: Take Your Medicine
Antiwar.com Original —
... or where we spend the money, just as long as we "stimulate" the economy with massive injections of monetary steroids. So why not military spending lots more military spending? After all, this is a point both conservatives and liberal Keynesians can agree on, as Putin surely realizes. I suspect his call for disarmament will be largely ignored, along with his insight that demilitarization will "bring significant economic dividends." That a Russian leader is now telling Americans that their turn toward statism and militarism is harmful both to themselves and to the world is a ...
Putin to the West: Take Your Medicine
Antiwar.com Original —
... or where we spend the money, just as long as we "stimulate" the economy with massive injections of monetary steroids. So why not military spending lots more military spending? After all, this is a point both conservatives and liberal Keynesians can agree on, as Putin surely realizes. I suspect his call for disarmament will be largely ignored, along with his insight that demilitarization will "bring significant economic dividends." That a Russian leader is now telling Americans that their turn toward statism and militarism is harmful both to themselves and to the world is a ...
Obamageddon
Antiwar.com Original —
... that government spending is the only way to lift us out of an economic depression is true, then surely military expenditures are the quickest way to inject "life" into a failing system. This doesn’t work, economically, since the crisis is ...
Backdoor Escalation
Antiwar.com Original —
... on your side, however, is to pour money into the military : that, at least, will get the armaments industry humming and keep many exporters afloat while everyone else is sinking. It also helps sop up excess labor by ramping up military recruitment efforts, including financial incentives. This is the chief problem standing in the way of the administration, at this point: the sheer ...
Our Chief Industry: War
Antiwar.com Original —
... reaches new heights of anxiety, there is one way out: more spending on the military . Here is a measure the thoroughly neoconized Republicans can support wholeheartedly – especially if the money is being spent ...
Who Will Protest Obama’s War?
Antiwar.com Original —
... – against what Yglesias and his fellow Keynesians imagine will be the "benefits" of spending all that government moolah and doling it out to their political allies and corporate patrons? These soulless policy wonks may believe this kind of calculus has no moral import, but for the rest of the human race the profoundly immoral and frankly repulsive nature of this arithmetical exercise is readily apparent. Yglesias himself has criticized our policy in Afghanistan and is skeptical of plans to escalate the conflict, yet he unhesitatingly unpacks the doctrine of ...
