This piece is cross-posted at my new home, MinnPost.com
Who’s more liberal, Clinton or Obama? One quick way to rate the liberal/conservative-ness of members of Congress is to check their ratings with the American for Democratic Action, the long-standing liberal advocacy group and the American Conservative Union, which holds a similar place in the conservative world.
In […]

This is a tiny glimpse into the current state-of-the-art media campaign.
As the Mitt Romney campaign tries to slow down Mike Huckabee’s surge in Iowa, they have long since begun issuing harsh criticism’s of Huckabee’s past actions and statements. On Sunday morning, on “Meet the Press,” Romney called on Huckabee to apologize to Pres. Bush for […]

Venerable New York Times sport columnist Murray Chass reports that Twin owners Carl Pohlad (estimated net worth: $3.1 billion) is the richest of all baseball team owners. I knew, of course, that Pohlad (at right) was wealthy, but I didn’t know that he was three times richer than Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.
This stuff usually drives […]

According to a famous saying, usually attributed to Bismarck, you never really want to see how sausage or legislation is made.
This piece, from Time magazine, about federal farm subsidies is brilliant, brutally honest and features Minnesota’s own Collin Peterson, chairman of the House Ag Committee, in a not-so-heroic role (that’s Rep. Peterson at right).
The […]

The New York Times went deep on the tale of Rachel Paulose’s appointment and tenure as U.S attorney for Minnesota. Regular readers of Black Ink won’t find much here that they haven’t seen before. But it can’t be good for Paulose to find herself identified (and on page one of the Times no less) as […]

The unwelcome news of Susan Albright’s forced departure as editorial page editor of the Star Tribune prompted her former deputy, Jim Boyd to write a crisp, blunt piece for the Minnesota Monitor, where he works as a mentor and where most of my work is also cross-posted. The money section:
“The issue, however, goes beyond unfairness to an […]

Good Wednesday noon Fellow Seekers of Wisdom and Truth,
Paul Krugman, the economist and New York Times columnist, has just launched a new blog called “The Conscience of a Liberal,” which is also the name of Krugman’s forthcoming book, and was the title of Paul Wellstone’s last book.
Krugman decided to launch with this graphic…

… has put out a fact-check piece on Gen. Petraeus’s testimony.
p.s. They’re skeptical.

I’ve seen the op-ed version of Gen. David Petraeus’ report from Baghdad. There’s a link below. This is not a joke, but there is a surprise ending, unless you already know it. To me, it was a surprise when a friend referred me yesterday to the op-ed. Here are outtakes from the Petraeus piece:
“There are […]

Good Friday noon Fellow Seekers,
See if you can figure out why New Republic Senior Editor John Judis believes experiments conducted by three psychologists like the one described just below provide a key to Pres. Bush’s political success from 2001 to 2005. In one experiment, the psychologists:
“assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges […]

Marc Ash of the lefty aggregator site Truthout hurls himself against the one thing almost everyone thinks they know about Karl Rove, that he was a political genius. His philippic is one-sided, heartfelt and admirably brief. Why can’t I write short like that? Okay, I just did.

“The internet news audience – roughly a quarter of all Americans – tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole. People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance. As many […]