Free Republic

On a single day in December 2015, Gary Jones, who resigned last month as president of the United Automobile Workers, spent more than $13,000 of the union’s money at a cigar store in Arizona. His purchases included a dozen $268 boxes of Ashton Double Magnums and a dozen boxes of Ashton Monarchs at $274.50 each. “Hi Gary, Thank you & Happy New Year,” read a handwritten note from the store. The purchases, documented by a federal complaint filed against a union leader in September, were part of more than $60,000 in cigars and cigar paraphernalia that Mr. Jones and other...

Now it can be told. Emphasis on “now”:Precisely. ObamaCare will stumble along for the rest of the year, with a new wave of public irritation to come once small businesses start dumping employees onto the exchanges en masse, but the prospects for repeal will remain dim even if the GOP takes back the Senate. The numbers in Congress just aren’t there to beat an Obama veto, and by 2017 so many millions will have been assimilated into the program that some critical mass of GOP centrists will end up taking a “mend it, don’t end it” approach. Only an adverse-selection...

Few things are more difficult in politics than confronting failure and learning from it. It is especially difficult when a leader you have championed, and in whom you have placed your highest hopes, turns out to be less than he seemed. Such is the dilemma facing liberals in the age of Obama. Barack Obama entered the presidency with his sights and standards very high, and many liberals believed he could be the transformative figure they had been awaiting for generations. But by now it is clear that, by any reasonable measure (including those set out by Obama himself at the...

The following 65 names are confirmed members of the now-defunct JournoList listserv. 1. Ezra Klein 2. Dave Weigel 3. Matthew Yglesias 4. David Dayen 5. Spencer Ackerman 6. Jeffrey Toobin 7. Eric Alterman 8. Paul Krugman 9. John Judis 10. Eve Fairbanks 11. Mike Allen 12. Ben Smith 13. Lisa Lerer 14. Joe Klein 15. Brad DeLong 16. Chris Hayes 17. Matt Duss 18. Jonathan Chait 19. Jesse Singal 20. Michael Cohen 21. Isaac Chotiner 22. Katha Pollitt 23. Alyssa Rosenberg 24. Rick Perlstein 25. Alex Rossmiller 26. Ed Kilgore 27. Walter Shapiro 28. Noam Scheiber 29. Michael Tomasky 30....

<p>President Obama? Not so fast, says The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber. John McCain doesn’t need a “catastrophic external event” to defeat Obama on Election Day, Scheiber says.</p> <p>“I happen to think Obama’s chances of winning are upward of 80 percent,” he writes at The Plank, his magazine’s political blog. He later adds, “But, truth be told, I can imagine a losing scenario that doesn’t involve outside events. It goes something like this: Obama wins all the Kerry states plus Iowa and New Mexico, giving him 264 electoral votes, then narrowly loses the rest of the red states where he’s currently competitive.”</p>

When Democrats contemplate the apocalypse these days, they have visions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugging it out à la Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter at the 1980 convention. The campaign's current trajectory is, in fact, alarmingly similar to the one that produced that disastrous affair. Back then, Carter had built up a delegate lead with early wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, and several Southern states. But, as the primary season dragged on, Kennedy began pocketing big states and gaining momentum. Once all the voting ended and Kennedy came up short, he eyed the New York convention as a...

The New Republic's Noam Scheiber argues that the Republican Party is less likely to benefit from the wave of "democratization" going on in the Middle East than the Democratic Party: "[I]n the long-term, I think Bush's democratization initiatives clearly benefit Democrats, assuming they don't find a way to screw it up. Here's why: The Republican base consists primarily of Southern and lower-midwestern isolationist/realist types, Western libertarians, conservative evangelicals, and K-Street taxcutters. (As far as I can tell, no one ever lost a Republican primary by failing to win the neocon vote.) None of these groups gets particularly excited about democratizing...