Week of December 1, 2008

As you can see, I did an interview with famed, notorious, outrageous GOP political operative Roger Stone yesterday. We posted a preview of the interview today. But my favorite moment came when he was explaining his lack of support for President Bush and particularly the element of that non-support tied to Bush's terrible record on civil liberties. So at one point he's listing through the fact that various previous Republican president's had ever done such things. And as he's running through the list of past GOPers who didn't do wiretapping, he gets to Nixon, cracks a hint of a smile and says that"Nixon didn't do it governmentally," i.e., Nixon may have done it as a private criminal enterprise directed from the White House. But he didn't do it as a matter of governmental policy.

I'm not sure that's actually even true. But this fine-grained distinction was the moment of the interview I enjoyed most.

At a time of great crisis with mortgage foreclosures and autos, [Obama] says we only have one president at a time. I'm afraid that overstates the number of presidents we have. He's got to remedy that situation.

As someone who was skeptical of Obama’s moderate posturing during the campaign, I have to admit that I am gobsmacked by these appointments , most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain.

Well, you hear a lot of loose talk, but let me just ... say, as a scholar of the Great Depression -- and I've written books about the Depression and been very interested in this since I was in graduate school, there's no comparison