Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Not in Florida, at least: Despite dumping record-breaking dollars into their maverick political campaigns, self-financed candidates Rick Scott and Jeff Greene trail their opponents heading into Tuesday's primary, according to a new Mason-Dixon poll released late Saturday. Republican Attorney General Bill McCollum now leads Scott 45-36 percent in the survey of likely Republican voters, reversing …
Continue reading "Self-Financing Isn't the Whole Deal In Elections"
I was encouraged to see the Anglican Curmudgeon's piece Keeping Religion out of Politics, and Vice Versa. You can see my immediate comments on that post, but it's heartening to finally see some movement on the "conservative" side of the debate over same sex civil marriage towards getting ride of civil marriage altogether. Earlier this …
Irrespective of what Obama's porte-parole might say: White House spokesman Bill Burton said most Americans care more about the economy and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and "they are not reading a lot of news about what religion the president is." He commented on Air Force One as Obama headed for a vacation in Massachusetts …
Continue reading "There is Nothing Obvious About Barack Obama. And That Includes His Religion."
"The New Foundation" business didn't work for either Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter: Obama’s contribution was to be the New Foundation. “We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity–a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest,” he declared. Obama would repeat …
Continue reading "New Foundations (Obama's and Otherwise) Are Expensive"
As the Anglican Curmudgeon points out: In the California case in Judge Walker's court, the principal defendants were Governor Schwarzenegger and the Attorney General, Jerry Brown. Both chose not to defend the constitutionality of the amendment, which had passed by a significant majority at the polls. (In doing so, they placed their personal views above …
Continue reading "The Standing Issue in the Proposition 8 Case Isn't a Done Deal"
When Michael Moore is doing the complaining: But if they're not laying people off yet, they're also not hiring. During the first half of 2010, GM made $2.2 billion in profit, yet according to The Wall Street Journal, they've only added 2,000 jobs in all of North America, taking their workforce from 113,000 to 115,000. …
But only President Obama's left-wing critics: 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,” …
Continue reading "Robert Gibbs Evidently Isn't Worried About the Right Wingers Taking Drugs"
There's been a great deal of press about the campaign by certain Republican leaders to either amend or redefine the Fourteenth Amendment to exclude the children of illegal immigrants from American citizenship. I don't think it's a winning issue politically, but on a more profound level it's based on the a priori assumption that American …
Continue reading "Why the Republicans' "Fourteenth Amendment" Campaign is a Waste of Time"
When the Telegraph's Nile Gardiner says that "the British press...has a far less deferential approach towards the White House," he's not just kidding: What the great French historian Alexis de Tocqueville would make of today’s Obama administration were he alive today is anyone’s guess. But I would wager that the author of L’Ancien Régime and …
Continue reading "The Ultimate Insult: Comparing the Obama Administration to France's Ancien Régime"
Like many other things in public education, the New York state Regents' exams for its high school students aren't working as planned: The big story in New York education circles is the further confirmation of what longtime critics have alleged: that the feel-good story of rising student test scores over the last several years is …
Continue reading "To Help the Regents' Exam, Maybe They Should Bring Back the Regents' Prayer"
Positive Infinity 