Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Rebecca Solnit at The Nation may have unwittingly stumbled upon something in her fifth anniversary article on Katrina: Those in power, on the other hand, often run amok. They did in San Francisco in 1906, when an obsessive fear that private property would be misappropriated led to the mayor's shoot-to-kill proclamation; a massive military and …
Continue reading "Élite Panic: A Lesson From Katrina, A Lesson for Today"
It's amazing what happens when the shoe is on the other foot: Pentagon lawyers believe that online whistleblower group WikiLeaks acted illegally in disclosing thousands of classified Afghanistan war reports and other material, and federal prosecutors are exploring possible criminal charges, officials familiar with the matter said. A joint investigation by the Army and the …
Continue reading "Obama Becomes Nixon: Going After WikiLeaks"
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"
Positive Infinity 