US
03/16/08 -
RBC - Yes, and fire burns. Obama is then doomed, as will.i.am is no brow, at best. (I wonder if "I got it from my mama" is meant for Obama, as well.) Where to go for highbrow campaign music? Anna Netrebko didn’t make a video for Medvedev, and I doubt that Esa Peka Salonen is composing a symphony for…whoever runs Finland (but Lordi might). I won’t argue that they’re highbrow, but Georgia’s...
03/16/08 -
Angry Bear - I know, start firing away about the need to not tie the bosses hands so tight, free markets in labor...etc, etc, etc. Personally, I see this as a step toward moving labor from an identity of “commodity”. Besides, the labor department has been against labor for about 8 years now....
03/16/08 -
will wilkinson - I think we can all grasp that it possible to reject some moral distinctions and accept others. In this case, it would seem that Ross understands the answer perfectly well. Children are not consenting adults. So there you have it....
03/14/08 -
concurring opinions - I think the court got this one right. There needs to be a case-by-case analysis if there is a specific and immediate government interest in conducting the drug search before invading public employees' Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure....
03/14/08 -
Max Sawicky - Senator Barack Obama has become renowned for his eloquence, and it’s almost unfair. He gets accused of being all sizzle and no steak. I’d even say there is a racial subtext to the criticism — that he is more preacher than statesman....
03/14/08 -
African Conflict - On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on Evaluating US Policy Options on the Horn of Africa. Two panels testified; the first consisting of government officials, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Jendayi Frazier, assistant administrator for Africa at USAID, Katherine Almquist, and deputy assistant secretary of defense for African Affairs, Theresa Whalen....
03/13/08 -
OMB Watch - erday evening, EPA announced its long-awaited decision on the national standard for ozone, a.k.a. smog. As expected, EPA chose to tighten the primary standard to 0.075 parts per million (ppm) from its current level of 0.084 ppm. The secondary standard for ozone will remain identical to the primary standard....
03/13/08 -
Election Geek - Race is now a major part of the Democratic nomination fight and yesterday saw the resignation of Clinton advisor Geraldine Ferraro after a racially insensitive remark. Last night Hillary Clinton herself apologizing to black voters for other statements made by her husband which were seen in the black community as racist....
03/13/08 -
Donklephant - A new Pew Research Poll shows 53% of Americans believe we will succeed in Iraq. That’s the highest percentage since the summer or 2006 and 11 points higher than last September. The percentage of people believing the war is going “very well” or “fairly well” has also jumped, from 30% six months ago to 48% now. ...
03/13/08 -
Jack and Jill Politics - Michael Chabon proved that a brilliant literary mind doesn't necessarily lend itself to politics, mostly because politics deals poorly with all but the most simple abstractions. The same can be said of Orlando Patterson's critique of the 3 A.M. ad, which most political observers saw as Patterson accusing the Clintons of being explicitly racist towards Obama....
03/13/08 -
MojoBlog - On Tuesday, Indiana's 7th Congressional District elected 33-year-old Andre Carson to the House of Representatives in a special election. Carson, a Muslim and a former cop, replaces his late grandmother, Julia Carson, the first African-American and the first woman to represent Indianapolis in Congress. Julia died in December of last year....
03/12/08 -
Douglas Farah - The relatives of five American missionaries who were abducted and murdered by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have filed suit against Chiquita Brands International Inc., accusing the banana company of secretly financing and arming the rebel (and terrorist) group. ...
03/12/08 -
Joel C. Rosenberg - The head of U.S. Central Command -- responsible for all American military operations in the Middle East -- resigned Tuesday over a firestorm that has erupted over his continuing criticisms of the Bush administration's tough line against Iran. Navy Admiral William J. "Fox" Fallon has been an outspoken critic of even the possibility that the administration might need to go to war to prevent Iran from...
03/12/08 -
Covering Florida - The latest in a long line of substances that can make a person feel “otherwordly” is a type of Salvia the Associated Press says “could be the new marijuana.” Legislatures in a number of states, including Florida, are considering bills that would make possession of Salvia Divinorum a felony. Reportedly, the high that comes from smoking this type of Salvia resembles the high those who use LSD...
03/12/08 -
Larry James' Urban Daily - Sitting in federal immigration court here in Dallas provides insights into the current national struggle for reform, as well as the heritage we enjoy as a people. While often enraged by the manner in which our current policy is working against so many great people who desire to be part of our national life, I am moved by the personal stories that unfold in the courtroom....
03/12/08 -
Vision & Values - Senator Barack Obama, the eminently likable possible Democratic nominee for president, has sponsored a “Global Poverty Act” that would require the United States to increase foreign aid by approximately $65 billion per year. If the Senate passes this bill, it will be Mr. Obama’s first significant legislative accomplishment in Washington (he has only been a senator since January 2005). As such,...
03/12/08 -
Informed Comment - Sunni Arab Iraqi guerrillas launched a four-pronged attack on their enemies on Monday. They killed eight US troops in two separate bombings, one in the al-Mansur district of Baghdad and one in the small town of Baladruz east of the capital in Diyala Province....
03/11/08 -
Poligazette - University of Minnesota Professor Ronald Krebs notes the relative lack of participation by Iraq war veterans in the ongoing debate over the war, especially on the anti-war side. In contrast to the Vietnam era when future Senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s “Vietnam Veterans Against the War” group boasted 30,000 members and was the subject of major Congressional hearings,...
03/11/08 -
NewsBusters - Remember when more than 400 scientists were revealed as "skeptical" about global warming hype? The New York Times's Andrew Revkin blogged about it, saying the "perennial tug of war" was actually "a distraction from fundamentals that are clearly established." Of course, 44 Southern Baptists who buy into the green agenda received a respectful print story in the March 10 Times, widely quoting the...
03/11/08 -
The Economic Populist - With the Manufacturing sector in crisis as the US enters a new recession, you may find of interest my attached analysis of US/Mexico Manufacturing and other goods trade for the three years before NAFTA compared with the most recent three years....
03/10/08 -
Brad Plumer - The moral questions surrounding prostitution are thorny (is it ever freely chosen? is it always coercive?), so let's set that aside and just note that criminalization creates a host of practical problems—and usually makes the sex trade more dangerous. One recent study by Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh found that many police officers rape prostitutes on a fairly regular basis, holding the threat...
03/10/08 -
ezra klein - I think I have the only blog on the internets where health policy posts get more comments than Iraq and O'Hanlon bashing. Y'all are weird. But I'm going to indulge you. I went to a presentation this morning by Alan Enthoven, the godfather of managed competition, and came away with some of the slides from his Powerpoint. One section focused on single payer. ...
03/10/08 -
Poligazette - It seems that some of those responsible for the (run-up to the) war in Iraq, and the way this war was handled in its early stages (the occupation, etc.) are trying to distance themselves from it. In this particular instance, it’s Dough Feith who blames Colin Powell (of all people), the CIA “retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up...
03/10/08 -
Strategy Page - The stress of repeated trips to combat zones like Iraq and Afghanistan is having an effect on American troops, as mental health professionals expected. Currently, for every soldier killed in combat, at least one is sent back to the United States because of severe PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), and several others are treated in the combat zone for less severe cases. During World War II, PTSD...
03/09/08 -
Pharmalot - To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe. But the presence of so many prescription drugs - and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen - in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of...
03/09/08 -
firedoglake - Consider the possibilities. Should a superdelegate support the person who carried their district? Maybe the candidate who won the majority of their state's pledged delegation, or whoever got the most popular votes in that state. Those who think in national terms might look to the national leader in pledged delegates, or perhaps the national popular vote leader. Maybe they'll look to the candidate...
03/09/08 -
Obsidian Wings - So: Clinton didn't mention that she advocated military intervention in Rwanda in her memoirs. Neither did Madeleine Albright. Neither, as far as I can tell, did anyone else. Military intervention was not considered as an option, "never even debated", which means that any advocacy she did engage in must have been pretty ineffective....
03/07/08 -
Arab Writers Group Syndicate - When controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan endorsed Barack Obama in a three-hour speech, the outcry demanding that Obama denounce Farrakhan was deafening. And the criticism of the widerspread racism against Muslims, Blacks, Arabs and “others” only became important as a way for mainstream media and leaders to defend themselves against the truth that they are more racist and bigoted...
03/07/08 -
Online Journal - An Army specialist who served two tours of duty in Iraq sued Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his supervising officer Wednesday for allegedly trying to force him to embrace fundamentalist Christianity and then retaliating against him when he refused. Plaintiffs Jeremy Hall, who was stationed at Combat Operations Base Speicher, Iraq, and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) filed the...
03/07/08 -
Prepare Yourselves for a Settlement - Samantha Power earned a degree from Yale. Then, she snagged her J.D. from Harvard Law School. She spent several years as an "on the spot" journalist, reporting from some of the world's most dangerous places about issues relating to genocide, human rights and the conduct of foreign policy....
03/06/08 -
Smart Borders - Native Americans surely define Americans differently. Indigenous people must look at this country as a nation of upstart immigrants. Their immigration over the Atlantic or the Bering Land Bridge happened so long ago that “Native” has become a part of their name. Recent immigration of the past 300-400 years has irrevocably changed their lands, their rituals, their ceremonies, and their daily...
03/06/08 -
The Russell Record - No responsibility has yet been claimed for this morning's IED explosion at the Times Square recruiting station. I rode past the site on my bus this morning, and things seemed quiet, if eerie. As I looked out the window, I could see the police cars surrounding the building, and I thought back to when I was a captain, about eight years ago. I was present at the dedication ceremony for the "new"...
03/06/08 -
Cogitamus - Republican presidential nominee John McCain has a nasty little religion problem about which the traditional media aren't saying an awful lot. Specifically, McCain has embraced the endorsement of Texas über-televangelist and pastor John Hagee. Trouble is, Hagee is a known bigot as well as a frighteningly extreme character who has gone on record and video--and countless times at that--spewing...
03/05/08 -
Ed Angleton Rants - There have been many complaints of late regarding Libertarians “stealing” elections from Republican candidates. That we agree in principle about 80% so we shouldn’t be fielding candidates. It has even been suggested that the Libertarian Party should simply fade away and its members and activists return to the parties from whence they came and work within them to effect change....
03/05/08 -
Health Beat - We all know that guns can be hazardous to our health. The number of children killed by guns in the United States each year is roughly three times greater than the number of servicemen and women killed annually in Iraq and Afghanistan. “In fact, more children -- children-- have been killed by guns in the past 25 years than the total number of American fatalities in all wars of the past five...
03/05/08 -
Democrats.com - Brattleboro, Vt., voted today in support of a measure calling on the town's police force to arrest and indict Bush and Cheney. The vote was 2012-1795. Marlboro, Vt., passed a similar measure at its town meeting today at which the vote to indict Bush and Cheney was 43-25-3. That's 43 in favor and 3 abstaining. Thus Marlboro beat Brattleboro to it by a few hours. In Brattleboro, the indictment...
03/04/08 -
This Ain't Livin' - Yesterday morning, I woke up and noticed several articles on an E.L.F. action undertaken near Seattle. Activists set fire to several “green” homes in a housing division, leaving derisive notes and a wake of substantial damage. You may not agree with E.L.F.’s tactics, but I do think that they chose a brilliant target, and I hope that the event stimulates some discussion. Alas, much of the...
03/04/08 -
The farm Gate - The average price of wheat in the current marketing year will take a nearly 50% jump from the prior all time high of $4.55. USDA’s projected range for all wheat in the marketing year that ends in May will be $6.45 to $6.85 per bushel. Over the past 30 years wheat has only averaged $3.33 per bushel. So what has suddenly overtaken the wheat market, even pushing futures for certain varieties above...
03/04/08 -
Blackline - In between cooking beats in his musical laboratory and sewing fabrics together for his clothing company, hip-hop music mogul Russel Simmons once in a while dips his fingers into the political arena, giving his opinions from the hip-hop community’s point of view. This time, instead of a point of view, he gave an endorsement-for Obama. Rap’s biggest defender and advocate said Sunday that he is...
03/03/08 -
feministe - I do have sympathy of the argument that people shouldn’t be outed for making anonymous comments on the internet. And of course I believe that free speech rights apply anonymously online as strongly as they apply in “real” life. Identifying anonymous internet commenters can have a real chilling effect, and I don’t think that people deserve to be outed simply for saying things that others...
03/03/08 -
Reflective Pundit - The question here is not how a seemingly educated woman can come up with such idiocy in the 21st century. Obviously, there are always some particularly dumb outliers. The real question is, then, why the editors of the Washington Post decided to publish such piece of rubbish and promote it prominently on their web site....
03/03/08 -
Cato at liberty - FISA has been repeatedly amended to further reduce judicial oversight of eavesdropping, most importantly with the Patriot Act in October 2001. The law on the books in early 2006 was even more permissive than the legislation Safire is blasted as an assault on civil liberties. Yet the Bush administration has been so successful at shifting the terms of the debate that even a lot of self-described civil...
03/02/08 -
angry bear - I was looking at some data yesterday and encountered a big surprise. I suppose like almost everyone I was under the impression that health care spending was growing much faster then the economy and absorbing an ever growing share of resources. This theme dominates much discussion of health care issues, particularly projections of the federal budget. So I was very surprised to look at the data and...
03/02/08 -
julian sanchez - I've complained before about the tendency, which I think is at least somewhat more pronounced (or at any rate, more overt) on the left to evaluate legal decisions by asking whether we like the group that benefits from a ruling in a particular case. That said, I'm not sure it's totally irrelevant to ask whether the justices are able to do this kind of perspective-taking. A lot of important decisions...
03/02/08 -
American Scene - It doesn’t seem very likely to me that it matters in the sense of genuinely being a major policy difference. In other words: I’m skeptical of the Clinton campaign talking point that this somehow proves that Obama is not really committed to major health-care reform and effective universal access to health care. Nor do I think Obama would have any difficulty changing his mind if and when he’s...
02/29/08 -
blackvoices - About a year and a few months ago, I visited a somber site in South Jamaica, Queens, right off Sutphin Blvd., about 200 yards from where the E, J, and Z subway lines meet and where you can get the AirTrain to Kennedy International Airport. It was a cold night on that lonely corner of Liverpool and 94th Ave., and I was the last one there, having covered a protest demonstration that wound through...
02/29/08 -
ms lady deborah - Voters in almost all the districts represented by the CBC have chosen Obama, helping him win more delegates than Clinton. But only some delegates vote based on the results of primaries. A fifth of the delegates that will vote at the convention -- and decide the nomination -- are "superdelegates" that can technically vote however they like, regardless of what the voters say. These super-delegates...
02/29/08 -
Jawa Report - This week a trusted contact revealed to me that he was hearing from Pakistan that Gadahn was most likely dead. I asked him if his sources weren't the same as NBC? No, he replied, he had a different source of information. Then why hasn't the U.S. confirmed Gadahn's demise? Too many body parts, he said. Very little left of any one on the ground. Could take some time, or we may never have...
02/28/08 -
Jeff Jarvis - Start here: Why should my son or daughter have to pick a single college and with it only the teachers and courses offered there? Online, they should be able to take most any course anywhere. Indeed, schools from MIT to Stanford are now offering their curricula the internet. Of course, these come without the benefit of the instructors’ attention — and without tuition — but it’s easy to add...
02/28/08 -
Tom Blumer - Though they have their disagreements, Democratic presidential contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who faced off in Cleveland, Ohio, Tuesday evening, clearly agree on one supposedly “obvious” thing — that manufacturing in the United States is in decline. Mr. Obama’s economic platform calls for a “comprehensive energy independence and climate change plan [that] will invest in...
02/28/08 -
CATO Blog - The principal reason to question democracy is to undercut the facile claim that majoritarian rule is the only or most legitimate form of rule. To the contrary, as I noted in my original post, curbing abuses of power by majority factions was a very serious problem that led to the replacement of the Articles of Confederation by the Constitution. The Founders’ attempted solution was a new form of...
02/28/08 -
neoneocon - Allison Kaplan Summer translates an Obama interview with the Israeli news source Ynet that is due to appear on Friday. Asked how he would deal with the threat of Iran and whether he would support military action if diplomacy fails, this was Obama’s answer: I don’t believe that diplomacy alone will stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. I believe that we will require our national strength...
02/27/08 -
bitch phd - Stay classy, Barack. That's some good shit. He's absolutely right, too. She doesn't have to "prove herself." He thinks he's better, and that's why he's running, but he doesn't think she would be bad. For all of the hooting and hollering about how Obama is full of empty rhetoric, he's really a plain-speaking guy a lot of the time. This honesty is refreshing. "She's good, but I'd be better."...
02/27/08 -
gay patriot - Until recently, among the issues which formed the core of modern American conservatism, as articulated by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and their ideoligical heirs, I found myself most at odds with my philosophical confrères on the issue of guns. Here, it didn’t seem that freedom would work. I used to believe that the proliferation of guns fostered increased violence in our society. But,...
02/27/08 -
world changing - Nowhere is this more true than in the U.S., where a study done last year by the Urban Land Institute, Infrastructure 2007: A Global Perspective, found that we'd have to spend $1.6 trillion dollars to bring our infrastructure up to date. Now you don't have to agree with ULI's ideas about what up to date means (they're long on totally discredited ideas like new freeway construction and automotive...
02/26/08 -
Annie Jacobsen - In the fall of last year, a man in a dark suit walked into a UPS Store in Las Vegas, Nevada, flashed a badge, identified himself to the store manager as a Special Agent H. Charles Maurer of the Department of Homeland Security and demanded to see private files on an individual who keeps a postal box there. Familiar with state law, the store manager, M. E. Burks, told the man that he’d have to...
02/26/08 -
Agoraphilia - Nevertheless, the number of delegates is approximately proportionate to the number of electors, at least once you ignore delegates from territories (which get no electors but which have delegates in the Democratic Convention). My quick calculations for the D’s (I was too lazy to do it for the R’s) showed that the percentage of delegates and the percentage of electors from a state never differed...
02/26/08 -
the monkey cage - The basic idea underlying the study is that how an organization structures the information that it possesses is likely to affect what decision makers learn from this information. Lacking an ability to create experimental organizations that structure information in different ways, the researchers turned to the library catalogue — which, after all, is a hierarchical organizer of knowledge — as a...
02/26/08 -
becker-posner - Senator Grassley of Iowa has expressed concern recently about the conjunction of huge increases in the size of the endowments of many universities (and colleges--for the sake of brevity, I shall use "universities" to denote colleges as well) with continued increases in tuition. Both types of increase have far exceeded the rate of inflation in recent years. The senator urges that investment income...
02/26/08 -
tigerhawk - Asia Times has an interesting opinion piece about Barack Obama, arguing that anti-Americanism runs deeply in his family, from his departed mother to his opinionated wife. I quite honestly do not know what to make of the argument, other than that it is fairly free of actual evidence and long on psychoanalysis. There is this, though: Barack Obama has not really been tested on the question, because...
02/26/08 -
motherjones - That's the kind of thing our hard-nosed superiors used to say to us when we bitched about how duty interfered with our lives (took me twice as long to get a BA, what with all the traveling). Some things cross a line though: military motherhood in a time of war without end might just be one of them. It was one thing, having to put my BA (and MA) on hold. I once had eight days to pack up my entire...
02/24/08 -
rightwing nuthouse - I love Sunday newspapers. There always seem to be columns and stories that sum up the past week’s news on a given subject and try to glean some essential truth that a single day’s coverage failed to do. This Sunday, when it comes to Hillary Clinton and the state of her campaign, there are a lot of these summary pieces but there doesn’t seem to be a consensus. Across the country, pundits...
02/24/08 -
Marginal Revolution - It was reading about the new $2500 car, from India, that got me worried. Let's say the new technology is more carbon-friendly than what we do now, but still generates some carbon. (That sounds reasonable, no?) The new energy technology is really cheap, so lots more people -- most of all in China and India and Africa -- enter carbon-using sectors of the economy. Even if the new technology is...
02/24/08 -
Jeff Jarvis - The only thing more shocking that the New York Times printing salacious innuendo about a presidential candidate is its editor not understanding why this caused controversy. I’m not sure whether he’s isolated or clueless or issuing cynical spin. I was gobsmacked reading the story when it came out. I didn’t blog on it because Jay Rosen did a great job succinctly dissecting its issues and...
02/22/08 -
Obsidian Wings - On the telecom front, the most excellent Ed Markey (future Senator, I hope, when Kennedy retires) recently introduced a new net neutrality bill. (Markey is the Chair of the House Telecom Subcommittee and Dingell generally outsources that stuff to him). At first glance, the bill seems timid – it’s simply codifies a policy statement that the Internet should be open without actually requiring net...
02/22/08 -
enterprisere silience blog - For decades foreign students have flocked to the United States to take advantage of its system of higher education. This was good for the students, the universities they attended, and, often, for the United States as well since many of the best and brightest students stayed in America. Since 9/11, it has been more difficult for foreign students to get student visas and they have begun looking...
02/22/08 -
Dr. Helen Smith - irst, let’s change this question from how the collective, “all men”— to the individual—you—can learn to handle negative stereotypes of men in the culture. It really does sound tiring to think that one has to fight a battle just for being male in our society. Having dealt with a lifetime of putdowns for your male gender from one of the most important persons in your life—your mother—it...
02/21/08 -
psyblog - Criminal justice systems around the world have treated human memory with undeserved reverence for a long time. Dubious eyewitness testimony has frequently secured convictions for the most serious of crimes. Even more incredibly for students of scientific psychology, repressed memories rising to the surface decades after the original event have been accepted by courts as the basis to lock a man away...
02/21/08 -
redstate - Everyone, with the possible exception of Mark Penn, must realize that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is hanging on the precipice. Her opponent Senator Barrack Obama has more money and a better organization; he has won more states and built more momentum – Tuesday's Wisconsin and Haiwii wins were his ninth and tenth in a row. Even her husband has admitted that she needs to win Ohio and...
02/21/08 -
whirledview - In the news media, at least, the caucus system seems to have acquired the warm fuzzy cherished status of folk tradition, which, of course, may enshrine customs and attitudes both worthy and unworthy. Many enthusiasts see caucuses as a welcome expression of pure democracy. Others view caucuses as the apotheosis of neighborliness and community. I’m all for democracy and friendliness. (Apple pie...
02/21/08 -
Jim Manzi - My reactions to Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous book Nickel and Dimed, in which she purposely lives on low-income jobs for a couple of years, weren’t very lofty. First, I’ve had some pretty unpleasant jobs in my life, so I felt simultaneously bad for people who had these jobs, and glad that I didn’t. Second, I was confident that in that situation, I would find a way to get out of it over time....
02/21/08 -
feministe - And this is another “thank feminism” moment. The idea that boys just want sex (and girls don’t) is at its heart conservative and essentialist — and it’s a stereotype that lays the groundwork for requirements of “femininity” that inevitably involve refusing sex until a big fat diamond enters the picture, and bartering virginity for financial and social security. It’s not feminists...
02/21/08 -
Scotus Blog - Dividing 7-2, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that states, under their own laws or constitutions, may give state prisoners the retroactive benefit of Supreme Court criminal law decisions, even if the Court itself has ruled they are not retroactive under federal law. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority in Danforth v. Minnesota (06-8273). Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., dissented,...
02/20/08 -
The Oil Drum - At one time I was really worried about Global Warming. And at the risk of starting a Global Warming debate here (one that I don't wish to participate in), my position is that the scientific consensus backs the hypothesis that human activity is contributing to Global Warming. I am not an atmospheric scientist, so in this case I rely on the scientific consensus of the experts. This is the same standard...
02/20/08 -
mesh - I will not take time here to relate or summarize his narrative. I want only to note that, of all the many reviews and discussions about this book and its precursor essay and “working paper,” Rabinovich’s is the only one to have taken the book’s argument to its logical apex, to wit: If, as Mearsheimer and Walt argue, the real variance in U.S. Middle East policy is explained by U.S. domestic...
02/20/08 -
Pandagon - If you want to gauge how much a social problem is determined by society to be a matter of individual morality more than a collective problem that can only be addressed by a collective solution, you could do worse than to ask, “Are individual women considered the gatekeepers/middle class white women the moral exemplars on this issue?” Rising obesity and nutrition-related health issues? If we...
02/19/08 -
The Moderate Voice - Were Americans individually and the nation generally better off in 1968 than in 2008? Thus framed, the answer to that question is a big fat “yes,” and so the answer to my initial question is that the changes of 2008 — at the very least the much anticipated end of the Age of Bush — may indeed be more important....
02/19/08 -
wizbang blog - With yet another mass shooting in a "gun-free zone," I find myself thinking a great deal about that concept. The first idea is one that is bouncing around the blogosphere -- the notion that the powers that be that designate such places ought to be held legally liable for the carnage that erupts in them. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that they are making a promise -- possibly a legally binding...
02/19/08 -
mises blog - Americans have given up celebrating George Washington's birthday in exchange for a 3-day weekend. The price includes overlooking the wisdom he has to offer us. That is particularly unfortunate at a time of intense political partisanship, illustrated by the Presidential campaigns, because he had plenty to say about such factionalism. The danger of factions to American liberty was a major part of his...
02/18/08 -
Pharmalot - Like many attorneys who think they have ‘the big case,’ Steven Cohen took a high-stakes gamble after meeting H. Dean Steinke, a Merck district sales manager in Michigan, who suspected that marketing practices aimed at docs were illegal kickbacks for two of the drugmaker’s most popular meds Vioxx and Zocor. Steinke’s prior complaints to his supervisor had fallen on deaf ears. And so the Merck...
02/18/08 -
poligazette - Short on funds and good press for a time, John McCain is proving experience means something in the 2008 campaign. One of the biggest concerns going into the general election for Republicans has to be the massive discrepancy between the amount of money raised by Democratic candidates in the primaries - especially Barack Obama - and the amounts raised by the GOP....
02/15/08 -
Bob Owens - Fresh off of impressive wins in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, Illinois Senator Barack Obama seems poised to ride his campaign mantra of “change” to the Democratic presidential nomination, with a very real possibility of becoming America’s first black president. His rock star — excuse me, “Barack star” — hype aside, however, he is running a campaign on ideas and...
02/15/08 -
Secrecy Blog - Public access to the Reimer Digital Library, which is the largest online collection of U.S. Army doctrinal publications, has been blocked by the Army, which last week moved the collection behind a password-protected firewall. But today the Federation of American Scientists filed a Freedom of Information Act request (pdf) asking the Army to provide a copy of the entire unclassified Library so that...
02/15/08 -
Pandagon - It pops up in comments here and at RH Reality Check all the time. It’s always a variation of: “Why do you use the term ‘anti-choice’? They want to be called ‘pro-life’! It’s only civil to act like you think they’re just in this because they want to save lives! Whine, whine, concern troll, whine.” It’s a variation on the standard right wing concern troll routine, which is to...
02/15/08 -
The Oil Drum - Government policies often generate unintended consequences. This has turned out to be the case with the aggressive biofuel policies pursued over recent years by the European Union and the United States. While the EU was developing action plans and setting targets to promote biofuels, many states in the U.S. - especially those with high levels of corn (maize) production - were enforcing mandates to...
02/15/08 -
ezra klein - How did John McCain become a maverick? After all, he's not nearly the most heterodox Senator in his caucus. He votes with his party 84 percent of the time and, according to the broadly respected Poole-Rosenthal Index, was the eighth most conservative Senator in the 110th Congress. There are plenty of actual centrists and moderates who hang out in the middle far more often tham McCain does. What...
02/15/08 -
Cobb - We don't often think of Barack Obama as a creation of the Democrat Machine, and it's really stunning to know that we haven't. But he is indeed the petard upon which Democrats have tried to hoist Republicans since his arrival on the scene. But where did he come from, really? The Democrats have given Obama an inch and he has taken a mile. With his recent four state sweep, the Clintons are really...
02/13/08 -
jay reding - Remember that analysis if Obama wins the primary. Obama’s appeal is with the new Democratic base—but the new Democratic base is frequently at odds with the old working-class Democratic base. If Obama wins, and it’s looking like he’s got the momentum now, the result could well be a Democratic Party that’s just as split as if Clinton wins. The new Democratic base of urban liberals and minority...
02/13/08 -
the monkey cage - These issues have, of course, taken on even greater resonance in the post-9-11 U.S., and it seems safe to anticipate further contributions along these lines from Gibson and others. One important question that will warrant attention is whether citizens of other nations, not just the U.S., are perceiving tighter restrictions on political self-expression. ...
02/13/08 -
ezra klein - Lets start from a basic proposition: In the current system, insurance companies add negative value, which is to say, they make health care worse, not better. Conservatives often complain that health insurance is not "insurance" in any real sense, it is not protection against unexpected costs, but insulation from largely predictable costs. We know we will need to purchase health care. We contract...
02/12/08 -
brendan nyhan - There's been some debate among pundits about where Barack Obama has been successful and why. To try to make some sense of what's going on, I decided to actually look at the data. (My pundit card will soon be revoked.) One issue is how to compare across states given the change in the number of candidates running over time. The method I used is to focus on how well Obama did relative to Hillary...
02/12/08 -
Counterterrorism Blog - Six plus years from the 9/11 attacks we now have senior counter-terrorism officials of the US Government finally recognizing, albeit somewhat indirectly, the Visa Waiver Program that was originally devised many years ago as a process to expedite international tourism for the travel industry is a genuine national security concern. Some others have been making this warning for quite a while, to include...
02/12/08 -
rightwing nuthouse - Apparently around 21% of people who don’t purchase health insurance are young, single, healthy workers who can afford individual premiums but refuse to cover themselves. This drives the price of health insurance up even more because it leaves older, less healthy people in the insurance pool who are more likely to need health care. So the thinking is if we get everyone covered under an insurance...
02/11/08 -
jeff frankels - I think the serious point is that conservatives like to think that they are keenly aware of the adverse effect of marginal tax rates on work incentives. Effective marginal tax rates on lower-income Americans trying to lift themselves out of poverty can be higher than on ultra-wealthy Americans. Yet the fixation of the Republican party from 2001 to 2007 was to make sure that the tax cuts went largely...
02/11/08 -
Brad Plumer - To nudge this all in a more serious direction, this follow-up Times story on the issues that arise when police rely too heavily on informants is great: "Petty crime is often tolerated in exchange for information. Detectives can be duped by an informant's agenda. While cases of corruption are rare, it is fairly common to have more 'give' in this delicate give-and-take." Ethan Brown runs down more...
02/11/08 -
Secrecy News - The next President of the United States could single-handedly do what years of advocacy, investigation, legislation and litigation have yet to fully accomplish, namely to uncover the concealed record of the Bush Administration’s two terms in office on everything from warrantless wiretapping to extraordinary rendition. In an essay published in the Nieman Watchdog today, I argue that the next...
02/10/08 -
michael yon - The biggest and most expensive dream of these new GI Bill scholars is to build a special 90-apartment complex to accommodate the physical and educational needs of young military veterans who’ve come home severely wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan. SFCC President Dr. Jackson Sasser was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the assisted living facility for wounded veterans, and Dr. James Bernard...
02/10/08 -
Agoraphilia - Two sharply contrasting views dominate the debate over copyright policy. On the one hand—the left one, we might say—copyrights represent mere policy tools, no better in principle than any other legal mechanism and, indeed, more modern, rationally planned, and democratically chosen that anything the common law can offer. On the other hand—the right hand, we might say—copyrights represent...
02/10/08 -
Angry Bear - The second thing we do is to report the average annual GDP growth rates for three periods. Real GDP as of 1980QIV was 281.4% higher than it was as of 1950QIV, which means during the 30 year period that included the Eisenhower, Kennedy-Johnson, Nixon-Ford, and Carter years, average real GDP growth was 3.5%. Real GDP as of 1992QIV was 143.2% higher than it was as of 1980QIV, which means during the 12...
02/08/08 -
pruning shears - Those who continue to support the administration’s radical theory of executive power are properly described as authoritarians. Once upon a time they may have been conservative but I think it’s safe to say that circa February 2008 conservatism has been orphaned by its ostensible champions. As a philosophy for governance it has no meaningful support on the national stage and hasn’t for years....
02/08/08 -
rightwing nuthouse - But of all the adventures and misfortunes to befall Odysseus, the most compelling has to be his journey past the islands where the Sirens sang their songs to bewitch unwary sailors. It was said that mariners went mad upon hearing the achingly beautiful music so of course, Odysseus being Odysseus, he had to tempt fate by finding a way to hear the songs but not come under the Siren’s spell. Circe...
02/08/08 -
the monkey cage - What about the charge “that the superstores are impersonal and full of ignorant salespeople? After several months of sampling both chains and independents, I have come to the conclusion that the average chain salesperson is neither more nor less ignorant than his or her counterpart in the independents.” (Editorial comment: Here I have to enter a dissent. This has not been my experience.) ...
02/07/08 -
Bob Owens - That admonition by the instructor came across as a non sequitur following four hours of classroom discussion covering the intricacies of North Carolina laws concerning the justification for the use of deadly force, the quirks of statutory law and the fact that even if a perfectly justifiable situation that you still had a ten-percent chance of going to jail in a jury trial, plus more than an hour...
02/07/08 -
NeoNeoCon - The Democratic Party—to which, when I last checked, both Hillary and Obama belonged—has been dedicated for quite some time now to pulling out of Iraq, and pronto. Once they have a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President who won’t offer the impediment of a veto, do you really think they’ll change tunes and say “never mind?” In Vietnam the entire “second act” of the war—the...
02/07/08 -
Angrybear - I believe the national debt should be near zero most of the time. I think that the country should run a deficit only during recessions (someone has to prime the pump), times of extreme danger (e.g., a war against an opponent that is truly dangerous), or when there is an extraordinary investment opportunity e.g., the Louisiana Purchase). The rest of the time, the government should run a small surplus...
02/06/08 -
Consider the Evidence - Douglas Hibbs’ Bread and Peace model has been extremely effective at predicting the outcomes of U.S. presidential elections. On the vertical axis is the incumbent-party candidate’s share of the two-party vote. On the horizontal axis is the growth rate of per capita real disposable personal income (DPI) over the three and a half years leading up to the election. The growth rate is adjusted so...
02/06/08 -
bouphonia - What we never learn from these earnest people is why it's so important, in practical terms, to discern "any possible ideological nexus between Hitler’s Nazism and Islam," instead of recognizing the various strains of violent Islamic radicalism as distinct, unique movements with their own goals and tactics and ideological substrate. Supposedly, it pays to know one's enemies. But "fanatical simplifiers"...
02/06/08 -
Cato At Liberty - The trouble is, Romney never proposed any bailout for automakers, much less just those in one state (relatively little of U.S. auto production is in Michigan). That key accusation was lifted uncritically from a McCain radio ad. As FactCheck.org noted, “Romney actually proposed a $16 billion increase in federal research into ‘energy research, fuel technology, materials science, and automotive...
02/06/08 -
Obsidian Wings - Any way you slice it, tonight was a draw on the Dem side. I just saw Chuck Todd crunching delegate numbers on MSNBC. The gist was that, even under assumptions most generous to Clinton, they would still be virtually tied. Todd, however, thought Obama would ultimately win tonight by a few dozen delegates. But still, that’s essentially a tie. To me, though, a draw is actually a big victory for...
02/05/08 -
news corpse - Over the past year there has been a broad array of economic and political indicators that have been trending generally downward. In the U.S. jobs having been declining, as have exports. Construction has pulled back and property values have fallen. Wages are not keeping pace with inflation. At the same time, approval ratings for President Bush have cratered and Republican Party registration is down....
02/05/08 -
the monkey cage - The rules mean that if a district has four delegates, a candidate will only win more than half of the delegates if they top 62.5% of the vote. Because 62.5 is the midpoint between 50 and 75, a candidate who tops this and earns less than 87.5% of the vote, would get three of the four delegates. Given the fact that Democrats appear to be closely divided between Clinton and Obama, topping this 62.5...
02/04/08 -
Blogging Stocks - American President George Bush announced his new budget spending plan today, and the package came out to a total of $3.1 trillion. Today's federal budget proposal marks the first time in America's history that a budget plan has been in excess of $3 trillion. Bush claims that his budget is "good" and "solid" and that the passing of this budget will help keep the troubled American economy...
02/03/08 -
Whirledview - Americans also need to understand that democracy – our own included - cannot be put on autopilot and forgotten. This is a garden that requires constant tending or it could soon come to resemble Ancient Rome’s descent into autocracy, a slippery slide that began with a veneer of at least quasi-representative government. Democracy foremost means sharing and placing limits on power. It is about...
02/03/08 -
feministing - I believe doctors and patients should have broad access to information about the drugs they prescribe/take, and the makers of those drugs. Because of the antis, that information about mifepristone has never been accessible. That said, knowing how the antichoice movement works, I fully understand why this information has been kept under wraps until now. And the conspiracy theorist in me thinks...
02/02/08 -
the carpetbagger report - When Alberto Gonzales would periodically stop by the Senate Judiciary Committee for oversight hearings, it was extraordinarily painful. The bulk of the poor schmo’s answers, when he wasn’t feigning a faulty memory, were so breathtakingly dishonest, it was almost comical. ...
02/02/08 -
working life - One interesting aspect--and an important one that has gotten very little coverage in the media (please put links to anything you see in the Comments section)--is what happens now to the labor support that John Edwards had. I suspect that the campaigns of both Sens. Clinton and Obama are working the phones hard to try to grab union support, particularly for Super Tuesday states. ...
02/02/08 -
RBC - One argument against the Obama strategy for November — mobilize the Democratic base, bring out more young and African-American voters, grab some moderates, and de-mobilize, or even capture, some of the right — is that the second half of it is based on misperception. Right now, the argument goes, Republican voters perceive Obama as less "liberal" than Hillary Clinton, which is plain silly. Once...
01/31/08 -
Strategic Security Blog - Very little in the directive is new or surprising*, and the administration has not released enough information on most of the specific reforms in the directive to assess their likely impact. The most notable proposal is for a self-financing mechanism aimed at generating additional resources for Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) – the chronically under-staffed office that reviews and...
01/31/08 -
the monkey cage - The Center for Public Integrity has issued a new report in which it presents the results of what it describes as a painstaking process of documenting and fact-checking statements about the security threat posed by Iraq by eight key Bush administration officials (Bush himself, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary...
01/31/08 -
Mark Daniels - Character is forged in personal experience with adversity, not only in the adversity we personally experience, but also in the extent to which we're willing to stand with others in their adversity. Often, the United States has been lucky. The presidents we've elected have largely, been unknown to us and what we have known of them has often been a public relations smoke screen. ...
01/30/08 -
See Me - I have reached that crucial time of year during which I must decide whether to apply for yet another year of student loans while I finish up my Ph.D. Relatively speaking, of course, I have not taken out that much in student loans, considering I have been doing the grad school game since 2001. But it is time for me to be finished with grad school and to move on to my life's next phase. Now I must...
01/30/08 -
redstate - It’s true: stubborn and irascible, John McCain’s living rendition of Don Quixote has been infuriating to watch. He always had a bit of the mad saint of the valley to him—a quality that has only increased with age. His breaks from conservative doctrine are manifold, but fewer in number than those of several of his fellow Senators. Yet McCain’s breaks seem so much greater than those of, say,...
01/30/08 -
marathon pundit - After law school, Obama spurned offers to work for a large law firm, such as Sidley & Austin, where he interned and met his wife, but accepted an offer from the small firm now known at Miner, Barnhill, & Galland. Obama was one of a dozen lawyers there, but don't be fooled by the size of the firm. The Miller is Judson Miller, who was Chicago's Corporation Counsel under Mayor Harold Washington. Obama...
01/30/08 -
Pharmalot - When several AIDS patients died after a clinical trial at a Beijing hospital five years ago, Viral Generics, a California biotech, was criticized for failing to explain adequately to patients they were taking part in a study rather than receiving a proven drug. There were also questions why some patients were given the experimental compound and others a placebo, The Financial Times writes. The...
01/30/08 -
the monkey cage - Senators Arlen Specter (R-PA), John Cornyn (R-TX), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Charles Grassley (R-IA), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are cosponsoring a bill to bring cameras to the Supreme Court. The bill would require the Supreme Court to televise all of its open sessions, unless the Court decides by majority vote that allowing such coverage in a particular case would violate the due...
01/30/08 -
Open Left - I spent this morning in South Philly conducting a long interview with Anne Dicker that I will post sometime next week (it needs to be heavily edited down from one hour and twelve minutes). Anne is one of the key organizers of the Democrat (capital D) reform movement in Philadelphia, running against indicted State Senator Vince Fumo in the first Senatorial district of Pennsylvania. While I was talking...
01/28/08 -
Balkinization - And then of course, there is the Administration's incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina, which aptly symbolized its lack of seriousness about domestic policy and, perhaps more to the point, its lack of seriousness about the competent implementation of domestic policy. Would Reagan have handled a crisis like Katrina better? It is hard to imagine that he could have done worse. Cannon and Cannon...
01/28/08 -
Reflective Pundit - The point here is that Senator McCain’s popularity among reporters is the result of his accessibility that began during his presidential run 8 years ago. In 2000, however, George W. Bush was ultimately most successful in charming and co-opting those reporters who covered him. The candidate the media described then was an accessible down-to-earth fun guy and the one you would pick to have a beer...
01/28/08 -
rightwing nuthouse - I have often referred to Obama as an empty suit. The analogy is apt because despite his obvious gifts, Obama has not fleshed out many of his basic, fundamental principles and how they would play a role in his presidency. Just what exactly does he stand for besides the vague platitudes about “hope” and “change” that pepper his speeches like little dollops of whipped cream? Where is the rock...
01/27/08 -
Balkinization - Michael Mukasey, of course, has moved in the opposite direction: from the bench to the Attorney General's office. What effect might his former judicial perspective have on the executive actor's ability to recognize and overcome "mental hazards," such as the natural tendency in times of crisis and anxiety to emphasize "transient results" over "enduring consequences"? Only time will tell. The...
01/27/08 -
Obsidian Wings - However, I don't think the problem is exactly that they are assuming that most people won't follow the news closely enough to know who is telling the truth and who is lying. As far as I can tell, that assumption is accurate. The problem is that they are playing on that ignorance in a way that displays a different sort of contempt for voters: not the assumption that most people do not follow the news...
01/27/08 -
Laura McKenna - They are the news consumers of the future and the evening news has no place in their lives. I teach Politics and Media with reading assignments from the most widely used textbook in the field, but the students don’t know what to make of it. To them, it reads like ancient history. The author writes as if the world still looked up to news anchors. She refers familiarly and respectfully to Brian...
01/25/08 -
Vox EU - No longer confined to the roundtables of politicians and scientists, the debate on climate change has become a mounting wave that doesn’t seem to be losing momentum. Both policy and research communities have focused on the need to stabilise atmospheric CO2 concentrations at about 550 ppm (parts per million, all greenhouse gases included). This is generally considered a very ambitious, hardly...
01/25/08 -
RBC - It's no secret that Barack Obama's candidacy is on the ropes. Yes, he's likely to win, and win big, in South Carolina, but he's likely to do so by winning an overwhelming volume of African-American votes while HRC and John Edwards split the white vote. I doubt that reporters will need the guidance they're certain to get from the Clinton spin control team stressing that Obama has become the new Jesse...
01/25/08 -
kikos house - Does John McCain need the Republican Party's atrophied conservative base to win the nomination? Wrong question. How about: Is there anything that John McCain, who for my money has the best chance of winning in the fall of any Republican, can do to win over the party's atrophied conservative base? Short of pandering, which is something that has not come naturally to McCain over a long...
01/24/08 -
ryanavent - Northern Virginia is preparing to widen and extend the HOV lanes and turn them into High Occupancy Toll lanes. These lanes will still be free to multiple passenger vehicles, but individual drivers will also be able to use them by paying a variable toll, the size of which will change with traffic in order to maintain a steady flow. Studies analyzing the proposed system have speculated that the toll...
01/24/08 -
Captain's Quarters - The most amusing aspect of this standoff is its futility. The Bush administration has repeatedly said it wants to expand this program, but it also wants adults out of a program that supposedly services children. The White House also wants to focus the program on the poor and working class, not the middle class, which can afford to pay for health insurance on its own. Instead of compromising with...
01/24/08 -
agonist - Supporters of the war are deeply committed to their position, in part due to the powerful myths that animate them. In the decade after the fall of Saigon, several myths about the war coalesced, especially in rural and small town America. As the pain of the war eased and wounded beliefs healed, the war underwent reinterpretation, from arrogant folly to honorable effort. Ronald Reagan called it a...
01/23/08 -
11d - Really interesting and I agree with much of what Hartford said. But I can’t resist poking holes in his argument. Hartford makes the same mistake that all rational choice economists make. They assume that people’s preferences are all the same. So, the looming spectre of poverty from divorce has pushed women to enter the workforce in droves. They need the insurance of a paycheck. That sounds...
01/23/08 -
dailykos - When it comes to the 50 State Strategy we know where Hillary Clinton stands. Heck, she's got Terry McAuliffe, a guy who is completely and totally opposed to Howard Dean, the 50 State Strategy and the netroots movement, as her campaign chair. But that's not what I want to focus on. Bill and Hillary keep asking Barack Obama and his supporters to enunciate an answer to this question: but what have...
01/23/08 -
the monkey cage - But what are the differences between Democrats and Republicans on economic and social issues in different states? Here’s a graph from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Studies. Each state represents the mean economic and social estimates (red states indicate self-reported Republicans and blue self-reported Democrats). Positive is more Conservative and Negative more Liberal....
01/22/08 -
Arms & Influence - Kennedy took office with the firm belief that the USSR and the PRC were exploiting what Khrushchev termed "wars of national liberation" for their own benefit. While scholars have been debating ever since how well the Soviets and Chinese could manipulate these movements in their favor, it was a threat that Kennedy decided to address. Counterinsurgency and counterterrorism may have been Cold War...
01/22/08 -
Secrecy News - In a small step that could nevertheless have far-reaching consequences for government information policy, the Department of Defense is preparing to eliminate various markings such as "For Official Use Only" and "Limited Distribution" that regulate disclosure of unclassified documents and will replace them with a new standardized marking. The DoD move (pdf) anticipates near-term Presidential...
01/22/08 -
The Oil Drum - A sizeable faction of the people who think peak oil is important, and happening soon enough to care about, think it has big implications for agriculture. And most of them agree on what those implications are: as a society, we are going to have to give up the big combine harvesters, the thunderous power of 275 horsepower tractors, and instead we will have to return to small-scale, hand-labor organic...
01/21/08 -
Reflective Pundit - In the early 1990s, political scientist Thomas Patterson published an excellent book. In Out of Order: How the decline of political parties and the growing power of the news media undermine the American way of electing presidents, he wrote that the reform of the presidential selection system in the wake of the turbulent 1968 Democratic nomination convention replaced party insiders with the mass...
01/21/08 -
Obsidian Wings - For what it's worth, I didn't know that Obama would be the strongest on transgendered issues when I started thinking about this. I have been looking for a summary of the various candidates' positions on these issues for a while, and had intended to post on it when I found it. This is part of my general attempt to try to work on these issues: I see no particular reason why transgendered people should...
01/21/08 -
Agoraphilia - We live together amicably because we recognize and respect certain natural rights. Which ones? Barnett names private property—including our property rights in our bodies—and freedom of contract. Since property protects both the right to it and the right against trespass, it corresponds to common law's property and tort rules. Freedom of contract, which includes the right to contract and to not...
01/20/08 -
Balkinization - Mike Huckabee is the latest Republican candidate to call for amending the Constitution, though Mitt Romney has led the way. It was "flip-flop" Mitt who in recently told the Family Values Research Council's Values Voter Summit, "I will work with the people in this room, as I have for the past four years, to champion a federal marriage amendment to protect marriage as the union of a man and a woman....
01/20/08 -
Pajamas Media - The real issue at stake in the two month-old Writers’ Strike may very well be the future of the entertainment industry itself, writes Pajamas CEO Roger L. Simon. He predicts that the power of the Internet as a distributor of content may spell nothing less than the end of Hollywood as we know it. Support Pajamas Media; Visit Our Advertisers by Roger L. Simon Deep into the Writers’ Strike...
01/20/08 -
Whirled View - Four very different books dealing with nuclear weapons proliferation and policy have been published in the last year. In alphabetical order by author, they are Joseph Cirincione, Bomb Scare William Langewiesche, The Atomic Bazaar Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade Another book that I haven’t read yet is Michael Levy’s On Nuclear...
01/18/08 -
mexico premiere - Starting in February, the U.S. State Department will begin accepting applications for a new concept they are creatively calling a Passport Card. These I.D’s will be available only to those people who live near the border and travel frequently between The U.S. and Mexico or Canada by land or sea. The cards will cost just $45.00, compared to $97.00 for a traditional passport. They will expire in 10...
01/18/08 -
Agonist - Several months ago, Ron Paul, the independent-minded congressman from Texas, raised eyebrows when on-line polls showed him the winner of a few televised debates. Yes, such polls are unscientific, and so they were ignored if not scoffed at. After all, he was only polling at one percent or less in the major national polls. Many commentators reasoned that the anomalous numbers were the result zealous...
01/18/08 -
powerline blog - Now that Mitt Romney appears to have won a solid victory in Michigan, I want to make a couple of points about his campaign in the context of this year's election season. First, the pervasive commentary over the last week to the effect that Michigan was do-or-die for Romney was, I think, nonsense. Even if Romney had lost narrowly to McCain in Michigan, which is not a winner-take-all state, he...
01/18/08 -
Plumer - Okay, start with an easier question: Is McCain sincere about tackling global warming? As the story goes, he was first quizzed on the subject eight years ago in New Hampshire, and, after pleading ignorance on the matter, studied up and became a convert. He's reportedly close to Fred Krupp, the head of Environmental Defense, who has a history of reaching out to Republicans with green leanings (and,...
01/18/08 -
the monkey cage - As I think back to my first year in graduate school, it occurs to me that there was no correlation (or, if anything, a negative one) between having what were considered the best credentials coming in to the program and ultimately completing it. (Perhaps that’s a self-serving attribution, given my own horrible credentials and the resulting mystery of how I ever got admitted in the first place.) In...
01/18/08 -
knowledge problem - The Federal Aviation Administration is proposing to change its policy toward landing fees to "provide greater flexibility to operators of congested airports to use landing fees to provide incentives to air carriers to use the airport at less congested times or to use alternate airports to meet regional air service needs." As explained in the notice issued by the FAA, the proposed policy change will...
01/16/08 -
immanent Frame - Mike Huckabee’s early success in the primary season shows that evangelicals have political muscles to flex in the post-George W. Bush era. Just as scribes across the country were ready to write Huckabee’s political obituary, he came out of nowhere and won the Republican Caucuses in Iowa by nine points over Mitt Romney. He also did better in New Hampshire than many pundits predicted, and with...
01/16/08 -
athena alliance - Believe it or not, patent reform has raised a great deal of passion. Both side argue that if their position is not adopted, innovation and the US economy will come crashing to a halt. Or, more correctly, they argue that if the other side’s position is adopted, the system be destroyed. (A tame version of this is John Markoff's recent New York Times column Two Views of Innovation, Colliding in...
01/16/08 -
federal union - Step forward Senator John McCain, who seems to be the only one to recognise that the development of a European foreign policy is a good thing to be welcomed. He dares to say that “Americans should welcome the rise of a strong, confident European Union”. Read the full remarks here: http://federalunion.org.uk/quotebank/?p=69 There is also John Edwards, who writes this: “In 1945, it would...
01/15/08 -
Balkinization - Many supporters of Second Amendment rights are, pardon the pun, up in arms over the Bush Administration Justice Department's amicus brief in Heller, the Second Amendment case now before the Supreme Court. The government's brief recognizes an individual right to bear arms but argues that historically the right excluded felons (even though they are presumably part of "the People"). Moreover, it argues...
01/15/08 -
buzzmachine - Polls are as discredited as they should be. So I’m thinking about writing my Guardian column next week about all the new metrics we have to take the pulse of the nation on the internet. Please help me out with numbers you follow. None of these is representative or certainly scientific. And many of them can be manipulated — which is just the point of them; they put metrics in the hands of...
01/15/08 -
Cobb - Now I know that as a black man, I am presumed to be extraordinarily sensitive to any racial impropriety. That's because I am heir to generations of victims and am thus some sort of victim myself. So goes the common wisdom. In America, I have the exclusive privilege to generate some extra measure of sympathy because of this. However, I personally choose not to exercise this privilege although I...
01/14/08 -
the monkey cage - Affirmative action — defined in various ways by various people — ranks alongside abortion as one of the true “wedge” issues of American politics. Among the charges that critics have leveled against affirmative action in higher education admissions are (1) it takes minority students from schools where they have received poor academic preparation and places them in situations where they are...
01/14/08 -
3 Quarks Daily - Tears work in American politics, as events in New Hampshire last week show. But they didn’t always work, as a 1972 presidential contender Edmund Muskie learned in New Hampshire 36 years ago. They cost him his presidential bid, even as they propped up Senator Clinton’s. What has happened in America politics and public life that tears have become so acceptable, even gratifying? Rather than...
01/14/08 -
Cato at liberty - Ron Paul says he didn’t write these newsletters, and I take him at his word. They don’t sound like him. In my infrequent personal encounters and in his public appearances, I’ve never heard him say anything racist or homophobic (halting and uncomfortable on gay issues, like a lot of 72-year-old conservatives, but not hateful). But he selected the people who did write those things, and he put...
01/13/08 -
Roger Kimball - We have all become inured to assaults on free speech from the Left. After all, that’s a large part of what political correctness is all about: free speech for me, but not for thee. It’s so blatant that the phrase “political correctness” is often accompanied by a smile—it’s an an uneasy smile, to be sure, but it is a smile nonetheless. “Politically correct” describes some exaggerated...
01/13/08 -
Reflective Pundit - Long-time Clinton-Hater Chris Matthew (host of MSNBC’s “Hardball Chris” show) said this about Senator Hillary Clinton one day after her victory in the New Hampshire primary as guest of MSNBC's “Morning Joe” show, "Let's not forget -- and I'll be brutal -- the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed...
01/13/08 -
Healthcare Blog - Can you really mandate people to buy health insurance? That's not so much a policy question as a practical question and it is what Hillary Clinton seems to be saying is the big difference between her health care reform plan and the health reform plan of Barack Obama. That's why a news story this week out of Massachusetts caught my eye. It seems that the Mass Department of Revenue is in the...
01/11/08 -
GristMill - I've seen lots of speculation about this. My strong inclination is that Gore will not endorse anyone until the general, when he will endorse the Dem candidate. His endorsement of Dean has become something of a political joke among the chattering class, coming as it did just before Dean's implosion. He's got nothing to gain and much to lose from endorsing another losing candidate. Right now Gore's...
01/11/08 -
stuartbuck - Do charter schools force the nearby public schools to improve (i.e., via putting competitive pressure on them)? Or do they drain resources or teachers or perhaps positive peer groups from those nearby public schools? One recent paper on this topic is Scott A. Imberman, The Effect of Charter Schools on Non-Charter Students: An Instrumental Variables Approach. The author explains that the usual...
01/11/08 -
cogitamus blog - Until, that is, someone found out that the rape victim was a distant relative of Bill Clinton. All the sudden people started to have "doubts" about Dumond's guilt. Rumors started to fly about Dumond being "another victim" of crazy Bill Clinton and his crazy wife. Mike Huckabee as Lt. Governor publicly stated that he questioned Dumond's guilt, and as Governor Huckabee pressured the parole board...
01/10/08 -
ezra klein - I've been struggling with how to handle Health Affairs' new study "Measuring the Health of Nations." It's the sort of report whose conclusions are easy to summarize but whose import is hard to accurately convey. The short version is that our health system is killing people. And not just a couple. Hundreds of thousands. The researchers examined amenable mortality -- "deaths from certain causes that...
01/10/08 -
NeoNeoCon - It used to be that virtually every society on earth had its own moral and social code and believed it was the best on earth—and not just the best for that particular society but the best, period. The only question was whether that society thought others should adopt the same code, or whether it had a laissez faire attitude on that score. Western culture was no different, although with our...
01/10/08 -
just one minute - So here is the latest Bold Prediction, inspired by a late night and little caffeine - Obama is about to endure a media backlash. Why a bursting of his media bubble? Well, they (alright, "they") have finally admitted what was obvious in this Harvard study last fall and to Bill Clinton at Dartmouth - as some NBC talent put it, "it's hard to stay objective covering this guy". However, while the...
01/09/08 -
box office junkie - Seeking their fair share of profits on all revenue-generating media, the WGA has stuck to the pickets lines for about nine weeks, putting them at odds with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). From the very beginning of the strike, the public has come to the side of the writers, but it isn't until recently that people have started to become downright outraged at the...
01/09/08 -
RBC - Obama doesn't identify with the poor in the sense that he doesn't think of himself as poor, or formerly poor, or having poor relatives. He grew up without much money, but in cultural terms his upbringing was solidly middle-class. (Maybe he has poor in-laws.) So when he thinks about the poor, he's thinking about other people: he thinks and speaks like, and as, a liberal, rather than a poor person. But...
01/09/08 -
dilbert blog - Why would you vote for a president who has a different religion than you? If you are certain of the rightness of your own beliefs, and equally certain of the wrongness of a presidential candidate’s belief, that proves the candidate has, in your opinion, bad judgment about the most important question in reality. For this discussion, I think you would have to say that someone who believes in a...
01/08/08 -
the space review - The chief motivation behind the ban is the old, predictable anti-human-spaceflight routine. Robots are better for science, therefore we should have a robot-only space policy. The counter-arguments are ignored: that establishing human/Earth life beyond Earth is progress for humankind, and that a both-robots-and-humans policy is fair to all sides. Mars was targeted because banning other places is...
01/08/08 -
lessig - That standard left open the question of what the "traditional contours of copyright protection" were. In three follow on cases, lower courts have now addressed the question. In all three of these lower court cases, the government has argued that by "traditional contours of copyright protection," the Eldred court meant simply the "idea/expression" dichotomy and "fair use." Thus, the only possible...
01/08/08 -
Roger L. Simon - Well, we have — the good news is we have 32 nations participating in Afghanistan. Some are clearly just token few troops, but it’s primarily a NATO operation. Now, there are problems with the command and control; there are really kind of two separate command structures, which has to be fixed. But the fact is we have our alliance allies engaged. Unfortunately, some of these countries have very...
01/07/08 -
Agoraphilia - Libertarians stoutly defend the right, sometimes even the virtue, of non-voting. Some pride themselves on their non-voting; others take pleasure in tweaking the conventional wisdom (“It’s your civic duty!” “You have no right to complain if you don’t vote!”). I’ve done this many times myself. I usually invoke the public-choice analysis of voting: the marginal benefit of voting is...
01/07/08 -
the monkey cage - The operation of source-credibility effects — roughly, that I may believe something if X says it but discount it if it comes instead from Y — is well established in social psychological research on attitude formation and change. But here’s an interesting new twist, in the context of current controversies over “fair and balanced” political coverage by the media. In a study reported...
01/07/08 -
Balkinization - When the destruction of the CIA tapes was publicly revealed, Congresswoman Jane Harman announced that she had advised against it back in February 2003. She offered to produce her letter to the CIA, but it was classified. Today, the CIA has declassified the Harman letter, along with a response from then-CIA General Counsel Scott Muller. Congresswoman Harman has posted them on her website, touting...
01/06/08 -
borjas - There is no doubt that the urgency of the immigration debate accelerated in the past few years. But why? After all, the resurgence of large-scale immigration started 40 years ago; we've had millions of illegal immigrants living in our midst since the 1970s; and it has been recognized that a disproportionately large number of the new immigrants are low-skill workers who have adverse impacts on low-wage...
01/06/08 -
Opinio Juris - The suit's allegations are wide-ranging, alleging that Yoo’s legal opinions and personal involvement in issues ranging from Padilla being designated an enemy combatant to his detention and interrogation violated Padilla’s constitutional and statutory rights (e.g., denying him access to counsel and courts; unconstitutionally confining and interrogating him; denying his freedom of religion,...
01/06/08 -
brian beutler - Jon rightly points to his position on climate change--indeed, in 2003, when McCain and Joe Lieberman introduced the Climate Stewardship Act, they were way ahead of the curve, and if the bill had passed then, it might well have been a sufficient regulatory solution to the problem. But the problem has grown worse and the measures needed to combat it more expansive, and as such, when the Democrats took...
01/04/08 -
Agoraphilia - All copyrighted works originate as ideas, born when authors choose how to express themselves. The slightest exercise of discretion will suffice; just about anything more original than an alphabetical listing of names can qualify for copyright protection. Once having crossed that low hurdle, it remains only for an author to fix her expression in a tangible medium for more than a transitory duration....
01/04/08 -
pandagon - This study is particularly timely since I've 1) been to the ER recently and 2) had gall bladder surgery last week. Both resulted in my receiving morphine while inpatient and pain-relieving opioid drugs for use at home. While I can't say that I experienced biased care and withholding of these medications because of my race, I have no doubt that implicit bias plays a role in denial of adequate medical...
01/04/08 -
the impolitic - This isn't security, this is security theater. Chances of a terrorist successfully pulling off another 9/11 are slim to none. As Smith points out, 9/11 succeeded because of the element of surprise. Until then, hijackers diverted flights and held hostages for money. No one crashed planes before. I can't imagine a planeful of passengers sitting quietly waiting for that to happen again. Meanwhile,...
01/03/08 -
becker-posner - In the sample as a whole, 44 percent of professors are liberal, 46 percent moderate or centrist, and only 9 percent conservative. (These are self-descriptions.) The corresponding figures for the American population as a whole, according to public opinion polls, are 18 percent, 49 percent, and 33 percent, suggesting that professors are on average more than twice as liberal, and only half as conservative,...
01/03/08 -
ezra klein - As per usual, Huckabee is staggeringly charming. He's not as gorgeous a speaker as Obama or Edwards, but is possibly a better talker than both combined. He mixes off-the-cuff eloquence with easy humor and evident compassion. His jokes are a serious advantage: It's a bit unnoticed, as the media reports all funny candidates as funny in the same way, but there's a political difference between folksy...
01/03/08 -
pajamas media - Journalists mistakenly believe that news has been continuously evolving toward better forms when, in fact, we are in the midst of a century-old trend. In the early 1900’s an attempt was made to transform journalism from the rough-and-tumble craft it had always been to a science producing verified, objective, unbiased truths. This now-laughable proposition was sustainable only while technology,...
01/02/08 -
David Corn - How else to explain two bizarre last-minute decisions of Mike Huckabee's campaign. First, the former Arkansas governor held a near-meltdown of a press conference on Monday, during which he decried negative campaigning but then played for the assembled camera crews the anti-Romney ad he had commissioned and had decided not to use. Then on Wednesday, Huckabee was scheduled to leave frosty Iowa--the...
01/02/08 -
3 Quarks Daily - A serious pandemic of delusion is gripping the world. Ground Zero for the spread of this scourge was in Annapolis, Maryland in late November. Within hours, millions of otherwise intelligent people started exhibiting the symptoms of this horrible affliction: uncontrollable optimism, abrupt failure of reasoning, oblivious disregard of reality, and a deeply religious faith in a fictional 'Peace...
01/02/08 -
reasonable citizen - You won’t hear this mentioned very often. And when you do, it is likely in some obscure context about Fort Knox and bars of gold used to support the dollar. If you do hear this, you are being bamboozled. Gold is no longer used to back up the dollar and you are ancient if you believe this to be true. Yet, a National Treasury exists. Where? In banks, in vaults, and wherever the Federal government...
01/01/08 -
rightwing nuthouse - A couple of thoughts on this poll that will probably be echoed by some of the campaigns as they try to spin the results to their advantage. First, I find it striking that observers on the ground in the last 72 hours who have been reporting surges for Hillary and Romney and the consequent drop of Huckabee and Obama are either seeing things or the poll itself is just not accurate. The reason for...
01/01/08 -
ezra klein - This set of elderly white eminences can count on affection from a small group of DC's political elite, and is mistaking that recognition for actual power. Alan Dixon and William Cohen do not have the clout to themselves pass legislation, nor lift the objections of the forces impeding reform. What they do have is David Broder's home phone number, and so can expect a laudatory column detailing their...
01/01/08 -
Balkinization - One would think from the recent excitement over the possibility of a bipartisan political movement that Hillary Clinton was running on a platform calling for confiscation of corporate property, reestablishment of the moderately progressive tax structure of the 1970s, the return of all American troops from abroad, the abolition of capital punishment, and (heaven forbid), gay marriage. With the...
12/31/07 -
The Fire - Freedom of the press remains endangered on U.S. college campuses. Even at public universities, where the school acts in the name of the government, student newspapers and their editors often face disciplinary action for exercising their constitutional rights. Two recent cases that come to mind arose at Colorado State University (CSU) and Central Connecticut State University (CCSU). In The Rocky...
12/31/07 -
Andrew Sullivan - But of course, the tapes also definitively prove torture - worse than most of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and obviously sanctioned, closely monitored and dictated up the chain of command. And when you actually see torture, it becomes harder to sustain the denial that Orwellianisms such as "enhanced interrogation" are designed to foster. Remember how Abu Ghraib only became a story once the photographs...
12/31/07 -
Whirledview - There seems to be a general agreement that deterrence isn’t what it once was. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, MAD is no longer the predominant scenario and is irrelevant against perpetrators who have no geographic stake to lose. Also, the lack of coherent policy (or the unwillingness to enunciate policy) on the part of the US is damaging deterrence, which requires an understanding on both...
12/30/07 -
Elizabeth Hackett - As Hollywood writing partners who have collaborated on nine scripts together over the past five years, we’re forced to spend a lot of time together. Like hostages without a bank robbery. As a result, we can talk about anything for hours. And we mean anything. Not just movie ideas. We once had a full five-minute debate about how burned a piece of toast would have to be before neither one of us...
12/30/07 -
Tax Foundation - Politicians will stop playing word games, and call taxes "taxes" and not "fees," "surcharges," or "profits." Any assessment that raises money in excess of what is needed to defray costs is a tax. Politicians will stop using the tax code to give even more preferential treatment to sectors like housing and healthcare that are already tax-pampered. This includes using the tax code as a bailout for...
12/30/07 -
Nurse Sean - Here’s how I see nursing in the future: Instead of working for hospitals, nurses will work for organizations similar to travel nursing companies, or perhaps nursing professional bodies. Nurses are commissioned by hospitals (not doctors…as that would make doctors our direct bosses…there’s enough issues there already without making it worse) to care for patients. The nurses would be paid PER...
12/28/07 -
HealthCarePolicy - Mike Huckabee is now among the front runners for the Republican nomination. So, what is his health care plan? First, he doesn't have a plan so much as a set of principles that would have to be detailed. On the surface he seems to want a lot of it both ways--no more government but lots of new program ideas. For example, he calls for tax credits to help low-income people purchase health insurance...
12/28/07 -
ChequerBoard - The House Democratic Caucus has a problem: It has a number of freshmen members who got elected from conservative districts. Said freshmen members will not long survive if they do not show some "independence" from the House Democratic leadership. It is a political necessity for them to be able to go back to their constituents and say that many a time, they were brave enough to cast votes defying...
12/28/07 -
Reasonable Man - After a recent conversation at work about driving, traffic jams, the lingering effects of excessive braking and stopping, a colleague sent me a link to this article that purports to have finally solved a mystery of traffic jams mathematically. To me, this was nothing new or exciting. I recalled reading this much better set of pages years ago. The author made many of the same observations, and...
12/27/07 -
instapundit - SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS ABOUT THE CANDIDATES: People want to know who I endorse, or who I'd vote for. I don't do endorsements -- I think they're presumptuous in newspapers, and I'd feel silly telling people how they should vote at this point. Most of my readers probably know more than me anyway. But since people keep asking, here are some thoughts. Since they're kind of long, click "read more" to read...
12/27/07 -
The New Republic - Today's Washington Post fronts a story about the continuing "relevance" of the Reverend Al Sharpton to the political scene. The decrease in influence implied via this public rebuttal is given little limelight. Rather, Sharpton, who continues to gleefully man the red phone connecting the MSM to American blacks at large, gets credit for involvement in a litany of ‘race cases' that have made headlines...
12/27/07 -
StraightDope - So much talk of waterboarding, so much controversy. But what is it really? How bad? I wanted to write the definitive thread on waterboarding, settle the issue. Torture, or not? To determine the answer, I knew I had to try it. I looked at my two small children. Surely, in the interests of science?..... But alas, my wife had objections. Perhaps her? Sadly, she is proficient in Ju Jitsu,...
12/26/07 -
HealthCare - Every year at this time, millions of Americans turn their attention to a much-beloved story about health care reform. I refer, of course, to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. While this is not the traditional plot summary, it aptly describes a story rooted in the plight of a crippled young boy whose father cannot afford the care his son desperately needs. The prospect of Tiny Tim’s eminently...
12/26/07 -
Center for Media - It’s hard to know where to begin in responding to David Hazinski’s “Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky,” an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he calls for regulation of citizen journalism: Supporters of “citizen journalism” argue it provides independent, accurate, reliable information that the traditional media don’t provide. While it has its place,...
12/26/07 -
Relflective Pundit - Although thought to promote participatory democracy and diminish the power of party insiders in the selection of presidential nominees, the post-1968 reforms in favor of binding primaries and caucuses resulted in unintended consequences. Nothing has been more absurd than the influential roles of Iowa and New Hampshire. Although this time around far more states decided on holding their primaries or...
12/26/07 -
Shikha Dalmia - According to Karl Rove, ex-White House press secretary Tony Snow is to his former post what Mick Jagger is to rock stars (Rove meant it as a compliment). During his year-and-a-half-long tenure with the Bush administration, The New York Times congratulated Snow for "reinventing the job with his snappy sound bites and knack for deflecting tough questions with a smile." Snow even won plaudits from...
12/26/07 -
Flopping Aces - With the Norman Hsu/Chinese funny money fundraising scandal as a backdrop, I visited Little Rock, Arkansas in September to retrace the steps of other Clinton scandals, particularly with an eye to Hillary's participation in them. What I learned was that Hillary's fingerprints were all over the misdeeds that ran all the way to the White House. No wonder she hasn't wanted anyone to see many of her...
12/26/07 -
ezra klein - I can't really respond to much in Glenn Greenwald's 83,000 word screed on Ron Paul, as it keeps bringing up arguments I've never made, and so don't know how to defend. Neat debating trick, but not much I can do with it. I urge readers to give it a look-see themselves, as it is eloquent in parts, and unintentionally funny in others (my favorite bit was "if I wanted to invoke the same manipulative...
12/25/07 -
Central Sanity - On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives, as part of its yearly ritual, passed a one-year patch for the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). The bill has already been approved by the U.S. Senate, and President Bush is expected to soon sign it into law. There is another provision that comes up for renewal periodically during the month of December called the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA)...
12/25/07 -
Cato At Liberty - The New York Times and Washington Post report today on a new study by the Pew Center on the States regarding unfunded state and local pension and health costs for retirees. Let’s just look at the health costs. Pew finds that state governments have promised their workers $370 billion of retiree health care that they have not put money aside for. Unless those benefits are cut, that figure...
12/25/07 -
Anonymous Liberal - A few months ago, it occurred to me that it would be useful to try to get all of the 2008 presidential candidates to state on the record whether they agree with the various controversial executive power claims advanced by the Bush administration. For instance, as president would they consider themselves to be bound by FISA? Would they consider themselves to be bound by treaties like the Geneva...
12/24/07 -
Metropulse - The nuclear arms race may be behind us, but a new nuclear power race has just begun, and the Tennessee Valley Authority hopes to win it. On Oct. 30, the federal utility applied for a license to build two nuclear reactors in Alabama. A Texas consortium got their license application in a month prior. Who builds first depends on how smoothly the licensing process goes, and since the Nuclear...
12/24/07 -
Arms and Influence - The Department of Homeland Security’s terrorist watch list is practically useless. Now bulging at 755,000 names, 20,000 new records names are added to the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) each month. With the 1,000,000 mark close at hand, the watch list is now unreliable. The signal-to-noise ratio is enormous, since terrorist organizations are very small. Al Qaeda in 2001 had only 200...
12/24/07 -
Marginal Revolution - A common response to my post showing that The Rich Pay for the Federal Government was that the rich also get more benefits from the federal government. Let's go to the numbers. Here's a chart showing federal spending categories for 2007. (Click to expand.) Spending_3 Social Security, the biggest category, doesn't benefit the rich at all because net Social Security payments are heavily biased...
12/21/07 -
the conglomerate - I think even the most pro-plaintiff of us (that would be me) will start screaming for tort reform when law students start suing us over grades. The National Law Journal obviously knows our deepest fears, and a recent article uses this attention-grabbing headline: Don't Like Your Grade? Sue Your Law School. However, most of the examples given in the article are not very frivolous, and most...
12/21/07 -
Demography Matters - Well, as promised in the comments to my last post, here is a little bit of US demographic data. This isn't the first time I have taken a brief look at US demography on this blog, and it surely won't be the last one. This was an early attempt, where I tried to link the rebound in the US TFR that we can see from the mid 1970s to the start of modern-era large-scale immigration and to a slowing...
12/21/07 -
Obsidian Wings - We hear a lot about how the war in Iraq is "breaking the Army." But while I have used that metaphor, I've never been comfortable with it. It's not as though one day we will hear a loud snap and find the Army broken in two. We will not get up one morning, flip a switch, and discover that the Army doesn't work any more. We will not have to hire a tow truck to drag it off to war. Whatever goes...
12/21/07 -
Manifest Destiny - It was not the intention of this outlet to become focused on the micro-political picture. While the ideology of those who control Congress, the White House, and the courts is important to the mission of the New Manifest Destiny, individual elections are viewed as simple snapshots in time. However, The New Manifest Destiny believes this upcoming election to be a trul...
12/21/07 -
Greg Mankiw - Some analysts, when discussing health reform plans, make a big deal over the issue of insurance mandates. They suggest that it is crucial to have mandates to solve the adverse selection problem and that plans without mandates will not work. Paul Krugman, for example, has given Barack Obama a lot of grief over exactly this issue. The more I think about it, the more I come to the view that much...
12/21/07 -
Richelieu - John McCain could indeed win the nomination. First, he upsets Rudy and Thompson to win third in Iowa and bounces into McCain-fertile New Hampshire as the big surprise of the Iowa caucus. While McCain is still campaigning in Iowa, that means little unless he invests some money in real Iowa TV. We'll know in the next few days. Without TV support, his chances of an upset are slim. But Iowa polling...
12/19/07 -
Andrew Sullivan - Curiouser and curiouser. I've learned to be a little suspicious when former CIA agents suddenly pop up on television describing torture sessions that have been wiped from the official record. Especially when those agents turn out not to have been actually present for the interrogation, give the opposition a morsel of truth - yep, this was torture - and yet also spin the story in ways amenable...
12/19/07 -
Pajamas Media - I recently read your post about a man whose wife had killed their son and now she wants alimony while in prison! It seems you didn’t think this was a very good idea and I agree. But my real question to you is “what is your personal opinion of alimony—do you think it’s passé?” Dear Anonymous Reader, Good question. First, let me make clear that we are distinguishing alimony here...
12/19/07 -
American Thinker - In an interview on former Senator Bill Bradley's Sirius radio show, Barack Obama let it be known that if elected president, he would organize a meeting between Islamic leaders and Americans: "I would convene a conference within my first year just gathering together Muslim leaders from all around the world, to describe for them what our values and our interests are, to insist that they...
12/18/07 -
Volokh - United States v. King: The Eleventh Circuit recently decided an interesting case applying the Fourth Amendment to computer networks, United States v. King. The question: If a person connects his machine to a computer network, and he unknowingly is sharing the contents of the machine with the rest of the network, does he retain Fourth Amendment protection in the inadvertently exposed contents? ...
12/18/07 -
Minding the Campus - Against repeated accusations of leftwing bias on campus, professors have mounted many rejoinders disputing one or another item in the indictment. They claim that the disproportion isn't as high as reports say. Or that reports focus on small pockets (women's studies, etc.). Or that party registration is a crude indicator. Or that conservatives are too greedy and obtuse to undergo academic...
12/18/07 -
Stephen Bainbridge - I’ve been cataloging my quest to settle on a GOP Presidential candidate to support in 2008 (so far I’ve stick with Fred Thompson mainly by default). I took on McCain, Romney, Huckabee, and Tancredo in this post. I went back to make the case against Huckabee in more detail in this post. With Andrew Sullivan having endorsed Ron Paul, it’s the latter’s turn. (UPDATE: Now Sullivan’s even...
12/18/07 -
Whirled View - It’s clear to me that last week’s threat from the State Department to cut 10 percent of middle grade generalist Foreign Service positions in the Department and at overseas posts other than Iraq or Afghanistan has all to do with the final 2008 budget negotiations with Congress. I realize this may not come through as baldly in Karen De Young' s Washington Post story on the subject, but...
12/18/07 -
Agoraphilia - To say that copyright does not protect any natural right is not to say that it lacks any moral justification. We naturally frown on unauthorized and misattributed copying. A singer who claims authorship of a song written by another commits a sort of fraud on his listeners. Most of the time, that sort of fraud does not rise to the level of materiality, and thus does not justify litigation. We...
12/18/07 -
Andrew Sullivan - By now, readers will know who I favor in the Democratic race. Here's my most considered case. But what of the GOP? For me, it comes down to two men, Ron Paul and John McCain. That may sound strange, because in many ways they are polar opposites: the champion of the surge and the non-interventionist against the Iraq war; the occasional meddling boss of Washington and the live-and-let-live...
12/17/07 -
the monkey cage - Promises to “make government run more like a business” by streamlining procedures, eliminating delays, and reducing waste are frequent refrains in campaign rhetoric, and for good reason. Support for the free enterprise system and suspicion of “big government” are central values in the American political culture. To be sure, these sentiments are often honored more in the breach than in...
12/17/07 -
The Anchoress - A while back, I took issue with a piece written for CBS Public Eye in which Samuel Freedman, professor of journalism at Columbia University and a columnist for The New York Times, who wrote: Instead of providing the ultimate marketplace of ideas, however, cable TV and the Internet have become the ultimate amen corner, where nobody ever need encounter an opinion, much less a fact, that...
12/17/07 -
Poligazette - Both Huckabee and Obama are now comfortably leading in Iowa and Huckabee’s in the lead in Florida. The races for both the Democratic and Republican nomination are becoming increasingly interesting. The media had determined, beforehand, that the two frontrunners were Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani: the nomination was theirs to lose. Sadly for the MSM, however, the races turn out slightly...
12/15/07 -
Jules Crittenden - It is beginning to look like George Bush may be a uniter, not a divider, after all. It’s not that the loyal opposition doesn’t have to be dragged kicking and screaming. But the Bush-bashers of the world are slowly being brought into the fold, recognizing the common interest … or at least, for now, beginning to arrive at common ends in their own interest. In war, we know, the ends so...
12/15/07 -
The Oil Drum - A short fifty years ago, people heated their homes in winter with coal. A hundred years ago and before, people living in cold climates largely stayed warm in winter with firewood. Today, in a country (and planet) with vastly more people, we heat homes in northern climates largely with high quality fossil fuels, specifically natural gas, heating oil, and propane. Trees, a less energy-dense form of...
12/15/07 -
Ablogistan - That's it. There were no binding laws tied to the bill, and it accomplished little other than expressing the sentiments of 372 Representatives (only 9 voted against it). Why do I care? For one, it's a waste of taxpayer money. Everyday, Congress wastes time on nonbinding resolutions like this that have no legislative function. They already have three-day work weeks, and when you factor in the time...
12/14/07 -
Reflective Pundit - After first proclaiming Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination as foregone conclusion, the news media took her down by first blowing her less than stellar performance in one of the numerous televised campaign debates out of proportion and then following up with a constant barrage of very critical straight news coverage and commentary. In today’s Washington Post, Dan Balz writes of...
12/14/07 -
grist mill - The Senate held a cloture vote this morning to overcome a threatened filibuster from Senate Republicans. It failed 59-40 -- one vote short of the 60 votes needed. Reid now says he'll introduce the bill again later today without the clean-energy tax provisions. More later. Right now I'm so disgusted and pissed off I don't know what to say. UPDATE: Well, here's one thing to say, to the Associated...
12/14/07 -
Former Spook - It's no secret that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have parlayed careers as "activists" into a pretty good living, for themselves--and others. In particular, the Reverund Jacksohn (as Rush Limbaugh likes to calls him), perfected the art of the corporate shakedown years ago, threatening corporations with protests or lawsuits, based on specious claims of racial discrimination. Those threats...
12/12/07 -
TPM muckraker - For years, the CIA denied recording any interrogations of al-Qaeda detainees. For years, the Bush administration denied issuing any legal authorization for torture. And for years, members of Congress claimed ignorance of what the CIA and the Bush administration had in store for detained members of al-Qaeda. All of these denials have proven false. There's a tremendous amount that remains...
12/12/07 -
Balkinization - No, not the Office of Legal Counsel. The intelligence oversight apparatus. Yes, a large part of the problem is the particular Democrats who happen to be among the "Gang of Eight" and "Gang of Four." (To get a good sense of why the Senate Intelligence Committee will not get to the bottom of the latest scandal, just take a look at this lackluster performance by Jay Rockefeller yesterday on Face...
12/12/07 -
Dani Rodrik - Dani has many complex and sophisticated arguments regarding his less than enthusiastic support for the Doha Round and his willingness to entertain the wisdom of a standstill. He argues in favor of Hillary Clinton’s position on this matter and against the view that if trade agreements do not go forward, they inevitably fall back. This may be a tenable position for a trade theorist or for...
12/11/07 -
the monkey cage - Want to save the environment? Get married. Or if you’re already married, take in a boarder. In the U.S. and all around the world, divorce rates are soaring. That trend has well-documented social and economic consequences, but now comes word that it has environmental consequences as well. In a just-published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Eunice Yu and Jianguo...
12/11/07 -
Plumer - One major point about drug laws is that they're very widely violated. In 2002, there were some 19.5 million drug users in the United States—about 8 percent of the population—but just 1.5 million drug arrests and 175,000 people who went to jail for drug offenses. Now, that's a ton of people in prison—and most of them should not be there, period—but it's still only a tiny fraction of all drug...
12/11/07 -
Prospect For Peace - Blatant fabrication in Middle East reporting by two outlets that take themselves very seriously – The New Republic Online (TNR) and the National Review Online (NRO) – has the blogosphere buzzing. The story went mainstream when the New York Times ran a piece relating how NRO, after months ofMartin Peretz sniping at TNR for carrying ‘Baghdad Diarist” reports of US military misbehavior in...
12/10/07 -
Vox Baby - Mark Thoma directs us to Michael Kinsley's commentary in Time arguing that "legal vs. illegal immigration isn't the real issue." I take the bait. Here is one of Kinsley's key paragraphs: Another question: Why are you so upset about this particular form of lawbreaking? After all, there are lots of laws, not all of them enforced with vigor. The suspicion naturally arises that the illegality...
12/10/07 -
Scotus Blog - Thursday is the deadline for the federal government to provide the D.C. Circuit Court with the full record of government information about a Guantanamo Bay detainee, Saifullah Paracha. His case is the first one to be heard by a civilian court on the military decision to continue his detention. The Justice Department has asked for a postponement of the Thursday date. If it does not receive one, early...
12/10/07 -
Pajamas Media - “Sunday horror: Church shootings in Colorado; gunman killed by armed female church security staffer.” (Thanks to Michelle Malkin for this rubric.) As Malkin comments: “Amid the horror, a glimmer of good news: The culture of self-defense may have saved untold lives.” Glenn Reynolds remembers meeting with a student shortly after the rampage at Virginia Tech last spring: On Monday,...
12/09/07 -
Pandagon - Ezra’s right; there’s something farcical about the knee jerk use of the word “nanny state” when you’re talking about children. The rhetorical device “nanny state” was developed to exploit a very specific set of non-subtly gendered anxieties—to make men especially picture a finger-wagging Mary Poppins that they could rebel against. “Don’t you tell ME what to do! I’m a grown...
12/09/07 -
Poligazzette - Only 18% of the American people believe that Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons program. Why? The latest Rasmussen poll shows that the American people aren’t buying the latest NIE assessment with regards to Iran. Only 18% of those asked by Rasmussen believe that Iran has, indeed, stopped its nuclear weapons program. In contrast, 66% of those asked believe that Iran has not put its...
12/09/07 -
Balkinization - After all, haven't they learned from the experience of the past 35 years that it's not the crime but the cover-up that'll get you? Yes, they have. Let's not lose sight of the big picture. This was not something they did on the spur of the moment. They vetted it with Rockefeller and Harman, for goodness' sake, and then destroyed the tapes after Harman urged them not to do so. And right...
12/08/07 -
Obsidian Wings - There are clearer signs that Iraq is becoming less violent, perhaps sustainably so. Civilian casualties are one measure for gauging the success or failure of a counterinsurgency operation, and they have dropped for the third consecutive month. Nov2007civcasiraq (Hat tip to Engram for the graphs.) The three-month moving average shows a similar trend. Nov2007civcasiraq3month The...
12/08/07 -
The Oil Drum - We on The Oil Drum spend so much time worrying about oil supply that we tend to think that electrical supply is relatively safe in comparison. If we stop to think about the issues, I think that we will find that the electrical situation is not much better than the oil situation. The likelihood of widespread electrical outages in next five to ten years is uncomfortably high. We may already...
12/08/07 -
Open Left - This is a long post framing a lot of thinking we've been doing at OpenLeft and elsewhere around ending the war in Iraq. One of Wes Clark's best expressions is 'we can do it because we are doing it'. And after wallowing in some frustration over mistakes progressives have made, I'm coming around to the view that we are working hard to end the war. Whether you are working to elect Democrats,...
12/07/07 -
Right Wing Nut House - Above and beyond the questions about the reasons key judgments on the Iranian nuclear program were altered so dramatically over the course of just two years, the biggest puzzle of all is why the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was released in the first place. Aside from initiating a political earthquake here at home, the revelation that Iran stopped working on its nuclear program in...
12/07/07 -
The American Scene - Why I Oppose a Carbon Tax I oppose a carbon tax for a very simple reason: I do not believe its benefits justify its costs. More specifically, I do not believe that that the incremental reduction in risk that it would provide over-and-above a much cheaper technology-focused policy would nearly offset its incremental costs over-and-above such a technology-focused policy for the foreseeable...
12/07/07 -
the space review - For NASA and Mars, it’s no humans allowed. As reported by the Mars Society and other space enthusiasts, Congress is finally clamping down on the menace of human life on Mars (see “Why ‘Save Mars’ is worth the effort”, The Space Review, November 12, 2007). The House of Representatives version of HR 3093, the bill that determines NASA’s funding for 2008, effectively bans the study of...
12/05/07 -
grist mill - A few weeks ago, one of the presidential candidates' advisors challenged a group of climate leaders to describe America's future. His challenge triggered a flurry of e-mails as we attempted to articulate a vision. We talked about carbon caps and price signals and new investments in R&D. That's fine, the advisor responded, but what it the vision? What is America's perfect future? I'm not sure...
12/05/07 -
Migra Matters - just keep that number in the back of your mind for the time being – I'll get back to it's significance a little later on . … but for now, just file it away somewhere where we can find it when we need it. For almost three years now, anti-immigrant forces have been ratcheting up their message of opposition to anything short of deportation and/or attrition for the approximately 12 mil unauthorized...
12/05/07 -
One Salient Oversight - Over the years I have come up with some crazy ideas and schemes. Every time I do, however, I discover that someone has been there first. I came up with the idea of a Democratic system of government that selects politicians randomly and without the need for political parties and elections, but then discovered that someone else had come up with it first. I invented the Zero Unemployment Economic...
12/05/07 -
Jonathan Stein - Nobody is waiting until Thursday's speech to weigh in on whether or not Romney is making a smart move. Marc Ambinder has a nice list of pros and cons, but I think Ross Douthat hits it on the head. With the Iowa caucus on January 3rd, the primary campaign basically lasts from today until Christmas Eve. That's all the time Romney has to reframe Mike Huckabee, his top competitor in Iowa, who, due...
12/05/07 -
VOX - Immigration stirs up strong enough fears to justify questionable measures of protection against it – from arrests at the doors of French schools to the border wall that separates the USA from Mexico. Economic research suggests that the intensity of these reactions seems completely disproportionate to immigration’s real economic impact on the local population. David Card has shown that even...
12/05/07 -
Cato - The politics of free speech are changing fast. The presidential public financing system is all but dead, largely because the candidates are raising so much money they don’t need to dun the taxpayers for campaign cash. The Democrats have raised a lot more money for the coming election than the Republicans. The Supreme Court is starting to favor free speech in campaign finance cases and casting...
12/04/07 -
gates of vienna - This is an unpleasant news story. If it were only another “political correctness run amok” article, I could simply post it with a snide comment or two as an introduction, and that would be it. But this is more than that. It’s not just the fact that a nine-year-old boy was charged with a hate crime. It’s what his teachers, his parents, and the newspaper writer consider normal and...
12/04/07 -
Balkinization - A couple of weeks back, Jack invited me to guest blog about my new book, Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for a Breakthrough Technology, just out from Yale University Press. The book examines a broad range of legal and policy issues raised by stem cell research, starting with the issues that garner significant media attention, such as President Bush’s restrictive federal funding policy, but...
12/04/07 -
Right Wing Nut House - At last night’s CNN/YouTube Republican Debate, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee finally came into his own on the national stage. He looked relaxed, in command, and spoke well and forcefully on his issues. This was a far cry from Huckabee’s first debate where he was seen as an asterisk in the polls and a non-entity on stage. He looked a like deer caught in Romney’s headlights, so...
12/03/07 -
Mulch Blog - The politics of providing nutrition assistance to low-income people, at home and abroad, have come into sharp focus this year. Rising food prices are straining domestic food aid budgets, even as demand for assistance surges because of higher unemployment. Programs that provide assistance in the form of food (versus cash) are coming up short. Prices have rationed away the "surplus" food and...
12/03/07 -
Jon Swift - Glenn Greenwald and other liberals in the blogosphere have been criticizing respected Time reporter Joe Klein for writing a piece about attempts to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that had a few minor factual errors and accused the Democrats of giving "terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." Time's Managing Editor Rick Stengel eventually responded to the...
12/03/07 -
Red State - Karl Rove and DCCC boss Chris Van Hollen were Chris Wallace's guest on FOX News Sunday, with Rove arguing that both frontrunners – Rudy and Hillary – could be in trouble if they lose Iowa and New Hampshire and the winners of the States have time to gain momentum. Van Hollen touched Rove inappropriately throughout the segment. Mike Huckabee told host George Stephanopoulos of ABC's This...
12/01/07 -
American Thinker - So said then-New York Jets coach Herman Edwards in a press conference a few years ago. His remark was so sublimely and simplistically apt that is a favorite of cable sports review shows and chat sessions. Yet William Rusher, one of conservatism's grey eminences, concludes that it would be better and not really dangerous for conservative voters to allow someone like Hillary Clinton to become...
12/01/07 -
Over Lawyered - Once again, the combination of contingency fees and law enforcement spells trouble: an article by Tresa Baldas in the National Law Journal reports that controversy is mounting over the activities of private firms that go after noncustodial parents' child support obligations in exchange for a percentage share of the bounty ("Suits collecting around child support collectors", Sept. 17, no free...
12/01/07 -
Cato At Liberty - Over at the National Interest, my boss Ted Carpenter has been slugging it out with former senator Jim Talent over (originally) Fred Thompson’s proposal to spend 4.5% of GDP on defense. Ted notes correctly that we already spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined, but Sen. Talent is nonplused. To the contrary, he protests that the Navy must buy new DDG-1000 destroyers,...
11/30/07 -
Reason - Advanced DNA testing has compelled America to confront some uncomfortable truths about its criminal justice system. In 2000 Illinois Gov. Jim Ryan imposed a moratorium on executions in his state after DNA tests exonerated 13 death row inmates, several of whom had come perilously close to their execution dates. In March 2007, the noted defense attorney Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project, which...
11/30/07 -
Juan Cole - Not Invading and Occupying other Countries Branded 'Isolationism' In a new low of despicable looniness, at the Republican debate in St. Petersburg, John McCain equated those Americans who want to stop militarily occupying Iraq with Hitler-enablers. He actually said that, saying that it was 'isolationism' of a sort that allowed Hitler to come to power. It gives a person a certain amount of...
11/30/07 -
Megan McArdle - . . . support the war. This is the emerging meme, mostly, interestingly, among people who are not themselves libertarians. Stand by for my post tomorrow: real progressives won't vote for Hilary Clinton. The central problem that libertarians sort of tried to grapple with, and then gave up in favor of shouting with each other, is how to reconcile respect for sovereignty with libertarian contempt...
11/28/07 -
Buzz Machine - I say it’s a good thing that our lives are becoming more public and permanent on the internet. It will keep us closer as people. It might make us more civil and more forgiving as a result. While we tend to focus on the dangers of losing privacy, for a Guardian column I’m working on, I’d like to examine the benefits of living in public, of publicness. * * * Start with the idea that...
11/28/07 -
Vox Baby - The Play's the Thing Why am I not surprised by this? Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside, Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to...
11/28/07 -
Balkinization - In a previous post I predicted that the Supreme Court would find for individual rights advocates in the upcoming Heller case, but that this might advantage gun control advocates and the Democratic party in the short run. Responding to my analysis, James Skoufis over at Real Clear Politics argues: if the conservative Court strikes down the DC law, a scenario I think is likely, it will take...
11/28/07 -
Becker-Posner Blog - All the rich countries are successful in raising sizable amounts of revenue from taxes with only a rather little tax evasion. Tax avoidance is the use of legal means to reduce taxes, whereas tax evasion uses illegal means. The federal government of the US raises almost 20 percent of American GDP through taxes on personal and business income, capital gains, estates, and the sale of gasoline...
11/28/07 -
Sentinel Effect - What do George Clooney, Newt Gingrich, and the Hungarian Communist Party have in common? They each have something to teach us about health care information, privacy, and public confidence. As most Americans probably know, Clooney had a motorcycle accident a few weeks ago and was treated in a New Jersey hospital. 27 hospital workers - including doctors, nurses, and clerical staff - were later...
11/27/07 -
Ross Douthat - Forty-five percent of black children whose parents were solidly middle class in 1968 -- a stratum with a median income of $55,600 in inflation-adjusted dollars -- grew up to be among the lowest fifth of the nation's earners, with a median family income of $23,100. Only 16 percent of whites experienced similar downward mobility. At the same time, 48 percent of black children whose parents were...
11/26/07 -
Firedoglake - During the many tortured hours of public statements and Congressional testimony that Alberto Gonzales gave before he resigned as AG, he repeatedly sought to distinguish among multiple intelligence gathering programs which the government is currently running. He repeatedly said the phrase “the program the President has confirmed.” It got me thinking about all the programs that we know something...
11/26/07 -
Future Pundit - A couple of New York Times pieces on wind power illustrate some of the obstacles in the way of growth in wind power. In the United States, one of the areas most suited for wind turbines is the central part of the country, stretching from Texas through the northern Great Plains — far from the coastal population centers that need the most electricity. In Denmark, which pioneered...
11/26/07 -
Van Der Galiën - As a European conservative I have to say that I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the branch of conservatism George W. Bush says he belongs to: compassionate conservatism. To me, it simply sounds like an excuse to favor and implement distinctly unconservative policies. What’s more, compassion has nothing whatsoever to do with politics. You’re compassionate in your private life. Out of...
11/26/07 -
Right Wing Nut House - I never thought I’d witness it in my lifetime. The paranoid left, aided and abetted by universal access to the internet along with an educational system that has stopped teaching young people the mechanics of thinking rationally, has apparently broken through and gone mainstream. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore...
11/26/07 -
The Moderate Voice - Actor and former Senator Fred Thompson’s candidacy has always been one of the most interesting in the 2008 GOP Presidential nomination sweepstakes. You can’t quite say he was drafted but there was a virtual clamor by some to get him in the race. After all, he was the perfect anti-Giuliani, the anti-Romney, the anti-McCain and reminded many in his plainspoken manner, with his ability to...
11/26/07 -
Clive Crook - Krugman and Krugman and Social Security 21 Nov 2007 01:11 pm Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post launches an angry attack on Paul Krugman's recent column on Social Security, which accused Barack Obama of being played for a sucker on the issue. The argument has two equally dishonest components. The first is to deny that Social Security faces a daunting financing problem -- one that will...
11/22/07 -
Matthew Yglesias - Under Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic Party assembled a political coalition so vast and diffuse that it included the "solid south" voting bloc of white supremacists, but also included most African-American voters, who were attracted to the New Deal's economic program and who were beginning to be incorporated into some Northern political machines. This, in turn, helped spur the growth of a...
11/22/07 -
Stumbling and Mumbling - As an argument for limiting immigration in total, this won't do. "Liberal values" and "national identity" are two different things. Many Brits' love of freedom is sadly lacking. Immigration can be a way of shoring up this love. Generations of Jewish immigrants (and their descendants) have surely contributed to support for liberty. The immigration of Ugandan Asians in the 1970s rekindled entrepreneurial...
11/22/07 -
Van der Galiën - During the examination the doctor was given a description of the injury and proceeded to perform her examination, concentrating on the knee area. Finding nothing wrong she asked for clarification about the injury was was told again that it occurred to the lower leg region. During the further examination, which was conducted efficiently and, to the uneducated eye, thoroughly, the doctor received...
11/21/07 -
The Moderate Voice - If that isn’t confusing enough, add this simple fact: I rarely express a political opinion. I talk about politics, to be sure. I’ve written extensively on my blog and elsewbere about political calculus, political candidates, political rhetoric and strategy, and about political history. But rarely have I expressed a specific opinion about a political issue. The main reason for this is that...
11/21/07 -
the oildrum - Recently, a large group of auto workers and dealers have broken from the industry in order to support the 35 mpg by 2020 fuel efficiency standard that is currently being debated by Congress. This is the latest high-profile group that has joined the ranks of a broad coalition of environmental organizations, student groups, musicians, and trade associations that have been lobbying Congress to pass a...
11/21/07 -
redstate - That analysis still stands. For a while, the Fred Thompson campaign gave me hope for someone who might be a little more solid on the issue, but looking at the polling right now leads me inescapably to the conclusion that Fred Thompson is toast. He's not polling any higher than third in any state right now, and Romney has even moved into second in the crucial state of Florida. I just don't know that...
11/20/07 -
Chicago Law Blog - As the Holiday season approaches, Consumer Reports has placed advertisements warning consumers of the waste associated with gift cards, a growing and popular means of getting through birthdays, bar-mitzvahs and now, the Christmas season. Retailers (and some banks) love gift cards because a sizeable fraction are lost or allowed to expire, and many go unused while the vendor enjoys the interest. The...
11/20/07 -
abu muqawama - The Army has summoned the top U.S. commander in Iraq back to Washington to preside over a board that will pick some of the next generation of Army leaders, an unusual decision that officials say represents a vote of confidence in Gen. David H. Petraeus's conduct of the war, as well as the Army counterinsurgency doctrine he helped rewrite. The Army has long been criticized for rewarding conventional...
11/20/07 -
Tech Republican Blog - Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton came by today's bloggers briefing at Heritage to talk about his new book, "Surrender is Not an Option," and sound-off on a wide variety of foreign policy issues. Ambassador Bolton has a knack for memorable lines, and I was extremely impressed by his knowledge of world affairs and his ability to concisely explain complicated issues in a...
11/20/07 -
kents imperative - We have never been much a fan of unions in this modern era of incredible individual opportunity and rapid innovation – qualities seemingly quite at odds with the behavior of most forms of organized labor. We do however freely admit that unions have their place in a competitive market economy so long as individuals are free to choose to organize (or not) as their preference dictates, free from...
11/20/07 -
Balkinization - To be sure, the death penalty is not consistently and predictably applied in this country. For one thing, opponents of the death penalty have reduced the number of times it has been used, and they have slowed down the process of executions. Moreover, it is possible to avoid the death penalty through plea bargains, which prosecutors may accept to ensure conviction and to avoid the expense of a capital...
11/20/07 -
Obsidian Wings - I’d like to say that I find Governor Perdue’s emphasis on prayer to address droughts baffling. But I don’t. I understand it completely. Growing up Southern Baptist, I regularly prayed until about midway through college when I turned into a freedom-hating Bolshevik surrender monkey. But even if I understand where he’s coming from, it’s still strange. Although it’s a seemingly harmless...
11/19/07 -
Minding the Campus - Five students drinking Gatorade and water for a week are apparently all it takes to bring a major university to its knees. Columbia has had more than its share of lunatic events this year - the noose, the cancellation of the Minuteman speakers for the second time, inviting and then abusing the Iranian madman, and last week another controversy over a biased comment someone had scrawled into...
11/19/07 -
Powerline blog - ...and I, for one, think it's a good thing. After being given up for dead just a few months ago, John McCain is surging in the polls and turning up in the news. Liberals are trying to make something of the fact that he answered a question by a Republican partisan about "how we beat the bitch" (i.e., Ms. Hillary) without falling over in a dead faint. This, of course, can only be good for his...
11/19/07 -
Mulch Blog - Suppose for a moment Sen. Reid fails to get the 60 votes needed to cut off debate on the farm bill later this morning. (I've already supposed as much to Steve Hedges.) It means he takes down the bill, or debates mischievous amendments to it for weeks. Which might as well be forever given all the other things on his plate. [UPDATE: Cloture did fail. If a compressed farm bill debate, with limited...
11/16/07 -
Where's The Outrage? - Warren Buffett, the second richest man in the world, has been an outspoken critic of the Bush tax cuts since back in 2001 or 2002. He is one of the few billionaires who are honest enough to admit that they aren’t paying as much in taxes (proportionately) as you or I. This is the problem in America. We have been sold a bill of goods and the goods are terrible. Let’s start with the Death Tax....
11/16/07 -
Patrick Ruffini - Let me throw out a counterfactual. If we had had blogs when Bill Clinton was President, he would have been a lot less effective and his approval ratings lower. Bloggers, who shape more and more of the coverage, deal largely in the printed word. Until YouTube, video was utterly irrelevant to our commentary. Even now, a well-informed blogger can go through an entire day without turning on the...
11/16/07 -
Accidental Blogger - In older agrarian and trade based societies, names often reflected people's vocations or otherwise described their position in a place or tribe. Some South Indian and Scandinavian names derive from the father's first name rather than the family name (a similar system existed among older Jewish cultures). Names like Smith, Miller, Fletcher, Bauer, Baker etc. point to the type of work the name holders...
11/16/07 -
Neo-Neocon - I’ve written a great many posts on the tireless efforts of Democrats in this Congress to stop the Iraq War in the face of the fact that they simply don’t have the votes necessary to override Bush’s vetoes. I’ve described their exertions variously as politically motivated wishful thinking, as theater, and as an overcalculation of their own strength, among other things. And those efforts...
11/16/07 -
Huffington Post - Posted November 15, 2007 | 10:11 AM (EST) Read More: Filmmaking, Hollywood, Hollywood Strike, Moviemaking, Television, WGA Strike, Writers Guild Of America, Writers Guild Of America Strike, Writers' Strike, Writers' Strike Opinion, Breaking Entertainment News stumbleupon :Writers Guild Strike Primer: Part 5, The Little Guy digg: Writers Guild Strike Primer: Part 5, The Little Guy ...
11/16/07 -
Counter Terrorism Blog - I do not know how many times I have made the point that United States citizenship represents the "Keys to the Kingdom." United States citizenship opens all sorts of doors to those who do not wish to share the "American Dream" but rather create a nightmare for our nation and our citizens. United States citizenship enables the alien who acquires United States citizenship to be able to work at any job...
11/14/07 -
agonist - The other day a friend pointed me towards two good Daily Kos diaries on immigration. There's a lot to like in both of them, but I want to pick out a couple of strands for discussion. In the first Duke points out, correctly, that the US has had other high immigration periods, and indeed as you can see in the chart to the left, this isn't even the highest. He then goes on to say: ...
11/14/07 -
Red State - They are the casualties of wars you don’t often hear about - soldiers who die of self-inflicted wounds. Little is known about the true scope of suicides among those who have served in the military. But a five-month CBS News investigation discovered data that shows a startling rate of suicide, what some call a hidden epidemic So reads the lede from the CBS News website version...
11/14/07 -
Captains Quarters - The Writers Guild went on strike earlier this month, suspending television and film production in Hollywood while they tussle with the studios over residual payments. So far, this has received significant coverage in the media, and today, Newsweek offers one writer the opportunity to explain the reason the writers walked off the job. What Douglas McGrath fails to provide is a reason to care...
11/13/07 -
Ezra Klein - So we're back to arguing about John Edwards' plan to strip members of Congress of their health care if they don't pass comprehensive reform. I'm always astonished at how bizarrely literally pundits act when they approach this idea. It's true that, in the strong form, its; unconstitutional. Edwards cannot, with his pen, deprive anyone of their health care. The Edwards Campaign, by contrast, says...
11/13/07 -
Eat Local Challenge - Here's something unexpected: the World Trade Organization (WTO) -- one of the most powerful forces for globalization and international homogenization -- might actually help the local foods movement in the United States. A little while ago I wrote about how planting restrictions in certain farm subsidy programs. These restrictions impede the creation of a local food system by requiring...
11/13/07 -
Daily Kos - Assuming we win the presidency in 2008, we'll have a historic window of opportunity to enact serious progressive legislation -- most importantly on Iraq and health care -- in a two-year window until the 2010 midterms. It'll be ugly, with a desperate GOP throwing the worst they can dish to stem momentum toward universal health care and efforts to dismantle the mess they've created these past...
11/12/07 -
Donklephant - I often get post ideas after responding to comments in Donklephant. So it is with this post, and while I may be covering some old ground, bear with me. I am going to pull on a few different threads, then try to knit those threads back together and try it on for size. After adding my two cents (well actually $100) to the Ron Paul “money bomb”, timed for Guy Fawkes day I had an entertaining...
11/12/07 -
Political Cortex - With an endless, futile and costly Iraq war, a stinking economy and most Americans seeing the country on the wrong track, the greatest national group delusion is that electing Democrats in 2008 is what the country needs. Keith Olbermann was praised when he called the Bush presidency a criminal conspiracy. That missed the larger truth. The whole two-party political system is a criminal...
11/12/07 -
Sublimity - Blog comments are for laying out relevant bits and pieces of one's philosophy (when they're not for snarking and making lame jokes). If you want to lay out a big chunk, you should use your own blog. And since this thread at ObWi was rapidly approaching big chunk stage, I'm going to transfer my thoughts over here. So this is simultaneously a response to Jesurgislac's latest comment as well as an...
11/12/07 -
Stealth Badger - This is the draft chapter on unions that’s being put together for the book. It’s not perfect (and literally I’ve just finished working on it for much of the day), but it is timely. Please forgive me for sketchy citations, I’m working on that too - and the only words that are not mine (the one snipped of Milton Friedman’s speech with the two Adam Smith quotes) are cited. Since the book...
11/12/07 -
Cato At Liberty - Atlantic blogger Matthew Yglesias argues that it doesn’t matter why income inequality is increasing. According to Matt, as long as higher top tax rates and more downward redistribution won’t much hurt economic performance, then we ought to just go ahead and raise taxes and increase transfers, never mind the mechanisms of rising inequality. Oftentimes, though, liberals act as if the...
11/12/07 -
Red State - On FNS, Democrat Presidential hopeful Bill Richardson demanded that the United States cut off all aid to Pakistan. Richardson based the necessity for his Iraq "plan" – run away – on the words of retired General Ricardo Sanchez. When host Chris Wallace pointed out that Sanchez had been removed from Iraq in June of 2004 following the Abu Ghraib incident, Richardson proclaimed that Sanchez had...
11/10/07 -
Becker Posner Blog - Posner raises interesting and important issues, and even paradoxes, about the nature of advertising by airlines and other sectors. The specific question that starts his analysis is why airlines with relatively good on time performances do not advertise that fact? To discuss this and related issues, it is necessary to consider the nature of advertising and the role of information in advertising....
11/10/07 -
Debatable Land - Although I'm rather suspicious of all the Obama-as-Messiah slavering one sees these days, it is true that in some policy areas he offers a better approach than Hillary Clinton. One obvious example is Cuba. Hillary, for reasons best known to herself but doubtless involving trimming and calculation and a determination to leave no opening any opponents - even the mad ones - could try and exploit,...
11/10/07 -
Balkinization - No way. In general, the excesses of the Bush II administration can be dealt with without permanently infringing on executive power. You don’t need provocative signing statements to be an effective president. And as Jack Goldsmith argues, referring issues like detainee treatment to Congress can actually enhance presidential authority. But what of a new Clinton administration’s (or any other...
11/09/07 -
The Oil Drum - Our reliance on foreign oil raises prices for families, contributes to the climate crisis, and leaves us more vulnerable to unstable regimes: Since 2001, gasoline prices have increased 105%, and energy costs are now consuming nearly one-fifth of after-tax income for the majority of low and middle-income families -- double the percentage of 10 years ago. And today, with oil prices at all-time highs...
11/09/07 -
kikos house - You know that we live in unusual times when Congress has seen the light and is resisting replacing the U.S.'s mainstay fighter jets with an incredibly expensive Cold War throwback and there are questions about whether the Air Force itself has outlived its usefulness. The F-15 Eagle is the Air Force's current all-weather tactical fighter. It entered service in 1974 and is slated to remain in...
11/09/07 -
taylor marsh - As the '08 primary season spirals into the silly season of circular firing, the first clear victim is John Edwards. He's not done yet but he is clearly sliding, which is anything but good news and something Mike Lux warned to watch out for on my show a couple of weeks ago. (Mike will be on again this coming Monday.) Another issue for Edwards is that he's not grown his support from a year ago, but...
11/07/07 -
Obsidian Wings - According to the Advocate, ENDA (pdf) -- the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which bans employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation -- is scheduled to come up for a vote in the House today. Rep. Tammy Baldwin will offer an amendment banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity. The amendment is likely to be pulled after being debated. If you support ENDA and/or...
11/07/07 -
Andrew Sullivan - One of the disturbing aspects of having two dynastic presidential families - a sign that a republic truly is turning into a corrupt empire - is that a former president can intervene, with all his partisan power, on behalf of a candidate to whom he is related during a critical primary campaign. This week Bill Clinton showed his usual class by accusing Obama and Edwards of "swift-boating" his wife...
11/07/07 -
Dipnote - In his first posting, John writes an open letter to his Foreign Service Officer colleagues about the controversial issue of directed assignments in Iraq. The issue raises an interesting question, "Should diplomats and other non-military personnel be forced to work in an active war zone"? John Matel is a career Foreign Service Officer (FSO) who is currently serving as the team leader of the...
11/07/07 -
Marginal Revolution - Economic mining of the deep ocean is decades away. But the ISA has veto rights over developing ocean resources and this hardly seems conducive to increasing the value of those resources. Nor does the "some regulatory framework is better than none, if only to alleviate uncertainty" argument apply. No entrepreneurs are sitting around waiting for the U.S. to ratify the convention so they can proceed...
11/07/07 -
michael linn jones - The result is a number of illegal aliens that is in the millions. “Illegal immigrant” is the preferred term by some, but I don’t use it because it is highly inaccurate. Talk of “guest worker” programs or “temporary work visas” underlines the fact that these people are “guests,” just doing whatever labor is required before being asked to leave. But they don’t leave. And why...
11/07/07 -
patrick ruffini - November 5th wasn’t a genius idea thought up by Ron Paul’s inner circle. It came from the grassroots. Why don’t campaigns initiate more of this stuff? Because the odds are that supporters are the ones who will be coming up with most of the new ideas, not you. Trippi’s axiom about 600,000 online supporters being smarter than 200 people in Burlington still applies. Campaigns succeed not by...
11/06/07 -
Tim Graham - We have a new Special Report posted on the main MRC Web site on the ideological sandbox we call PBS. In previous years with Democratic control of Congress, PBS has played a more activist role within the media, dragging the rest of the national media further to the left and spurring more aggression and ill will against conservative and Republican leaders. Just as 2007 has been a year for a...
11/06/07 -
3 Quarks Daily - Global20warmingWhile discussing the issue of climate change, most people now accept that a solution must involve either a tax or a permit system to reduce emissions and create the incentives for lower emission technologies. Most people also assume that such policies must be coupled with active governmental regulation of certain industries, car-emissions standards, decommissioning of power-plants,...
11/06/07 -
Captains Quarters - Senior Republican leaders went to an ex-president hoping to get him to influence George Bush to knock Dick Cheney off of the 2004 ticket, according to a new book. Did they visit the ex-president with the most influence over George W -- his father? That would at least have been worthy of the Washington Post's time and effort to report. Instead, they look at the revelation that Gerald Ford turned...
11/04/07 -
Whirled View - I’ve been looking for a way to sum up George Bush’s black hole with regard to strategy. It’s not just that he seems incapable of strategy; he and his administration seem to actively work against strategy. I’ve found large numbers of examples (every foreign policy initiative, plus the nonstrategy for nuclear weapons), and recently it seemed to me that I was seeing enough commonalities...
11/04/07 -
Another Brilliant Idea - I am a fan of free-markets, and the key idea in free markets is competition. Although some claim that politics should be left to "free competition" (eg, "may the best man [sic] win"), I think a little regulation can make results better. My idea is to reserve half of all representative seats in the legislature for women. Here's why I think this is important: 1) After an election, the...
11/04/07 -
Brian Beutler - I've been trying to think up a good lead in to a post about taxes and sacrifice and politicians'--and by extension Americans'--unwillingness to confront long-term problems if such confrontation involves actually doing anything, and fortunately commenter alkali came through for me: If you were going to try to discourage use of mercury in consumer products by imposing a mercury tax, you...
11/02/07 -
Balkinization - All of which is to say -- and it's fairly amazing that this still needs to be said in this day and age -- if there is any single thing imaginable that the Senate, the Congress, and the world community have not "declined to do," it is to ban torture categorically. (Even Judge Mukasey understands this: He writes it dozens of times in his responses to the Senate.) That's not to say it would not...
11/02/07 -
worldwide sawdust - Is there any area of our government, over the span of the last seven years, any area, in domestic or foreign policy, national defense, public welfare, the economy, name it, where the average, reasonably informed American might point to success, to signs of progress, of improvement, something, anything, to point to with satisfaction, with pride? Yesterday I read an article by Steve Benin on the...
11/02/07 -
Whiteness Studies - We all know this rhetoric; we've been subjected to it non-stop for the last 40 or 45 years. You who are younger are lucky; you have not heard it as many times as some of us have. And unfortunately those who have grown up under the politically correct regime know no other way of thinking, unless somehow they have been kept out of the mainstream or raised by dissenting parents who don't conform to...
11/01/07 -
Culture Kitchen - The Pew Institute for Research is probably the largest non-for-profit public opinion survey group in the United States. Many people from both the left and right look at them as the source for number crunching anything having to do with elections, media use and the socio-political impact of market demographics. So it is not shocking to see the reaction around a recent survey they released...
11/01/07 -
Rightwing Nut House - What is it about the candidacy of Ron Paul that has attracted the paranoid fringe of American politics? Clearly, there are Ron Paul supporters who are rational and grounded, not given to spouting conspiracies or blaming “neocons” for everything bad that happens in the world (neocons being a blind for anti-Semitism). For all we know, they may be the majority of his voters. But...
11/01/07 -
Presto Pundit - are incompatible with Catholic social thought — so suggests Bush speech writer Michael Gerson, and so much the worse for the principles of the founders in Gerson’s view. (I’d like to hear Michael Novak weigh in on that one.) I don’t know how the Bush Republicans think they can grow a party when they are so busy alienating the conservative movement with such distorted and dishonest...
10/31/07 -
Dani Rodrik - We are all so affected by bad news on so many fronts – rising global inequality, a looming economic crisis, a warming planet, etc. – that we seldom take the time to savor the good news when they happen. According to the latest gender related statistics published in the 2007 World Development Indicators (WDI) by the World Bank, the gaps between the sexes are going through a major shift worldwide....
10/31/07 -
Whirled View - This is historically boneheaded. There are about 44 nations that have a level of nuclear technology that could support a nuclear weapons program. Beyond the five nuclear weapon nations in the NPT, only five more have actually developed testable nuclear devices. Three of those additional five have chosen to stay out of the NPT. One of the remaining two (South Africa) gave up its nuclear weapons and...
10/31/07 -
the revealer - An odd assessment from a man who, by his own admission, has been covering mainly the leaders, not the people in the pews, for the last three years. Even Kirkpatrick's definition of leadership is a little thin: He has focussed on the leaders who shouted "Look at me!" the loudest, the Falwells and the Dobsons and the absurd Rick Scarborough (who also shows up to provide color in Goodstein's piece)....
10/31/07 -
liberal order - This is likely a small problem. Do we see colleges springing up with such curricula? The gains to privatizing education are great and costs like this seem trivial given the substantial benefits. Two weeks ago I was listening to a discussion on NPR of research scientists in the U.S. who all (four of them) expressed their concern that scientific research and development in this country has deteriorated...
10/31/07 -
Ezra Klein - I used to believe that one of Bush's primary problems was that he was governor in a state with an absurdly weak governorship. In Texas, the executive is only the fifth most powerful position, and so Bush's disengagement with public policy made sense. He'd never needed to be engaged. I hoped Giuliani would actually be better, as his time in New York required real substantive involvement with policy...
10/31/07 -
megan mcardle - So what's different from liberalism? To the extent that the problems of the poor are inadequate money, I think that we should solve this problem by . . . giving them money. Not giving them food, shelter, or health care; just giving them money, and letting them decide what they want to buy. If they want to eat cornmeal mush for a month while watching cable television, let 'em. I think the government's...
10/29/07 -
TPM muckraker - The doubts, the concerns, the reasons for pause about attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey are coming fast and furious from senators left and right these days. It's been a steep descent from the heady days when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) preceded Mukasey's confirmation hearings by saying, "I like him." The tone seemed to first shift from one of friendly...
10/29/07 -
Freeptop - The Myth of Privatization is rather simple: the idea is that if you take any service rendered by the Government, and sell it off to private corporations, the service provided will be improved in cost and function. The idea behind this theory is that Government is burdened with bureaucracy, so therefore, will always do a worse job than commercial businesses, which are perceived as being more...
10/29/07 -
MVDG - Britons have had universal health care for years, something many progressives in America hope to copy. Sadly for those progressives, and most of all sadly for the British people themselves, socialized medicine seems to excel at one thing particularly: pushing those who have the money to receive better and on-time health care to other countries. Record numbers of Britons are travelling abroad...
10/28/07 -
The Tattler - The Senate passed the Matthew Shepard Act which updates and expands the federal hate crimes laws to include bias motivated by violence based on a victim's sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, and disability. By a vote of 60-39, the Senate ended a debate, conducted a voice vote, and attached it to an amendment to a Department of Defense Authorization Act. Matthew Shepard's parents,...
10/28/07 -
Marc Ambinder - When I visited Ron Paul's New Hampshire campaign headquarters this morning, only one member of his staff, Kate Rick, was there. The other six were out building a contraption to capture the unique energies of the Paul movement here. Excitement -- Paul is moving up (slowly) in the polls and has only, to this point, run a single radio ad. A check of the parking lots at Paul events in New Hampshire...
10/28/07 -
Ari Kaufman - When residents of the East or West Coast tell me their impressions of the American Midwest, they think of bucolic terrain, churchgoing folks, Main Streets dotted with Old Glory, Mom and Pop stores and family values. While much of this is true, especially the farther you move out from the major Midwest cities, most of these folks actually mistake the Midwest for the Great Plains. Look at a map of...
10/27/07 -
Valerie Plame - On this fifth day of my book tour for Fair Game; My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House and my final book tour blog for the Huffington Post, I'm finding my stride. With the outing of my covert identity by conservative columnist Robert Novak in July 2003, I went from being a very private person whose entire professional career was devoted to the idea that discretion was paramount, to a...
10/27/07 -
Dana Goldstein - Ezra has encouraged me to jump in to what has become an energetic debate on vouchers for poor urban public schools, so here I go. Quick run-down: Megan McCardle seethes with rage over rich liberals who essentially practice "school choice" by picking up and moving to expensive suburbs, but who don't support vouchers so poor parents can also get their kids out of bad schools. Ezra responds that vouchers...
10/27/07 -
Balkanization - Believe it or not, Judge Mukasey's confirmation (or at least a positive vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee) just might depend on his acknowledgement that waterboarding is torture. (Or so says this AP story, anyway. I'll believe it when I see it.) In any event, what's the big deal, right? Saying that waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in the east. Should be a piece...
10/26/07 -
Connecting the Dots - The Presidential polls keep telling us Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani are “polarizing” voters. Even as they widen their leads by more than 2-1, the two front runners are beset by sizable minorities who swear never to vote for them under any circumstances. Today new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg numbers show the former First Lady “viewed unfavorably by 44% of respondents” and about...
10/26/07 -
11 D - Thanks to Jeremy for two links today engineered to get me all steamed up. One article was Rudy's pick for the World Series. As if we needed another reason to not vote for the man. The second link will make for more productive discussion and far less profanity. According to the Economist, an increase in the funding of schools has not led to improvement in test scores. They point to evidence...
10/26/07 -
Federalist - I wrote about this before, but Democrats are not being taken to task like they should for their assertion that health insurance is one of the biggest crises facing America today. Since they have so few positive ideas to offer, I guess they have to attack something. But if we’re going to pick something that a large minority of Americans don’t have, why pick health care? What about life...
10/24/07 -
The Moderate Voice - A Commentary on Two Disasters The inferno in Southern California rages on unchecked, but already comparisons are being made to the last major natural disaster in the U.S. – Hurricane Katrina, which walloped New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, taking over 1,800 lives and destroying $81 billion worth of real estate. Because of the very nature of the SoCal disaster – several wildfires...
10/24/07 -
Mark Kilmer - Ron Paul does not belong in the race for the GOP nomination Ron Paul played a valuable role in Congress. I do think so. He was never effective at limiting government, but that's not the role I saw him fill; rather, he was a minor gadfly to the statists, keeping in the vocabulary of Congress the small-l libertarian notions of a government limited to specific functions, non-confiscatory taxation,...
10/24/07 -
Dinesh DSouza - It seems atheists have developed a comprehensive strategy to win the minds of the next generation. The strategy can be described simply: let the religious people breed them, and we will educate them to despise their parents’ beliefs. Many people think that the secularization of the minds of our young people is the inevitable consequence of learning and maturing. In fact, it is to a large...
10/23/07 -
Quick Rob - This post will not necessarily deal with arguing that the popular global warming theory is ALL wrong, or that global warming isn’t occurring, but rather this argument’s strength is pointing out the incredible amount of doubt and the giant-sized holes and questions which still remain. No one with any sense in their head can listen to so much doubt and contrary evidence and still remain...
10/23/07 -
MVDG - While delivering his inaugural address before the American people, President Jimmy Carter was given the task of reconciling a scarred American psyche with the enduring hope of national exceptionalism and pride. Marred by the Watergate scandal and Vietnam, the American morale was low, and the country’s global standing was left in question. Attempting to juggle this sensitive dichotomy, Carter...
10/23/07 -
Farm Policy - An update posted at the Senate Agriculture Committee webpage indicated that a press conference, in which the Chairman’s mark of the Farm Bill will be unveiled, is going to be held today at 12:30 p.m. EDT in 328A Russell Senate Office Building. The press conference can be viewed live via the Committee webpage. DTN writer Chris Clayton reported yesterday (link requires subscription) that,...
10/22/07 -
Captains Quarters - Perhaps. They always seemed beyond embarrassment in their relentless support for Democrats in elections, even when Republican policies generated economic growth and investment -- and jobs. The Democrats offer the ability to dodge transparency, however, and that has more allure for union bosses than a growing economy, which explains why workers have increasingly rejected unions over the last few...
10/22/07 -
Whirled View - Avoid false choices driven by ideology. Seeing choices as mutually exclusive reflects an ideologically blinkered vision of the world that denies the United States the tools and the flexibility it needs to lead and succeed. Power usually depends on blending policies. U.S. foreign policy must be guided by a preference for multilateralism, with unilateralism as an option only when absolutely...
10/22/07 -
the impolitic - What if one company owned the daily newspapers, the weekly “alternative” newspaper, the city magazine, suburban publications, the eight largest radio stations, the dominant broadcast and cable television stations, popular internet news and calendar sites, billboards and concert halls in your city -- in your country, asks John Nichols, blogger at The Nation? Is there anyone but Rupert Murdoch...
10/22/07 -
The Moderate Voice - It has been a tough decade for the venerable New York Times. After winning a record seven Pulitzer Prizes for post-9/11 coverage that exemplified the great journalism the newspaper has produced for 150 years, it has been pretty much all downhill. To be sure, the Times has been buffeted by market forces beyond its control, but its problems are substantially of its own doing, including scandals...
10/22/07 -
Ezra Klein - I'm off to the Bridging the Gaps conference, where I'm speaking on a panel about state and federal solutions to the health care crisis. For those interested, here are my opening remarks: I’m here, I think, to be the Grinch. We’ve got all these great universal bills passing at the state level, and I’m here to tell you that, well, they are pretty great, but they’re not going to work....
10/22/07 -
Red State - Today, Virginia Governor Mark Warner (D) granted clemency to Robin Leavitt, thus saving him from the death penalty. This is front-page news because Levitt would have been the 1,000th person legally executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, a period of almost 30 years. The 999 convicted criminals thus far executed since 1976 had an opportunity to make their...
10/19/07 -
Agonist - Last time the FCC, under Powell (yes, Colin Powell's son, whose career Colin bought and paid for by carrying Bush's water) did this 3 million Americans contacted them, coming out against it -- the most in FCC history. Of course they ignored all that and passed it anyway, then it was reversed by the Supreme Court. Which is, needless to say, the other reason this is being done again: because the...
10/19/07 -
Robert Reich - No candidate for president has suggested that the nation should raise the marginal tax rate on the richest beyond the 38 percent rate it was under Clinton (it’s now 35 percent, but the richest of the rich, as I’ll explain in a moment, are paying only 15 percent). Yet new data from the IRS show that income inequality continues to widen. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans are earning more than...
10/19/07 -
the seminal - The arguments against compulsory voting typically run in the rights vs. responsibilities vein. Rights like free speech are given to all Americans, but all Americans do not need to exercise their right to free speech. Coercing people to vote, so the argument goes, is a severe breach of our liberty. I don’t buy this line of thinking, for two reasons. One, I think compulsory voting can be created in...
10/18/07 -
Appalachian Greens - John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, will meet behind closed doors this Thursday to start piecing together the Senate's version of an electronic eavesdropping "reform" bill. You have a critical role to play to ensure Senator Rockefeller protects the Constitution and our privacy. What the Intelligence Committee comes up with this Thursday will guide...
10/18/07 -
The Garance - The libertarian magazine Reason holds a monthly happy hour here in Washington, which I stopped by once a few years ago. It was at a smoky bar (this was before the city banned smoking in bars), and the room was packed with a crowd that appeared to consist of approximately 92 men and, uh, me. I’m sure there were a few other women there, but between the massively skewed gender ratio, the look...
10/18/07 -
Pharmalot - The agency effort over the past year to remove unapproved drugs from the market is gaining considerable attention, and for very different reasons. When the FDA launched this initiative, the reason cited was fairly straightforward - due to a grandfathering provision in a 1962 law, there were numerous little-known but widely-used meds that were actually never approved for public consumption. Citing...
10/17/07 -
Andrew Sullivan - I forced myself. It was excruciating. Beyond embarrassing. Extraordinarily painful - especially for his wife. Why on earth they decided to subject themselves to prolonging this agony is a question worth asking. And the answer, I think, is: they have to. At this point in their lives, to allow the possibility that Craig is indeed homosexual, that he has sustained, lived, internalized a fundamental...
10/17/07 -
Balkin - The president has nominated former federal judge Michael Mukasey to serve as the next attorney general. The Senate will have plenty of questions to ask and issues to raise, and it should take this confirmation seriously. But it should move expeditiously to approval, recognizing that this is the first essential step towards taking the Justice Department off of life-support and making it a functioning...
10/17/07 -
Lessig - I bought this book because I heard it described on the radio (NPR, no less) in a way that made it sound like the dumbest book of the decade. It turns out that it was the summary, and not the book, that was dumb. Indeed, this is a fantastic book by an extremely smart and experienced liberal. It is the first book on the Corruption Required Reading list. A clue that there's something interesting...
10/16/07 -
Democracy Arsenal - Last week, Michael Cohen, in response to a post of mine, disagreed with my statement that “the understanding that while we may be good in some abstract sense, we are not, and cannot be, inherently good...is the major point of distinction between liberal interventionists and neo-conservatives,” and rightly countered that while he did believe in America’s inherent goodness, that didn’t make...
10/16/07 -
Captains Quarters - Aaron Klein, author of Schmoozing With Terrorists, met with a suicide-bomber recruit in Jenin to discover what drives volunteers to kill civilians in the name of Allah. Tomorrow, WND plans to publish excerpts from the book's first chapter in which Klein relates his conversation with Ahmed, as well as with Ahmed's recruiter, Abu Ayman, the head of Islamic Jihad in Jenin. Here's a taste of what...
10/16/07 -
Matthew Yglesias - The good news about John McCain's Foreign Affairs manifesto is that it lacks the tone of demagoguery and hysteria that you saw in Rudy Giuliani's contribution to that forum and, to a lesser extent, in Mitt Romney's as well. Unlike the others, who seem to want to be regarded as crazy, McCain clearly wants to seem pragmatic and reasonable. Unfortunately, appearance and reality aren't quite the same...
10/16/07 -
Connecting the Dots - Acting in a free-lance role, a nonprofit organization, Pro Publica, will offer long-term projects to uncover misdeeds in government, business and organizations on an exclusive basis for newspapers, magazines or other media outlets. To start, their offers won’t thrill thin-skinned editors. Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, is quoted as being “open to using work from an...
10/15/07 -
quick and ed - Hillary Clinton unveiled her presidential campaign higher education agenda yesterday. On the whole it's quite good and by far the most substantive proposal from any of the major candidates thus far. The safe thing for a Democrat is to focus on financial aid -- everyone's in favor of making college more affordable -- so it's no surprise to see worthwhile proposals to consolidate the HOPE and Lifetime...
10/15/07 -
rightwing nuthouse - Leaving aside the obvious political framework in which the criticism is given, perhaps it’s time to have a debate about what kind of government we have, what kind we want, and most importantly, what kind of government we need to insure that liberty is not just something our grandchildren read about in history books. This is a debate conservatives should win every time because at bottom, a majority...
10/14/07 -
The Moderate Voice - Among the millions of Americans frustrated with the refusal by the federal government to forcefully control illegal immigration is South Carolina Senator Glenn McConnell. As President Pro Tempore of the Senate McConnell has explained why he is calling for the nation’s first use of the US Constitution’s Article V provision for a convention of state delegates to propose constitutional...
10/14/07 -
Balkinization - Leiter is in the major leagues, the top-twenty, elite law schools of this country. Many law professors who raise objections to tenure, it is no coincidence, work in less luxurious circumstances, in double A and triple A law schools. As I have described in previous posts, it is an open secret that a sharp divide exists between elite and non-elite law schools, especially in the job prospects of their...
10/14/07 -
samizdata - From defining the strength out of the militias generally. And at the same time, part of an effort by the anti Federalists to prevent those same powers from being used to render only the individual states weak. History has shown in other places that when the central government has the power to call up and relocate military forces around the country (think Tian An Men square), the militias of each...
10/12/07 -
Andrew Sullivan - This ad hominem attack on anyone's views who veers from far left orthodoxy is routine among the professional GBLTXYZers who mau-mau the rest of us. John Aravosis is an almost pathologically partisan Democrat, a gleeful outer of insufficiently correct closeted public figures, a blogger in the mold of Atrios ... but he still can't be oppressed enough to be valid for the gay left. Hey, John. It's...
10/12/07 -
the carpetbagger report - A prominent Texas Republican has sued Rudy Giuliani’s law firm and a close friend and partner of Giuliani’s, Kenneth Caruso, alleging that Caruso, the firm and others “schemed and conspired to steal $10 million.” J. Virgil Waggoner, a Houston businessman and philanthropist, filed the previously unreported suit in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan in July. He alleges that...
10/12/07 -
All Alone in the Night - The United States government has been expanding the scope of its powers since the day the Constitution was ratified. This process ramped up markedly in the 20th century, and the expansion of the President's war powers grew alongside that more general growth. Today the United States finds itself embroiled in (arguably) three wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Global War on Terror. The Democratic Party...
10/11/07 -
Patrick Buchanan - What is it that distinguishes Bush Republicanism from the Coolidge, Taft, Eisenhower and Reagan varieties? Four major issues come to mind. Bush is a “Big Government conservative” who repudiated the “government-is-the-problem” philosophy of Reagan. His No Child Left Behind program, doubling the size of the Department of Education, and his vast expansion of Medicare to cover prescription...
10/11/07 -
Manager's Realm - American companies heard good news as exports reached their highest level ever, fueled by the falling dollar. Leading the export surge were consumer goods, farm products and industrial supplies. The overall increase in American exports was at 0.4 percent, which brought it to the record $138.3 billion. As a result, the trade deficit dropped by 2.4 percent over July, bringing it down to $57.6...
10/11/07 -
Campaign Trail - If you had told me back in January that after Labor Day Rudy Giuliani would have aired zero TV ads, John McCain would have just run his first ad, Mitt Romney would have run ads unchecked on the airways in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida, that Bill Richardson would have spent more on TV ads than John Edwards and Hillary Clinton combined, and that only a handful of states would have...
10/11/07 -
griper blade - A secret legal opinion? WTF is that? A more honest description might be "a legal defense, loaded and ready to fire, on the off-chance that we wind up facing charges over this." During his confirmation hearing, future (and former) Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a hint of the administrations' mindset when it came to torture. After Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested that torture might possibly...
10/11/07 -
Ezra Klein - Something has gone wrong on the Right. Become sick and twisted and tumorous and ugly. To visit Michelle Malkin's cave is to see politics at its most savage, its most ferocious, its most rageful. They say they've spent the past week smearing a child and his family because that child was fair game -- he and his family spoke of their experience receiving health care through the State Children's Health...
10/11/07 -
Crooked Timber - Suppose that you see the divide between private and state schools as the major institutional instantiation of educational inequality (to forestall objections from our American readers I should say that such a vision seems deeply mistaken in the US, but entirely reasonable in the UK). How would you address it? One way would be to abolish private schools by law, a demand that has occasionally been...
10/10/07 -
Willwilkinson - I was surprised to discover that U.S. market income (i.e., pre-tax) inequality is lower than the U.K.’s, the same as Germany’s, and only slightly higher than Sweden’s, as can be seen in this chart (click for full size): Pre-Tax and Disposable Income Inequality This is from Brandolini and Smeeding’s 2007 “Inequality Patterns in Western-Type Democracies: Cross-Country Differences...
10/10/07 -
Becker-posner-blog - At about the same time that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was speaking at Columbia University and being insulted by his introducer, the university's president, liberal law professor Lee Bollinger, former Harvard president and former Secretary of the Treasurer under Clinton, Larry Summers, was being disinvited to address the University of California Board of Regents after being denounced...
10/10/07 -
MVDG - John Yoo - who’s criticized often by the left and for good reason in certain respects - wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal, in which he tries to describe who US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas really is and what made him who he is today. Judge Thomas is, according to Yoo and my reading on this subject gives me this impression as well, not the person many liberals pretend...
10/08/07 -
Total Information Awareness - Honestly, I don't know if successful counterinsurgency operations are possible in a densely populated urban setting. I have serious doubts, but I'm sure some of the more enthusiastic scholars in the field would be able to present at least a mildly compelling case. Either way, whatever reservations I have concerning COIN operations in urban areas generally speaking, our current entanglement in...
10/08/07 -
Jules Crittenden - This is interesting. Concerns about stability in the region stalled attack on Syrian nuke facility. I’m not sure which stability they’re talking about. There’s the stability enforced by dictatorial regimes in places as Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. There’s the stability places like Lebanon and Iraq are barely managing to maintain … no thanks to Syria, Iran, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the...
10/08/07 -
American Prospect - A scan of today's headlines is like viewing a potpourri of economic dissolution. We've got a broken mortgage system, unaffordable health care, skyrocketing consumer and student debt, and inflexible, stressful workplaces. It is a moment ripe for rethinking the economy. John DeGraff, a filmmaker and activist with that rare gift of 20/20 foresight, has organized a campaign and conference that will...
10/08/07 -
Agricultural Law - The posting of Iris Dement's "My Town" was a musical treat - great song by a great artist. Can't quite agree on the anthem idea though. As pretty as the song is, I just can't say it reflects my views on rural life. As a rural resident, I don't see rural life as in decline. To the contrary, my only real frustration with our rural life - our dial up internet connection - was just replaced with...
10/08/07 -
Carpe Diem - 1. As a result of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, Congress established different mandatory penalties for cocaine and crack cocaine, with significantly higher punishments for crack cocaine offenses. There is a 5-year minimum prison penalty for a first-time trafficking offense involving 5 grams or more of crack cocaine or 500 grams or more of powder cocaine (see top chart above) and a 10-year mandatory...
10/06/07 -
Michelle Malkin - I often ask you: Are we a sovereign nation or a sanctuary nation? I often remind you: It’s your choice. You can choose to get involved in immigration enforcement efforts in your backyard. Or you can choose to do nothing and allow the sanctuary brigade to have its way. A lot of media attention has been paid to the veteran who ripped down a Mexican flag. I prefer to focus on the efforts of...
10/06/07 -
Policy Review - Conservatism in general, and in particular the social or traditionalist conservatism reclaimed by the extraordinary lifelong labors of Russell Kirk (1918–1994), counsels that dominant opinion should serve as a starting point for serious inquiry. Dominant opinion in the United States today, at least among the intellectual class, is progressive opinion. And according to progressive opinion, contemporary...
10/06/07 -
FrostFireCore - The state of Texas executed death row inmate Michael Richard because the court responsible for his sentence was unwilling to remain open an additional 20 minutes to receive a petition for a stay on his execution. Business hours were to be respected, and Richard was killed, on schedule, by lethal injection. When it comes to Texas justice, 20 minutes could mean the difference between life and death....
10/04/07 -
TPM Election Central - So, his reasons for staying are (1) he says he realizes he can still be effective; (2) he would be letting down Idaho to deny them his continued service and experience; and (3) he can't clear his name unless he stays. Political impact: Because he says he's not running for reelection, the seat is likely to stay in GOP hands due to the tilt of the state. But Craig's decision to stay will infuriate...
10/04/07 -
ed notes online - eality based educator has nailed another one at the NYC Educator blog regarding the AFT endorsement of Hillary Clinton. As all UFT members pay dues to that organization and the UFT is by far the largest block of votes in the AFT [add the NY State United Teachers, which the UFT controls], people opposed to the Clinton endorsement may be a wee bit vexed. As noted in the article in the NY Times,...
10/04/07 -
david in manhattan - On the day after Christmas 2004, while in the midst of the war on terror in Iraq, Americans and the world awoke to the horrible news that a tsunami had hit Indonesia. Immediately, there were pictures and video of its victims, and the extreme devastation it caused. America, with the rest of the world, felt their loss and shared their pain. And as Americans, we reached deep into our pockets and our...
10/03/07 -
Captains Quarters - The Democrats conducted a full-court press yesterday to publicize the SCHIP legislation. Over the weekend, they used a 12-year-old to explain why Democrats want to take money from primarily poor and working-class people to subsidize middle-class families' health care choices. (I suppose only a 12-year-old could buy that logic.) Union representatives from AFSCME expected to hold over 200 events...
10/03/07 -
culture kitchen - Well, Spitzer was true to his word. While Bush and the "drown America in a bathtub" Republicans try to cut healthcare for Americans even further, Eliot Spitzer, joined by Governor John Lynch of New Hampshire, Governor Martin O’Malley of Maryland, Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey, and Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, are suing the Bush Administration for its failure to follow the law requiring...
10/03/07 -
Debate Link - As I've argued elsewhere, if the key goal of anti-racism politics is to find and punish the evil-doers who are racist, then motive becomes very important in terms of assigning culpability. But that isn't the primary agenda of anti-racism activists. We're interested in protecting those vulnerable to racist politics, and providing restitution and remedy to those who have been victimized already. In...
10/03/07 -
The Heritage Foundation - Federal tax policy is not made in a vacuum. Small policy changes reflect current political winds. Congress enacts larger policy changes in reaction to broader budgetary or economic developments. More fundamental changes occur when theoretical perspectives and national views realign along key policy fault lines. And all the while, state and local tax policy developments provide often ignored context...
10/03/07 -
Ian Welsh - As with Phoenix Woman over at FDL, I tend to think America is coming up on a time of decision. There is going to be a new Great Depression, either this cycle or next, and when that happens Americans will have to choose how to react to it. In the last great Depression the US chose Roosevelt. Other countries (Italy and Germany among others) did not make such good decisions. One question which...
10/03/07 -
Dave Bufkin - Sally Field made an ass of herself at the Emmy's, but she is not alone in buying into the idea that if only men would step aside and let the ladies rule, there would be no war. Indeed, in a recent Good Morning America interview, Diane Sawyer asked Hillary Clinton, "Do you believe that if there were more women presidents in the world, there would be less war?" I decided to test this theory with...
10/01/07 -
ranger against war - As a palliative measure for the masses, the White House recently released figures showing the latest Good News: U.S. forces in Iraq have killed upwards of 19,000 insurgents. Ranger doesn't care a diddle about dead bodies and fully understands that people get killed in wars, but why, and to what purpose, is the question. These 19,000 were not al-Qaida types targeting U.S. citizens in our homeland...
10/01/07 -
david d friedman - The cost of college has increased faster than prices in general over recent decades. After spending eight days visiting four colleges--all good liberal arts schools--that my daughter is interested in, I have at least two pieces of an answer as to why. Such schools practice extensive price discrimination, I think more than in the past, so tuition substantially overstates the real cost. Judging...
10/01/07 -
will wilkinson - I am an American with two sisters. Suppose that, for whatever reason, one is a French citizen and one is an American citizen. Do I weigh my American sister’s interests more highly, in virtue of our shared citizenship? (Start from an egalitarian baseline, then give both a bonus for being my sister, and then give one a bonus for being a co-national?) Or do family relationships trump political...
09/30/07 -
Back Talk - I am tracking casualties from two sources now, Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (ICCC), which is my usual source, and Iraq Body Count (IBC), which I am attending to more closely now that I realize that their numbers agree with those presented by General Petraeus. These are both anti-war sites that track casualties based on media reports, so you can be sure that the numbers are not biased to make matters...
09/30/07 -
Talking Points Memo - Perhaps the moral of the story is that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) would be far better off avoiding religion as a campaign issue. It's been dogging him for years, and his fall from grace continues. In 2000, the Arizona senator gambled that denouncing religious right leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would pay off, and went to Virginia to condemn the TV preachers as "agents of intolerance."...
09/30/07 -
Redstate - First, a caveat: This is the first such review of the Sunday Shows ever drafted for RedState by a cancer patient undergoing simultaneous radiation and chemotherapy treatments. There will be weeks, I'm sure, when I cannot do this, and the quality might be diminished when I can. I beg your patience and understanding, and I ask for your prayers. First this morning, on NBC's Meet the Press with Tim...
09/28/07 -
Obsidian Wings - Communications networks are the lifeblood of our economy. And I, personally, think the Internets are pretty cool. There’s simply too much at stake to leave the everyday administration of the greatest invention since the printing press to companies who (quite rationally) aren’t worried about anything but the bottom line. It’s not a matter of evilness, it’s a matter of incentives and...
09/28/07 -
Anonymous Liberal - For a moment, I'm going to pretend that I'm a hotshot political consultant and not some anonymous dude on the internet. Much has been made of Hillary Clinton's improved standing in recent national polling. Her goal has been to improve her standing with the party base while projecting an aura of inevitability that causes money and endorsements to flow her way and marginalizes her opponents. This...
09/28/07 -
michael linn jones - What possible relevance to any election can one find in one third of the voters? More importantly, is it not fair to ask why one would so gleefully dismiss one particular demographic as no longer being the “kingmaker?” SOMEONE is; the important thing apparently is that white males be marginalized. No, eliminated from the Democratic Party. The elites and academics of the Democrats (most of whom...
09/28/07 -
Firedoglake - In little noticed news, Blackwater, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Arinc were recently awarded a collective $15 billion — yes, billion — from the Pentagon to conduct global counter-narcotics operations. This means that Blackwater can be deployed to engage with citizens on a whole new level of intimacy anywhere around the world — including here at home. What is scarier than...
09/28/07 -
democracy arsenal - In the case of counterinsurgency the perception of security is more important than the actual metrics. People need to know that the government, and not the insurgents or local militias, is going to keep them safe. Only in that case will they cooperate with the government and participate in the political process. Unfortunately, according to a recent survey of Iraqis conducted by the BBC and ABC...
09/28/07 -
iTeach - Three weeks ago, I spent a very exciting and enlightening week with a dozen pre-service teachers from rural Alaska. This was an “intensive” class–a week of face-to-face teaching and learning followed by a semester of distance-delivered coursework. This was an incredibly energetic and enthusiastic group which gave me much hope for the quality of instruction in our rural sites. I learned as much...
09/27/07 -
Matthew Yglesias - Bill Clinton, at the opening ceremony for his meeting, defined the purpose of the Clinton global initiative as to tackle problems that "government won't solve, or that government alone can't solve." A worthy purpose, indeed, for a charity. And I really think there are things that fit that category. Direct government sponsorship of the arts, for example, is a great way to preserve classic works and...
09/27/07 -
Balkinization - These guards are heavily armed and appear to have no external authority over them. Their job, loosely defined, is to protect Americans and other westerners in Iraq. They do so with helicopters, armored cars, and serious amounts of firepower. According to the Times, they bully their way through the streets of Baghdad and other cities, and apparently drive as fast as 120 miles an hour in convoys on...
09/27/07 -
Maha Blog - I believe Kucinich also had a problem because House Democrats agreed to drop language from the bill that would have allowed foreign-born children who are here legally to obtain coverage. Apparently this was a sop to right-wingers who feared SCHIP benefits might go to illegal aliens in spite of identification requirements. The provision for legal immigrants was being called ” a gaping loophole to...
09/25/07 -
Ezra Klein - Folks are having some fun with Barack Obama's reported belief that "the very act of Americans choosing to elect him would amount to the biggest foreign policy advance of the past 20 years, would immediately change the way, say, a young boy in Lahore views this country, would crush the propaganda gains of radical Islam since the end of the first Gulf War, would heal the scar that serves as a reminder...
09/25/07 -
Andrew Norton - Today’s Galaxy poll was more of the same old bad news for the government, another week of no rain in a long electoral drought. Because of the way single-member electorate voting systems exaggerate results, a uniform swing would see the Coalition’s 44% of the vote translate into only about a third of the seats in the House of Representatives. An election victory that big would have systemic...
09/25/07 -
melancholic feminista - Last week I met with a financial planner to start a college fund for my daughter. While I am a college professor and therefore, my daughter can attend my school for free (a huge benefit), I want to give her the opportunity to attend whatever college she wishes. Well, I wanted to give her that opportunity. What I discovered was that I would have to save $12,000.00 a year to have enough money by the...
09/25/07 -
concurring opinions - A few days ago, the United States Senate handily (75-25) passed a "sense of the Senate" resolution condemning a political advertisement placed in the New York Times by the anti-war group MoveOn.org. Many conservatives, most prominently presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, complained both about the substance of the ad and the process by which it came to be in the Times -- the allegedly "discounted"...
09/25/07 -
becker-posner - Universal service usually means that young persons, say 18 year olds, can either be drafted into military service for a specified period, say a year or two, or instead they can work for a similar period in one among a number of qualifying occupations. In Germany qualifying occupations include menial jobs in hospitals or nursing homes, while France has qualified working overseas in a French company....
09/25/07 -
schneier - s the name implies, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are anonymous. You don't have to sign anything, show ID or even reveal your real name. But the meetings are not private. Anyone is free to attend. And anyone is free to recognize you: by your face, by your voice, by the stories you tell. Anonymity is not the same as privacy. That's obvious and uninteresting, but many of us seem to forget it when...
09/23/07 -
history unfolding - Both George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton exemplify one of the things that has been going wrong with American politics for the last half-century--the critical importance of name recognition and fundraising contacts. Party leaders and party activists picked Presidential candidates exclusively until the early 1900s, when primaries began to come in. The party leaders, however, dominated the process right...
09/23/07 -
untravel - In other words: the fox guards the chicken coup. A few chickens disappear. The other chickens are outraged, demand action. The fox promises to look into it. This sort of 'form a committee' move is such a cliche, I wonder if anyone actually believes it. Like resigning in the middle of a scandal 'to spend more time with the family', it seems like a hollow formality. I wonder if the Iraqi government...
09/23/07 -
william boot - A while back I posted in response to Bryan Caplan’s essay (and now book) on voter irrationality. He views human misconceptions, about economics in particular, (he quotes how people are wrong in orders of magnitude about the extent of foreign aid given by the US, the effects of immigration etc.) as irrational. That is, people will wrap themselves in the blanket of stupidity despite knowing how dumb...
09/21/07 -
My DD - Obama's poverty agenda is similar to his recent energy policy plan insofar as that it draws from elements of other plans that worked on a state or community level and then applys it to the national level. He then injects the plan with new ideas that look beyond the narrow specifics of previous partisan attempts. That is exactly the kind of plan Obama's urban agenda encompasses. He acknowledges...
09/21/07 -
Opinio Juris - I have been thinking a fair bit about comparative law recently and it strikes me that the only valid way to describe the United States as a constitutional outlier is to do a truly thorough international comparison. It requires that we not only locate our country in relation to other countries, but also that we locate other countries in relationship to each other. Describing the United States as an...
09/21/07 -
belgravia dispatch - Look, if we were at all serious about public diplomacy, we'd have had all our regional experts who speak Arabic flooding the airwaves apologizing for Condi's immensely tone-deaf "birth pangs" comment during the Lebanon-Israeli war the summer before last, when the entire Islamic world was enraged by images of cluster munitions being littered willy-nilly through south Lebanon, not to mention the...
09/20/07 -
RBC - The "leading" GOP candidates refusal to speak to African-Americans, as it was with Latinos, seems in one sense to really be a grave miscalculation--not for the GOP generally (which it is with Latinos but not with African-Americans), but with their own chances. Giuliani's race-baiting in New York City might make him an exception, but the other three front-runners don't have a strong profile on...
09/20/07 -
media bloodhound - Alexis Debat, who’s been ABC News’ go-to guy since October 2001 for all things “war on terror”-related, including high-profile stories on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, was “discreetly dismissed” in June by ABC News after it couldn’t confirm credentials on his resume, primarily his purported Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. * The French news site Rue89 reported on September 7...
09/20/07 -
will wilkinson - Despite Lakoff’s sage instruction, Bush won a second term, and the GOP picked up seats in the House and Senate. The post-mortem to the 2004 presidential election showed that “moral values” were the “most important issue” for a plurality of voters, and that of those most moved by moral values, a whopping 80 percent punched their ticket for George W. Bush. That would seem to be more a matter...
09/20/07 -
Jason Easley - On Wednesday the Senate, by a vote of 56-43, failed to cut off debate on a bill that would have given U.S. detainees the right to challenge their detention in federal courts. According to the 2006 Military Commissions Act, detainees are denied habeas corpus. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case and consider if the ban on habeas corpus petitions is constitutional. Many, including the Republican...
09/20/07 -
arm chair generalist - The Blogger Roundtable has been talking to U.S. Air Force representatives about the rebuilding of the Iraqi Air Force. It's taken a little longer to rebuild the air force given that the hardware is slightly more expensive, and the whole business of developing an air traffic control system, training mechanics, developing pilots, and deciding which planes to buy. Brig Gen Bob Allardice was on the net...
09/20/07 -
Sentencing Law - It seems fair to assume that the federal government would not have been able to secure this plea deal were it not for the threat of the death penalty. (Other high profile cases with similar "death-defying" plea bargains include the Unibomber and the Green River Killer.) Though many might debate whether justice has been served by this plea deal, no one can question whether justice was...
09/19/07 -
News For The Left - There are so many things wrong with this video that I don't even know where to start. You can see another video, posted at Daily Kos here that shows the student's full question. Sure, he ranted and raved just a bit. But, he barely got his 'impolite' question out before the University of Florida Rent-a-Cops started harassing him. If you ask me, more people should rant and rave like this. He's...
09/19/07 -
Power Line - William Katz has had a long and varied career, as an assistant to a U.S. senator; an officer in the CIA; an assistant to Herman Kahn, the nuclear war theorist; an editor at the New York Times Magazine; and a talent coordinator at The Tonight Show. He is the author of ten books, translated into 15 languages. He admits to degrees from the University of Chicago and Columbia. When I asked him if he'd...
09/19/07 -
Balkanization - Section I of Article I of the Constitution is a model of brevity and clarity: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives." A website dedicated to educating kids about the constitution emphasizes that in our system, consistent with the language of Article I, the legislature alone makes...
09/17/07 -
Firedoglake - It seems like only yesterday I wanted to put my head through a wall when Hillary Clinton decided to pile on John Kerry on the eve of the 2006 election, just as the right wing was swarming him over his bad joke. It’s just such a basic, elemental principle at play here — you don’t help the right wing out by repeating their talking points, ever. Why was this so hard to grasp? But here we are,...
09/17/07 -
Captains Quarters - ummers may well be wrong about gender differences impacting educational aptitudes in a general or specific sense. Does that mean that Summers should get barred from addressing academics in the future? Does he need to do a Galileo and issue public recantations while muttering E pur si muove under his breath? Because as long as institutions like UC Davis continue to surrender to the dogmatists, Summer...
09/17/07 -
In From the Cold - While the type of review mandated for the Senate makes for good political theater, it isn't the answer for what went wrong at Minot. All indications point to human failures in the B-52 incident; after all, missiles didn't load themselves onto the bomber, and someone was supposed to remove the warheads from the cruise missiles before they left the weapons storage area. And of course, there were...
09/16/07 -
Crooked Timber - Google is staking a claim on the moral high ground of Internet privacy. The company has called for new international rules, ostensibly to protect privacy online. Little of Google’s search information is strictly ‘personal data’, i.e. data directly concerning named individuals. But search data, potentially tied to individuals’ IP numbers, is dynamite, something it’s taken Google a long time...
09/16/07 -
defence of the realm - One approaches this subject with a degree of trepidation, not on the basis of expert knowledge but with political antennae twitching at the scent of something not quite right. The subject is the so-called "super-bomb", more prosaically known as an "explosively formed projectile" (EFP), a weapon that has made an appearance in Iraq and been used with deadly effect against coalition forces. Dealing...
09/16/07 -
minding the campus - It's easy to think of Universities as a circus for wacky professors; their semi-monthly comparisons of Bush to Hitler or indictments of inherent American racism are hard to miss. Universities' deviations from traditional education are far more serious than a few zany radicals, though. Something far more significant overshadows this ranting, namely how PC invisibly sanitizes instruction to avoid...
09/14/07 -
bacons rebellion - The Virginia Energy Plan has set the goal of reducing the rate of energy consumption per capita in Virginia by 40 percent from current projections, in effect stabilizing per capita consumption, not reducing it. Total energy use would continue to grow along with the population. While praising many aspects of the plan, the Southern Environmental Law Center criticized the report for its modest...
09/14/07 -
Born Again Redneck - The biggest problem that Fred faces in the media is that he is not an ideologist. He's just a regular guy with ordinary middle-class, middle-of-the-road views. The media (and "pundits" like Will) would prefer to be able to pigeon-hole Fred. But common-sense is not easily pigeon-holed. Common-sensical people learn from their mistakes and sometimes even hold contradictory views. The media wants...
09/14/07 -
Jack lemoult - After President Bush's investigators reported that Saddam Heussein had no weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam had not been supporting Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the President continued to maintain an army in Iraq and continued to require that the army referee the ongoing civil war between Sunni and Shia Moslems in that country. After the President's advisory commission recommended pulling...
09/13/07 -
hybrid car blog - "There is no question that the GHG (greenhouse gas) regulations present great challenges to automakers," Judge William Sessions III, sitting in the U.S. District Court in Burlington, wrote at the conclusion of his 240-page decision. He added, "History suggests that the ingenuity of the industry, once put in gear, responds admirably to most technological challenges. In light of the public statements...
09/13/07 -
richard miniter - As many of you know, Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and I no longer get along. Once a cordial and helpful source, Berger turned on me in January 2002 when the first installment of a Sunday Times (U.K.) series that I co-wrote appeared. He phoned my hotel room at something like 6AM, screaming that I was accusing him of “murdering 3000 people.” He promised that he was...
09/13/07 -
yama llama - On Monday the state of California started dumping $16 million and 17,000 gallons of poison into Lake Davis, all in the name of environmentalism. According to a New York Times article, 500 state fish and game personnel will be pouring CFT Legumine, which contains the poison rotenone, into Lake Davis in an effort to eradicate northern pike, an exotic invasive fish. The northern pike is certainly...
09/13/07 -
dailykos - Now Obama, like Hillary, like Dodd, need to keep the pressure on in the Senate and in the media. I've been watching the media war, and I think we've got the early edge. Pundit reaction to Petraus' testimony has ranged from cool to hostile. Republicans, left with nothing positive to work with, have resorted to screaming about a newspaper ad -- as if people around the country give a crap about an ad...
09/13/07 -
GRC - As the 2007 economic collapse picks up speed, it’s time to take a hard look at the performance of the U.S. national political leadership in meeting some of their most fundamental responsibilities. It’s time to face the fact of serious failure over the last quarter century. During this time, the leaders of both political parties and of major institutions such as the Federal Reserve have presided...
09/11/07 -
The Tygrrrr Express - Typing from Chicago instead of from my usual home in Los Angeles, I am pleased to announce that this city is not always awful. When I was here in April, it was 38 degrees, and I maintained that this place was for animals, and not human beings. Although it is September, the weather is balmy, and it is amazing how pleasant I can be when I am not spitting blood every second of every day due to risks...
09/11/07 -
Borjas Blog - Reflecting on the experience of Germany with its guest workers, Swiss writer Max Frisch remarked: "We wanted workers, but we got people instead." The myopic emphasis on looking at the economic impact of immigration often leads many people astray when evaluating the consequences of immigration for the host society. The overwhelming concern with the measurable aspects of the bottom line--how much...
09/11/07 -
Thomas Joscelyn - In this essay, I survey the evidence of Iran's ongoing support for al Qaeda. For readers of my blog and my articles, this argument will be nothing new. But, I have included a lot of new details and evidence in ways that I haven't seen compiled before. But enough of the self-promotion. Let me answer, in advance, a few questions I expect to get: Q: Are you arguing that we should go to war with...
09/11/07 -
Agonist - So, yeah, who else is getting tired of Democratic candidates who say they want to end the war but leave troops? The latest is Obama who wants to remove "all combat brigades" by March 31, 2008". The only person who wants to "end the war" who is making any sense on this is Richardson, perhaps because he's the only one who really wants to end the war....
09/11/07 -
3 Quarks Daily - On September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda conducted an attack that ‘shocked and awed’ the United States. The US responded with a military attack on Al Qaeda at its center: Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. It also pursued a further strategy of tightening the noose around Al Qaeda’s funding, arms supplies, recruitment, ideologues, and supporters. Notwithstanding the overthrow of the Taliban regime and the...
09/11/07 -
Swamp Politics - The problem for MoveOn.org is that the ad will strike many Americans as extreme and likely turn a lot of people off to its larger message. As a new New York Times/CBS News poll being reported out today indicates, most Americans have more faith in the military to bring the Iraq War to a successful conclusion than they have in civilian leadership in either White House or Congress. But the ad is...
09/10/07 -
The Campaign Spot - Of all the criticisms to make of Rudy Giuliani, his touting of his support from a few Hollywood actors seems like a pretty light one. But Soren Dayton thinks it's an unwise move: And that’s why you have to wonder why Rudy Giuliani is dropping endorsements from famous Hollywood actors like Robert Duvall and Ron Silver this week. I mean, the Leno thing puts the whole Hollywood story on Fred...
09/10/07 -
Marijuana - Massachusetts, despite boasting the highest marijuana consumption rates in the country, has been conspicuously slow to soften the penalty for narcotic indulgence. Much of the blame belongs to Beacon Hill, which has, in the face of mounting pro-reform support, declined to act. So what do you do when the legislature won't cooperate? You go over its head. A group calling itself the Committee for...
09/10/07 -
Obsidian Wings - As Steve Benen helpfully documents, the Messiah Fred Thompson hasn’t exactly stormed out of the gate. Skipping debates for Leno, talking gibberish, staff turnover -- all in all, a poor start. In all seriousness, this is a very dangerous time for the Messiah. Over the next few weeks, the risk is quite high that he’ll have a “Wesley Clark moment” and blow the entire election. Indeed, he may...
09/08/07 -
Silflay Hraka - Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and Civilians of Multi-National Force-Iraq: We are now over two-and-a-half months into the surge of offensive operations made possible by the surge offerees, and I want to share with you my view of how I think we're doing. This letter is a bit longer than previous ones, since I feel you deserve a detailed description of what I believe we have...
09/08/07 -
Marc Ambinder - Former U.S. Amb. Alan Keyes is sending signals to allies that he is weighing a late bid for the Republican presidential nomination, two sources close to the two-time presidential candidate say. This week, Keyes's name was registered to participate in the West Virginia Republican convention in 2008 -- that party's delegate selection contests. The entry fee is $5000 and the deadline for payment...
09/08/07 -
Majikthise - Bacterial infections aren't sexy: no one walks, bikes, hops, pogo sticks for the cure. There are no ribbons, no bumper stickers, and no hot celebrities (damn!). Yet, according to the CDC, bacterial infections acquired in hospitals kill at least 90,000 people per year in the U.S. Granted some of those who died would have died from something else anyway, but that's still a really large number. To put...
09/06/07 -
will wilkinson - Why cite numbers on people’s satisfaction with life and their assessment of whether their “life situation” has improved or will improve? Because Ross claims that middle-class Americans in fact are and are going to continue to be highly anxious about their economic condition. If people’s alleged economic anxiety is important enough to create a powerful demand for populist policies, you would...
09/06/07 -
counter terrorism blog - The SITE Intelligence Group reports that a new Osama Bin Laden video message is forthcoming. SITE states that the new Osama Bin Laden message will be "addressing the American people on the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001." ABC also reports this stating that a Jihadist web site posting made this afternoon announced the planned Osama Bin Laden video stating: "Soon, with the...
09/06/07 -
TPM Cafe - Why the hubbub over a B-52 taking off from a B-52 base in Minot, North Dakota and subsequently landing at a B-52 base in Barksdale, Louisiana? That’s like getting excited if you see a postal worker in uniform walking out of a post office. And how does someone watching a B-52 land identify the cruise missiles as nukes? It just does not make sense. So I called a old friend and retired B-52 pilot...
09/06/07 -
The Moderate Voice - Former Senator and actor Fred Thompson formally announced his candidacy for President on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show — following in the footsteps of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger who found the venue a lucky one to announce his own intentions: After months of false starts, staff shake-ups, and questions about the seriousness of his intention to run for president, Fred Thompson...
09/06/07 -
Andrew Sullivan - He has some, it seems. It remains the case that Craig stands accused of obscure code in a bathroom stall. No one is saying he exposed himself; no one is saying he spoke a word; no other person apart from a cop is involved. Levin has a point. David Bernstein has one too: OK, so he was caught soliciting sex in a public restroom. Not so good. But compare that with behavior by other Senators that...
09/06/07 -
Blog Maverick - I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat. Although I like to tell people I'm a Libertarian, I'm really not. I'm unaffiliated with any political party. In fact I can't think of anything good that comes from political parties because they do just one thing, politics. When I vote in any local or state election, I vote for the candidate who I think will do the least. Not the least of anything specific,...
09/05/07 -
Donklephant - When asked to pick between voting for “experience” or “change”, 3 out of 4 voters want change. However, that’s not the whole story from Gallup: The results of this forced-choice question were lopsided in favor of “change” — 73% of Democrats said changing the system would be more important to their decision about whom to support, while only 26% opted for “experience.” ...
09/05/07 -
Ross Douthat - Last, what is populism anyway? I think of a politics that pictures the economy as a huge zero-sum game, sets social and economic classes against each other, and promises “the people” free stuff at the expense of some other, usually richer, people. Ezra adduces evidence from the recent Pew Political Typology that shows increased support for a bigger, more domestically activist government. I...
09/05/07 -
Huffington Post - Leave it to No Child Left Behind to further frustrate the path to actually helping and protecting students. As required under NCLB, a list of twenty-seven "persistently dangerous schools" was recently released by the New York State Board of Regents.Twenty-five of those scarlet letter schools are in New York City, a jump of 11 city schools from last year. However, list is actually an insidious...
09/04/07 -
Think On These Things - A new WCNC poll finds that John Edwards is running in third place in the Carolinas. Edwards was born in South Carolina and was a former one-term senator from North Carolina where he currently lives. In the general population of voters from the Carolinas, Clinton has 28%, Obama has 14%, and Edwards has 13%. Among Democrats, Clinton has 52%, Obama has 17%, and Edwards has 14%. Among independents,...
09/04/07 -
Secrecy News - The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has increasingly supplemented its traditional law enforcement role with new intelligence and counterterrorism functions, now says its paramount objective is to "prevent, disrupt, and defeat terrorist operations before they occur." New domestic intelligence collection activities that have been adopted in pursuit of this goal are described in unusual detail...
09/04/07 -
Dissecting Leftism - That old Leftist, John B. Judis, has an article in The New Republic that summarizes a stream of psychological research into fear of death that goes by the name of "worldview defense". The idea is that if you are reminded of your own mortality, you become more conservative. In one way, that is all fair enough. The old saying "A conservative is a liberal who was mugged last night" embodies a similar...
08/31/07 -
flapsblog - A top Democratic fundraiser wanted as a fugitive in California turned himself in Friday to face a grand theft charge. San Mateo County Superior Court Judge H. James Ellis ordered Norman Hsu handcuffed and held on $2 million bond. A bail hearing was scheduled for Sept. 5, at which the judge will consider reducing his bail to $1 million. Hsu appeared in court accompanied by a lawyer and publicist,...
08/31/07 -
Bob Bauman - The news today reported that the Bush administration plans to use again a dubious legal tool, the “state secrets” privilege, to try to stop a lawsuit against a Belgian banking cooperative, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) that secretly supplied millions of private financial records to the United States government, court documents show. The suit alleges that...
08/31/07 -
Juan Cole - I personally find the controversy about Iraq in Washington to be bizarre. Are they really arguing about whether the situation is improving? I mean, you have the Night of the Living Dead over there. People lack potable water, cholera has broken out even in the good areas, a third of people are hungry, a doubling of the internally displaced to at least 1.1 million, and a million pilgrims dispersed...
08/31/07 -
Strategic Security Blog - The Bush administration has decided to more than double the number of nuclear warheads undergoing an expensive upgrade for potential future deployment on the Navy’s 14 ballistic missile submarines, according to answers provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration in response to questions from the Federation of American Scientists. The decision preempts a debate in Congress about...
08/31/07 -
Illinois Conservative - When compared to other nations of the world, using the values of the era in which events took place, America is and always has been one of the most moral nations on the face of the earth. Humanity is a work in progress. That progress is slow and occasionally must be reevaluated and reworked. Unfortunately, those who insist on seeing America as a nation built on the perceived immoral values of our...
08/31/07 -
Angrybear - The three Democratic Presidents are in the top half of the sample... and only one Republican President is. Put another way, 80% of Republican administrations are in the bottom half of the sample, and 100% of the Democratic administrations are in the top half of the sample. Next, debt. Why debt? Well, GDP = Consumption + Investment in Capital + Government Spending + Next Exports. Which means...
08/30/07 -
majikthise - At that point there were only rumors that some patients had died after being given large doses of morphine as a New Orleans hospital was being evacuated. It was almost a year later when Dr. Anna Pou and two nurses were arrested, charged with four counts of second degree murder. The charges against the nurses were dropped. The grand jury refused to indict Dr. Pou, but not before Louisiana Attorney...
08/29/07 -
Ablogistan - I came across two polls today that paint a pretty unflattering picture of the American public. The first, an AP-Ipsos poll, found that one in four adults in the U.S. say they haven't read a book in the last year. Some interesting correlates. Democrats and liberals read more than Republicans and conservatives. The president of the American Association of Publishers says this is because "The...
08/29/07 -
TPM Election Central - You may recall that some time ago Rudy Giuliani unveiled a group called "Firefighters for Rudy" in response to some heat he was taking from firefighters over the deficiencies they saw in his 9/11 performance. At the time, this blog noted that the group's leader was merely a Rudy campaign aide and wouldn't say how many firefighters were in this new "group." Not much has been heard about the group...
08/29/07 -
Best American Hospital - It is certainly true that Sicko is not a careful accounting of the pros and cons of the U.S. insurance system. But the basic truth of Moore's indictment is undeniable. A recent survey by Consumer Reports found that nearly half of adults younger than 65 — most of them insured — say they are "somewhat" or "completely" unprepared to cope with a costly medical emergency in the coming year. A...
08/29/07 -
Strong As An Ox - To begin, what makes an income tax progressive? The probable answer is that the higher the income, the higher the tax rate. The intent of progressive taxation is to have the wealthy carry the tax load, because: “They should pay their fair share. They need to give back. They receive the greatest benefits. Yada, yada & Etc.” Because of the “progressive” nature of our income tax system, the...
08/29/07 -
3 Quarks Daily - I sublet. Being chosen as the one fit to take care of a stranger’s prize possession, their home, is not easy. I’ve taken care of their pets, helped with moves, stored their boxes and, when told, avoided the landlord. Most have been fair. However, I recently subleased an apartment from a woman in Brooklyn. She asked me to take care of her cats, find and send important mail to her, and store her...
08/28/07 -
Agonist - When you look at the demographics, economics and budget of the US, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that the great political battle of the next generation can be summed up very simply - it's going to be about "who pays, who wins... and who takes it on the chin." The US has a number of entitlements. Typically they're considered to be Social Security, Healthcare (Medicare, Medicaid and...
08/28/07 -
RBC - I'm not generally fan of literary and cultural criticism as a mode of political discourse. It's too easy, for example, to elide from the identification of a phenomenon such as "moral panic" to dismissing any recently revealed form of wrongdoing as a mere "moral panic" without reference to the facts. (No doubt someone could have done a careful analysis of the "moral panic" around the sexual abuse of...
08/28/07 -
Cosmic Variance - One searches the article in vain for the part where they say “Of course we live in a democracy, and some people think that there are certain benefits to that kind of system, even if the government does have to ask permission before tearing down historic sites,” but the moment never comes. Instead, we are treated to stirring stories of the plucky citizens of Shanghai, who don’t raise a peep...
08/27/07 -
Blogs for Bush - Barack Obama has been saying for a while he can unite our country if elected president. Now, most people know his claim is ridiculous, so Obama has decided to reveal which Republicans he'd be willing to work with. Did he say he'd work with both parties? No. he said he'd work with a few select Republicans. And we're supposed to be impressed? Now, Obama also accused Bush of creating "a partisan...
08/27/07 -
Maha Blog - Although the hard-core Right vowed to dismantle the New Deal from its beginnings, as I’ve written before most Americans were fine with the New Deal, including Social Security. And in the 1950s they were fine with the GI Bill and mortgage subsidies that helped the Greatest Generation become way more affluent than their parents had been. Nor do I remember a great hue and cry from the general population...
08/27/07 -
Colin Farrelly - I would like to briefly outline one line of argument I have been recently developing against libertarianism. The thrust of this criticism stems from a larger beef I have with theories of justice that function at the level of “ideal theory” but I won’t get into that (at least not yet! :)). There are of course many variants of libertarianism, each of which is subject to different kinds of concerns...
08/24/07 -
Obsidian Wings - "While genetic discrimination is banned in most cases throughout the country, it is alive and well in the U.S. military. For more than 20 years, the armed forces have held a policy that specifically denies disability benefits to servicemen and women with congenital or hereditary conditions. The practice would be illegal in almost any other workplace. There is one exception, instituted...
08/24/07 -
The Daily Background - Clinton says that if the US is attacked between now and election day 2008, Republicans will “automatically” have an advantage, but that she will deal with it the best of all the Democrats. Discussing the possibility of a new nightmare assault while campaigning in New Hampshire, Clinton also insisted she is the Democratic candidate best equipped to deal with it. “It’s a horrible...
08/24/07 -
Opinio Juris - Since moving to Philadelphia last summer, I’ve been struck by the large number of African-American women here who wear head scarves and full burkas – the latter-dressed entirely in black, with face fully covered except for a thin opening around the eyes. Until this piece appeared a couple of weeks ago in the Philadelphia Inquirer (as much focused on the implications of the fashion choice during...
08/24/07 -
Washington Note - At the first Democratic presidential primary debates, Bill Richardson was asked about what he'd do with regards to Cuba, and he proceeded to spend much of his time answering not that question but rather an earlier question about how each of the potential presidents would react in case of another terrorist act. Like the other candidates, Richardson said he'd quickly go after the bad guys. Retribution,...
08/24/07 -
Dangerous Intersection - In a recent poll, reading in America is revealed to be, well, less than appreciated by large swaths of the population. This ought come as no surprise. We live in a time of stupendous ignorance, which allows for the expression of epic stupidity. The Founding Fathers were suspicious of democracy (I learned this by reading several books on the subject of the early republic), believing that the vast...
08/22/07 -
Hot Air - The 2007 report’s Executive Summary details systemic problems within the CIA, from the failures mentioned above to the CIA’s inability to work with the NSA from 1998 through 2001. That’s Tenet at CIA, first failing to work with Sandy Bergler’s and then Condi Rice’s NSA. It’s not a partisan thing, evidently, so much as either a priorities, turf war or competence thing. And the CIA’s...
08/22/07 -
Meng Bomin - I do think there are some serious issues with Kucinich’s candidacy. The first and most obvious one is tactical: Kucinich would get shredded in a general election. While Kucinich’s positions are favorable to the left-wing of the Democratic Party, they will not appeal to some of the more moderate sections of the Democratic Party and certainly not independents or Republicans. While Bush’s...
08/22/07 -
Hinz Sight - While excuse makers and vacillating politicians bicker over immigration and No Child Left Behind, public education’s politically correct culture continues its noxious indoctrination of those confined inside its system. The kinder and gentler social experiments that masquerade as modern pedagogy are brainwashing many students into a bunch of low-achieving, over-sensitive, undisciplined, and dimwitted...
08/22/07 -
All American Patriots - As First Lady, Hillary helped create SCHIP, which provides health insurance for more than 6 million children: As First Lady, Hillary helped pass the State Children's Health Insurance Program. She helped negotiate the bill with Congress and later was the point person working to ensure that parents across the country knew about the program and signed up their children. "Over the course of a year, the...
08/22/07 -
Faculty Blog - On August 5, President George W. Bush signed into law legislation that amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA). This new legislation authorises the electronic surveillance of international telephone conversations and e-mails, even if one of the participants is an American citizen on American soil, as long as the intercept is undertaken for foreign intelligence purposes...
08/22/07 -
Balkanization - The Vice President's office sent Pat Leahy this letter today, asking for an extension of time to respond to the Senate Judiciary's subpoena for documents relating to the NSA's warrantless surveillance between 2001 and 2007. I think it's fair to predict that, no matter how many extensions it receives, the Administration will not provide the Senate with the requested documents. Senator Leahy is...
08/20/07 -
The Y Files - According to a repot in Inside Higher Ed, the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association was focused on "new reseach designed to shift the debate" on affirmative action. The main point of this shift: repealing affirmative action, the new argument goes, is unfair not simply because it results in a drop of black and Latino enrollment at the top universities, but because this drop is not...
08/20/07 -
Huffington Post - Is today officially Freaky Friday? Because either I'm still rubbing sand out of my eyes and not seeing straight, or I actually agree with the two Davids (Brooks and Harsanyi) and with the archconservative Club for Growth.New York Times columnist David Brooks is, as Rolling Stone has called him, the ruling class's "house bumlicker" - a man who actually has written that "primary voters shouldn't be...
08/20/07 -
The Smirking Chimp - Wouldn’t it be sad if freedom of the press, which was one of the rights that members of America’s armed forces have fought for in the past, was abandoned as outmoded? Suppose some nefarious bully forces tried to shame newspapers into suppressing bad news because, by its very nature, it is not fair and balanced. An absurd example of fair and balanced would be if, on Monday December 8, 1941,...
08/17/07 -
Captain's Quarters - The New York Times provides an interesting analysis of the Jose Padilla conviction, one that essentially credits the Bush administration with a victory. The jury convicted Padilla in almost no time at all, saying that the evidence was overwhelming -- and yet the question remains as to why the administration didn't just put Padilla on trial from the beginning:...
08/17/07 -
Obsidian Wings - I finally read Rudy Giuliani's (ghostwriter's) Foreign Affairs piece, days after everyone else, and boy, is it bad. I won't bother to rehearse the criticisms made by others -- Matt Yglesias ("a chilling vision of a world where peace can only be achieved through American military domination"), James Joyner ("I must concur in Matt Yglesias‘ judgment: “this man is batsh*t insane”"), Michael Cohen...
08/17/07 -
Say Anything - I have a few thoroughly-entrenched beliefs that take a hell of a lot to shake. But this morning, my local paper had a story that challenged two of them....
08/17/07 -
Lee Rockwell - Recently, for example, when I sent "Rock the Non-Vote" to LewRockwell.com, I suspected it might generate many comments, and, lo and behold, it did! (By the way, I try to respond to every reader who writes to me. However, especially when I receive many letters about an article, I often can't find time to answer all of them as they arrive. Then, some of them may drop off the first screen of my inbox,...
08/17/07 -
Say Anything - I was thinking some more last night on the question about whether or not Barrack Obama is “black enough” for black voters, which is something journalists seem to keep asking over and over again. I keep wondering: What does “black enough” mean? How is Obama supposed to behave in order to be “black enough?” Because it seems to me that the media wants Barrack Obama to fall into some black...
08/17/07 -
Michael Totten - The American soldier sitting next to me flipped open his Zippo lighter and gloomily lit a cigarette. “Do you know why this base isn’t attacked by insurgents?” he said. I assumed it was because his area of operations, in the Graya’at neighborhood of northern Baghdad out of Coalition Outpost War Eagle, had been cleared of insurgents. Many American military bases and outposts in Iraq are...
08/15/07 -
Hutch Report - There are few hot button issues more important to conservatives than abortion and illegal immigration and on both of these issues Rudy Giuliani has been less than stellar in his previous approaches to these two issues according to many social conservative voters. Everyone knows that Rudy Giuliani has had and continues to have a pro abortion stand and now word is starting to leak out about Rudy...
08/15/07 -
La Shawn Barber - Hillary said the problem of fatherlessness and high crime in the black community is not a “moral crisis but an economic crisis,” which is exactly what liberals of any color like to hear. No, it’s not individual immoral idiots who make babies they end up abandoning or who opt for a life in and out of the criminal justice system. No, it is the economy, and Hill has the fix. Not to worry about...
08/15/07 -
Cato blog - The Treasury Department reported Friday that federal revenues reached $2.12 trillion ($2,120,000,000,0000) for the first ten months of fiscal year 2007. In both current and inflation-adjusted dollars, that puts the federal government on course for the most revenue it’s ever collected in a year. Indeed, it’s the most revenue any government in the history of the world has ever collected. And yet...
08/13/07 -
Marc Ambinder - The sixty-second spot features an excerpt from Clinton's stump speech, interspersed with footage of Clinton talking to farmers, shop-keepers and other ordinary folks. "As I travel around America, I hear from so many people who feel like they are invisible to their government," Clinton says in the ad. "If you have a family that's struggling... you are invisible to this president...You're not...
08/13/07 -
Media Blood Hound - After Rudy Giuliani's apology Friday morning for having said he visited the toxic 9/11 site “as often, if not more, than most of the workers,” the Republican presidential front-runner eagerly shifted the focus. While campaigning in Iowa later that day, Giuliani attacked the one candidate he’s still trailing in the polls. “When I said that the Democrats running for president are...
08/13/07 -
Called As Seen - With the surge succeeding (the best recaps are at AJ-Strata's blog), Lieberman's now looking like he had the right moves all along. Why else would three hard-core anti-war lawmakers upstage him (as Eve described in her column)? Second, Lieberman's influence may have been overstated in the wake of his win last November. You see, it really takes two-thirds of the House and Senate to ensure that...
08/12/07 -
Angry Bear - Revenues always drop when Reps are in office, and under every single Republican administration, revenues dropped by more than they did under JFK/LBJ, the only Dem administration under which revenues dropped. Even Reps that didn’t “cut taxes” see drops in revenues as a percent of GDP. (GHW is the classic example.) What gives? Well, as I noted before, there are many ways to cut taxes, and...
08/12/07 -
LFTL - A few decades ago, there was a country that was revered as the promised land. This country granted opportunity to all and its citizens were considered the best and brightest individuals in the world. This countries culture, which was inspired by, and originated from many nationalities, was unique and was instrumental in facilitating its political, cultural, culinary, fashion, technological,...
08/12/07 -
Say Anything - This is the natural result of the absurd definitions of what is and is not a life the pro-abortion crowd has been forced to resort to. The entire idea behind partial-birth abortion being illegal is that you are killing a human child after it has been pulled from the womb, even if partially. Currently, a child killed in the womb by a mother or by a doctor with consent from the mother cannot be...
08/10/07 -
Open Left - This moves the four-poll average in New Hampshire to Clinton 34.0%, Obama 25.3%, Edwards 13.3%, Richardson 9.5%. With her national advantage currently sitting at 15.3%, I calculate that she is only four points away from being able to survive a defeat in Iowa and New Hampshire and still be the frontrunner for the nomination. In fact, with a 9.3% advantage in New Hampshire, she is only three points...
08/10/07 -
Britain & America - YouTube video above records gloves-off exchanges between Democrat presidential hopefuls Chris Dodd and Hillary Clinton with their fellow Senator Barack Obama. Both Senators were targeting last week's remarks by Obama in which he naively suggested bombing Pakistan. The Illinois audience cheered their embattled Senator but he is having the roughest time since he announced his nomination and Senator...
08/10/07 -
Econ Log - One insight I've gleaned from reading a lot of presidential debate transcripts (see here, here, and here): Democrats and Republicans have radically different demonologies. Both sides see evil forces behind the world's troubles, but their lists have only one overlap. In Republican demonology, the evil forces are almost invariably foreigners. Muslim extremists of all kinds (al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents,...
08/09/07 -
Ezra Klein - Matthew Scully's long, bitter takedown of Michael Gerson, his former boss in the White House speechwriting shop, is a great read. The portrait of Gerson as a credit-hogging, manipulative climber is fun enough, but the article is more interesting for providing such an extended tour of the craft of speechwriting is carried out. Bureaucracy is fascinating, dammit! But where Scully is furious with...
08/09/07 -
Cato Unbound - No sane person believes that anarchy generates order. The idea that anarchy could be superior to government in some cases seems even more absurd. Everyone from Thomas Hobbes to Adam Smith repeats the claim that societies need government to protect property and produce widespread cooperation. Even the most libertarian thinkers believe this is true. As Milton Friedman put it, “government is...
08/09/07 -
Around the Clock - Welcome to my blog, Senator. It is great privilege for me to be able to ask you a few questions on topics of interest to the scientific community in particular and the 'reality-based' community in general. Let's start with the fun part of the interview - your personal thoughts on science: past, present and future. Were you a science geek as a kid, where do you get your science information today and...
08/08/07 -
Texas Freds - OK, being a ’strategist’ for Reagan speaks pretty highly of the guy but he didn’t do Bob Dole a lot of good, I hope he’s learned from his errors… And this ‘testing the waters’ BS is getting really OLD in a BIG hurry, at least for me, and it has nothing to do with a lack of patience on my part, ‘testing the waters’, and ‘the waters are feeling real warm’, that ranks right up...
08/08/07 -
Obsidian Wings - Watching YearlyKos from afar, it was rather amusing to see perennial blog targets like Matt Bai and Mike Allen fraternizing with the blogofascists. And though I generally loathe trite “don’t sell out” slogans (and the people who use them), I do wonder whether YearlyKos-type events are good or bad for progressive blogs’ “edge.” Before I go on, let me say a few things up front to avoid...
08/08/07 -
DMI Blog - Looks like our elected officials in Washington have jumped ship. And I don’t mean Congress leaving the capital for its August recess. I mean the Senatorial stampede to jump on the anti-immigrant bandwagon by signing on to the latest misguided immigration proposal. Late last week a group of Republican Senators introduced a bill with its feet squarely planted in enforcement-only thinking that...
08/07/07 -
Working Life - Today is a significant day for the Democratic presidential race: the unions of the AFL-CIO will be freed up to endorse candidates. But, I suspect that a number of unions may hold back, at least until after Labor Day. Here are a few guesses, some based on information and some wildly speculative and pulled out of my... All the AFL-CIO unions respected the internal process of the AFL-CIO, which...
08/07/07 -
Debate Link - Commenting on the recent Republican candidate's debate in Iowa, Steve Benen said of Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee that he "continues to show impressive qualities. If he had any money and Republicans liked this guy, I might even worry about him." Indeed, a constant theme I've heard in the chatter about Huckabee is that a) Democrats think he'd be a strong foe in the general but b) he has been able...
08/07/07 -
My DD - Now it is the unfortunate truth that in politics, it isn't enough just to be right. It isn't enough to have the facts on your side. You either have to have a lot of money or you have to have a lot of people, in other words, power, or no one will listen to your facts. Even, to take an extreme example, if those facts are that civilization as we know it has less than a decade to avert the worst case...
08/06/07 -
Hullabaloo - Josh Marshall picks up on a key Ron Paul moment in Sunday's debate: It's sort of obvious now that he said it. But I had not quite thought of it that way. The same people now continually raising the stakes on the price of redeployment from Iraq with increasingly lurid tales of genocide, ethnic cleansing and regional implosion are pretty much exactly the same people who gamed us into this mess in the...
08/06/07 -
Eunomia - The radio host interviewing Romney in this video, Jan Mickelson, raises some of the same objections to Romney’s “wall of separation” logic that I assumed conservative Christians would be making all along. Here you have someone who wants to run as a religious conservative, but who won’t talk about his religion, and who explicitly denies that his religion is connected to his candidacy (except...
08/06/07 -
Pen and Sword - Secretary of State Robert Gates seemed sober and subdued on Meet the Press last Sunday. He was candid about the negative effect of Iraq's Parliament taking August off while American troops continue to fight in support of it, and of the Sunni ministers who resigned from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's cabinet last Wednesday. Gates kept things matter-of-fact as he admitted that a troop drawdown might...
08/05/07 -
Obsidian Wings - Of the many problems surrounding the new FISA bill (soon to be law), the most frustrating one is that we (the public) didn’t really have a chance to debate it. And I mean this in two different respects. First, and most obviously, Congress railroaded the bill through too quickly for meaningful debate. But more importantly, the terms of the debate were fundamentally dishonest. I wish that, for once,...
08/05/07 -
Whirled View - The July/August issue of Foreign Affairs contains articles by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The magazine says that in its series “Campaign 2008,” it will present a series of essays by “top presidential candidates.” All last week, the commentariat observed that foreign policy is a central part of this campaign, for both parties. I’m sure it’s a big part of the campaign for WhirledView’s...
08/05/07 -
Horse's Ass - A few days ago I’d heard from somebody in the Darcy Burner camp that Dave Reichert was preparing to introduce legislation this coming week, adding 26,000 acres along the Pratt River to the Alpine Wilderness Area. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me, but it also sounds pretty damn cynical considering Reichert’s poor record on environmental issues, and his lockstep support of President Bush’s...
08/03/07 -
Jeffersonian Privilege - The D.C. Circuit ruled this morning on Rep. William Jefferson's motion to get back the material seized when the FBI searched his congressional office in the Rayburn House Office Building. As is so often the case, the early AP story on the decision sort of missed the boat. It was headlined "Court: FBI Violated Constitution in Raid." But the actual holding is quite limited. Jefferson gets back originals...
08/03/07 -
The Faculty Blog - The Obama Campaign has a new and clever offer to encourage donations. The candidate promises to sit down for a "relaxing" dinner with four ordinary Americans/donors in order hear their views and concerns. We are all now encouraged to send a contribution before a given deadline in order to get a chance to be invited to the next intimate dinner with the candidate. The lucky winners will have their...
08/03/07 -
Political Cortex - The current political campaign has become fascinating with two diametrically opposed views on how to handle foreign affairs with diplomatic skill. Barack Obama cut right through the charade with which the U.S. has been conducting its foreign affairs when he dramatically declared in this week's Democratic presidential debate co-sponsored by You Tube and CNN that, if he were elected president, he...
08/02/07 -
Huffington Post - Whenever the public becomes aware of some new example of huge salaries and huge payouts to the chief executives of big companies the response from economists (and the politicians who believe in economists) is as swift as it is predictable. Market forces they say to the tv cameras. Pay peanuts and you get monkeys. International comparisons. Value for money. Have to compete with other companies to...
08/02/07 -
Ace of Spades HQ - As many have pointed out by now -- if the GOP now has so little credibility on Iraq and terrorism, why do GOP candidates continue to lead on that issue? Granted, it's not as big of a margin as we're accustomed to. But rumors of the death of the GOP advantage on national security have been greatly exaggerated. I'm pushing Rudy a little more again now because I think it's likelier he'll actually be...
08/02/07 -
American Expat - It's amazing how clearly Ronald Reagan's speech from 1964 reflects the challenges that our nation faces today. Not only does it reflect the challenges that we once faced before, but highlights the fact that we have become a nation completely void of true leadership. "If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based upon what we know in our hearts is...
08/02/07 -
Protein Wisdom - Which, it turns out, is probably a good thing, or else I’d be combating nonsense like this, from David Sirota (who, incidentally, was profiled in the Denver paper when he moved to Colorado. He has dogs, I learned, and is passionate about politics. Which is newsworthy in precisely the same way that, say, an interview with Brad Pitt’s abs might be newsworthy. But I digress): At the 1984 Republican...
08/02/07 -
Fed Locally - Talk has been brewing for some time about Michael Bloomberg's potential run for President of the United States as an independent, third party candidate. The speculation greatly intensified when the billionaire mayor of New York changed his political affiliation from Republican to unaffiliated. The last time he changed political parties was when he ran for mayor. Prelude much? Further fueling the...
08/02/07 -
Captain's Quarters - Democrats have been demanding a withdrawal from Iraq for the past two years, and Barack Obama knows exactly what he'll do with the troops once they withdraw. He'll send them on an invasion of Pakistan: "In a strikingly bold speech about terrorism scheduled for this morning, Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Sen. Barack Obama will call not only for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, but...
08/01/07 -
Captain's Quarters - Apparently, three million dollars doesn't go as far as it used to go. According to The Politico, that's how much money Thompson raised in his first month as an official non-candidate. The number comes a little south of expectations, which has some people in panic mode prematurely: "Fred Thompson plans to announce Tuesday that his committee to test the waters for a Republican presidential campaign...
08/01/07 -
Booman Tribune - This morning I had one of those mornings when I look around and ask myself "What the hell am I doing here?" I was invited to take part in the Maria Leavey Breakfast series, which gets blogger types around the table with various and sundry political types. I wasn't able to break bread with Grover, but this morning I got some face time with Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. It wasn't until I stepped...
08/01/07 -
America Blog - John's already blogged about why Mitt is no JFK. Here's a snippet of a press release about a documentary, 'A Mormon President' Uncovers Anti-Mormon Feelings, that is slated for release this fall. The film is by Adam Christing, a member of the Mormon History Association. It's hard to tell whether this is going to further inflame the evangelicals Mitt is courting, since many believe LDS is a cult....
07/30/07 -
Firedoglake - I swear, I can’t sort out what the Republicans are talking about when they describe our Middle East wars and who the enemy is, but I’m pretty sure they want eventually to be at war with just about everyone. In today’s Washington Post, Robin Wright explains that some of the White House necons see us in Cold War II against the menacing Iranians. That would be the same Iranians who are allied...
07/30/07 -
Ezra Klein - One substantive point that the Obama/Clinton spat has laid bare is the odd, almost talismanic, power that "negotiating" has amassed in the Bush era. Because the current administration blatantly refuses to negotiate, the willingness to meet with non-allied, even hostile, leaders has become a signifier for being "Not George W. Bush" in foreign policy terms. That, in a sense, is what Clinton and Obama...
07/30/07 -
Say Anything - It’s worth noting these cameras simply document people while they’re out in public. If we strip all the paranoid “Big Brother” rhetoric from this issue, the questions we need to ask ourselves are these: Are our actions in public private? Do we have an expectation of privacy while on private property? The answer to those of those is, of course, “no.” Anyone can see you, video tape you...
07/29/07 -
Majikthise - Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) surprised observers by coming out against legislation that would expand state-based health insurance for children by taxing tobacco. David Donnelly of campaignmoney.org notes that McConnell has received a lot of money from the tobacco industry over the course of his career, $257, 725. That's more than any other sitting senator except Richard Burr (R-NC)....
07/29/07 -
Redstate - Call this a Sunday night throw away post if you like, but it's one I've been meaning to write. I was doing my usual pre-bed Sunday night routine of standing under the stream of water in the shower thinking about all the things I forgot to do last week and need to do this coming week and remembered this is a post I've never written and should have written. Let me give you my picture of the ideal...
07/29/07 -
SirotaBlog - Maybe for the first time in my adulthood, I don’t have any strong preference among the Democratic presidential nominees and am not in anyone’s camp. I feel blessed to be able to sit back and objectively watch a pretty impressive group of candidates knowing that I’d be just fine with any of the top six (particularly the top four) emerging as my nominee. So far, the punditry seems...
07/27/07 -
cunningrealist - Remember those audio clips in Colin Powell's discredited presentation to the UN that purported to show Iraqi officers discussing prohibited weapons? A part that, at this point, seems particularly ludicrous: "Nerve agents. Stop talking about it. They are listening to us. Don't give any evidence that we have these horrible agents." Where did that audiotape come from?...
07/27/07 -
THP - he causes of World War I can be difficult to decipher. Are we talking financially, psychologically, sociologically, historically, politically or otherwise? But certainly, as Winston Churchill points out in his “The Crisis”, the arms race between Germany and England was a major factor. So let us begin with it. Before World War I, the British were the “superpower” of the era. It was claimed...
07/27/07 -
David Kuo - DiIulio notes that it was eight years ago this week that Bush delivered the first public policy speech of his campaign, titled "The Duty of Hope" where he rejected extreme Republican notions that government should just get out of the way and let our social problems solve themselves. Rather, government had to help "in the common good, and that good is not common until it is shared by those in need."...
07/26/07 -
The New Moderate - Thank God this courageous man was chosen to lead our country during its most unsettling crisis since the Civil War. Bush had the guts to challenge Islamic terrorists and hunt them down where they live. (Can you imagine if Gore had been president on 9/11? He’d probably have scolded the terrorists for releasing pollutants into the atmosphere over lower Manhattan!) Unlike most politicians, who...
07/26/07 -
Crooked Timber - For some time, Josh Marshall has been saying that President Bush won’t fire Alberto Gonzales because he wouldn’t be able to get a new Attorney General confirmed by the Senate who would be willing to keep all of the cover-ups in place. Evidence for this theory is mounting. But Bush won’t be able to keep him in office for ever. Assume a new Democratic President is inaugurated on January 20,...
07/26/07 -
Patrick Britton - It’s an understatement to say that there is a large variety of Republican candidates running for President of the United States in 2008. With ten names (counting Thompson) it’s safe to say if you are looking to vote Republican that there is a candidate that is running that fits your values. In this post I am going to lay out each candidate in biography form so you can get to know the candidates...
07/25/07 -
Belief Net - As we're discussing "The Great War and Modern Memory" on the DMN Book Club blog, I was reflecting on Paul Fussell's stage-setting observation, namely that no one prior to World War I could have conceived of how many illusions it would shatter by the time it ended. Of course the Iraq War is nothing compared to the civilization-shattering phenomenon of the Great War. Still, I reflected on what things...
07/25/07 -
Red State - If the media was being honest about the situation (Heh, right. Hell will freeze over first) most of McCain's fall can be centered on his positions during the immigration debate and a few other areas in the past where he failed to carry the mantle of small government. Let me be specific about the immigration issue because the news clip I saw of McCain played during the CBS morning news made it...
07/25/07 -
TalkLeft - Josh Marshall has a, to me, very inadequate post this evening on what to do about the Bush Administration: "Without going into all the specifics, I think we are now moving into a situation where the White House, on various fronts, is openly ignoring the constitution, acting as though not just the law but the constitution itself, which is the fundamental law from which all the statutes gain their...
07/24/07 -
ERM Blog - My colleague Tom Barnett has for years talked about the need for two forces -- a Leviathan force that can win the war through kinetic action (i.e., bullets and bombs) and a System Administrator force that can win the peace through non-kinetic activity (i.e., capacity building). The latter force would have a military component that could help smooth the transition from military to non-military...
07/24/07 -
Open Left - Taking a quick look at The Liberal Blog Advertising Network, it occurs to me that I am not aware of any single blog on the list endorsing any of the eight Democratic candidates currently running for President. I even checked some of the major local and state blogs on the list who cover politics in the home states of Presidential candidates, and again I don't see any endorsements. BlueNC in North...
07/24/07 -
The Center Blog - The Supreme Court issued its decision in Planned Parenthood v. Gonzales (and Carhart v. Gonzales) on April 18, 2007, upholding the constitutionality of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban and holding that a "health" exception to the statute was not constitutionally required (the law contains a life exception). Abortion advocates argued to the Court that the lack of a health exception in the law would...
07/23/07 -
Mike The Actuary - I'm disappointed that the "so we get out of Iraq; what next”" question isn't going to be asked. It's a shame that it was tainted by “stuffing the ballot box”, because it is a question I’d like to hear the answer to. After the first few questions, I get a distinct impression that we’re moving into the “why me rather than that joker” phase of the campaign, rather than the Democratic...
07/23/07 -
Ampec Blog - Speaking to journalists at a breakfast hosted by the American Spectator this morning, Newt Gingrich predicted a Clinton-Obama ticket, said Republicans need to move beyond President Bush to have a chance to win in 2008, and remained coy about his own presidential ambitions. “My personal guess is that the ticket will be Clinton and Obama and it will be a wonderfully left wing, deeply...
07/23/07 -
Thought Theater - Conventional wisdom suggests that an atheist could not be elected president of the United States despite the fact that our constitution grants no fewer rights to those who do not believe in a higher being. I find that improbability rather troubling since most atheists have no fundamental objection to those who do believe in god. In fact, by and large, atheists vote for theists in virtually all...
07/20/07 -
The Huffington Post - "Broader Privilege Claimed In Firings White House Says Hill Can't Pursue Contempt Cases Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked...
07/20/07 -
Gregg Easterbrook - Today in Washington I was in the room as the greatest living American received a medal. George W. Bush, Nancy Pelosi and others were present. But will you ever hear this event occurred? To judge from tonight's major network evening newscasts, perhaps not. Cameras were allowed at the ceremony but I saw none from the major networks, though the international press was significantly represented. And...
07/20/07 -
National Parks Traveler - In a move that can be expected to generate some attention from the White House, two prominent members of the House of Representatives have introduced a billion-dollar centennial funding bill for the national park system. Two big differences from President Bush's initiative: no private matching funds are required, and this package has an identified funding source. The legislation, which was...
07/19/07 -
Huggh Hewitt - You heard it here first. He leads the second tier in cash-on-hand. He was able to get 1,200 people out to the Hy-Vee (has any candidate done something that big on their own, not at an RPI event?). His home base in Texas isn’t that far of a drive, and his people are motivated enough to come in from out of state for him. And he’s making a big push on his Web site, which for all intents and purposes,...
07/19/07 -
Tapped - I find disagreeing with Mark Schmitt about matters of social policy to be almost absurdly discomfiting, but his post on John Edwards and poverty genuinely surprised me. Mark has got to be the first liberal in years who wants to restore race's primacy in the political discussion over poverty. I thought severing that linkage was 60 percent of the justification for welfare reform! Indeed, the most...
07/19/07 -
Say Anything Blog - Someone I know with some connections in DC is telling me that Arent Fox, the law firm Fred Thompson worked for when he was a lobbyist, has found the billing records that details Thompson’s lobbying efforts on behalf of a pro-abortion group and that some journalist will be reporting it soon. This is the story the LA Times broke a while back. I’m sure that this will be painted as a bombshell...
07/19/07 -
Campaign Blog - The Senate's overnight Iraq debate presented a nice opportunity for the chamber’s presidential aspirants to strut their stuff. The latest National Intelligence Estimate would seem to provide even more rich fodder for Democratic candidates to challenge the Republican administration over mishandling post-9/11 national security. After all, Democrats have consistently faulted President Bush for...
07/19/07 -
The Washington Note - When in Europe, I was frequently queried about the current state of play in the Republican and Democratic presidential primary process. My quick response on the Dems was that Hillary's juggernaut was extremely impressive -- but that Barack Obama had passed the skeptic's test and was filling the "bubble" of expectations he created with an impressive architecture of widely diverse donors and well...
07/19/07 -
Political Animal - Cast your mind back to early 2001. It was before 9/11, before Abu Ghraib, before the signing statements and the suspension of habeas corpus. George Bush had just spent the previous year campaigning as a compassionate conservative. He had promised to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. He had won a bitter recount in Florida and the conventional wisdom suggested that the closeness of his victory...
07/18/07 -
Powerline - From a conservative perspective, two legal issues come quickly to mind with respect to Rudy Giuliani -- abortion, of course, and also the perception that as a federal prosecutor he tended to use the government's power and the legal process abusively at times. The first issue is pretty straightforward, at least as a legal matter. Either one accepts Giuliani's statement that he will appoint stict...
07/18/07 -
Open Left - Even if it was not supposed to be public, I am glad that Democratic candidates are starting to voice frustrations with existing debate formats. Edwards is apparently leading the charge. Considering that Kucinich has agreed to a "debate" on right-wing propaganda outlet Fox News, I am not particularly moved by his claims about "integrity" when it comes to debates. However, considering the struggles...
07/18/07 -
Andrew Sullivan - So we now know that, measured in terms of financial support, Ron Paul, the one GOP candidate who actually backs individual liberty against government power, is now ahead of Huckabee, Brownback, Gilmore, Thompson (Tommy), and Tancredo. He's the alternative to the Big Three. But guess who are among his strongest supporters? The US military, now being shamelessly coopted by the stab-in-the-back righties....
07/16/07 -
Chicago Law - After the long years of the Bush administration, the United States needs to elect a president in 2008 who can inspire the nation and call upon us to be the best Americans we can be. In that light, I watched last week’s Republican presidential debate with special interest. The moment in the debate I found most revealing, most distressing, was when the moderator asked the ten Republican candidates...
07/16/07 -
The Situationist - Democrats are feeling pretty confident these days. To begin with, the opposing team is beleaguered. George W. Bush, seven years after taking the Presidency, is not wearing well. His approval ratings are at an all-time low, and there is growing hostility and increasing defections from among erstwhile Bush supporters. Hard-core Republicans no doubt hope that someone else might be able to pick up the...
07/16/07 -
Captain's Quarters - Rudy Giuliani's ability to win the Republican primary hinges on convincing GOP voters that he supports federalism and constructionist views on the Constitution. It takes his socially-liberal policy views off the table to a large extent if he can convince Republicans of his sincerity on those points, and nowhere will that be more evident than in his appointments to the bench. His new effort in that...
07/11/07 -
Spot-on - With this presidential election, it's become abundantly clear that the Internet and politics were made for each other. For better or worse, campaigns start on-line - you're not in the race until you've got a website - and they're going to end on-line as well. So what happens in the next 18 months, the real dawn of this new era, will set practices that determine how campaigns raise and spend money...
07/11/07 -
Hugh Hewitt - This evening, I got an email from John McCain filled with typical political happy talk like "Though we have a long, hard road ahead of all of us, I know that with your help, we will prevail," and "Together, I have every confidence that we will be successful." I certainly don't feel any outsized affection for Senator McCain, but I sincerely believe he missed an opportunity to make history tonight....
07/11/07 -
The Informed Reader - A new kind of elaborate game that combines online elements with real-world activities is drawing the attention of activists and policy makers, who hope to tap the strength of virtual communities to solve large problems. These so-called alternate reality games initially began cropping up in entertainment marketing campaigns � rock band Nine Inch Nails developed a game to hype a new...
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