National Politics
Perhaps it would not have been as deliberately un-gun-shy, but Jeanne Moos could have avoided the controversy with this skit and made it funnier, because more relevant: This morning’s e-blizzard of insults was prompted by a Moos piece on body language of the various candidates — particularly their strange, compulsive habit of pointing off into…
This comment from Greg, in conversation with Old Time Liberal, is surprising in the degree to which he sets aside incisive surety for a conservative’s spin on the mushy milieu of liberal emotivism: I love to engage in raucous political debate with people from the other side of the fence. In person (Blogs I mostly…
An interesting passage from Steve Peoples’s second part to the Projo’s series on local unions: LABOR UNIONS and their allies walk a fine line when it comes to influencing elections. State and federal campaign finance laws have strict limits on what is, and isn’t, permissible. That may be why Ocean State Action is actually made…
Perhaps it’s because I’m a populist or an elitist (pick one), but I find images of Barack and Michelle (Bachelle?) fist-bumping nauseating. The statement that I read in it — albeit, between the lines — is “if we do this, people will think we’re regular folk, just like them.” And why should this well-to-do, upper-crust,…
Today is a day full of sad memories, offering an opportunity to reflect on what once was and what it teaches us today. It was 40 years ago today that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, the night he won the California Democratic Party primary. I lived in Southern California at that time…
From Senator Tom Coburn (R, OK): Becoming Republicans again will require us to come to grips with what has ailed our party – namely, the triumph of big-government Republicanism and failed experiments like the K Street Project and “compassionate conservatism.” If the goal of the K Street Project was to earmark and fund raise our…
My dispositional inclination is to agree with the ProJo’s Bob Whitcomb: Sen. Barack Obama visited the Capitol in his glory the other week, with other, lesser politicians crowding around to be photographed — testifying to his charm and to the tendency to suck up to the winner. It recalls how we pay far too much…
Moving beyond the world of over-reactions and political drama, has anyone actually read President Bush’s speech to the Israeli Knesset? …We gather to mark a momentous occasion. Sixty years ago in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s independence, founded on the “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate.” What…
Mark Steyn’s astute observation is applicable to much more than foreign affairs: Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies. It’s one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most midlevel powers, talks are the end, talks without end. Because that’s what civilized nations like doing — chit-chatting,…
Historian Dale Light offers an interesting summary of how the candidates and their supporters view the country. One benefit of this interminable Democrat nomination process is that fundamental issues do get discussed — no I’m not talking about health care, or foreign policy, or the war, or any of those other transitory things; I’m talking…