I don’t have a read [on Sarah Palin]. I try not to make, or set opinions about people that I haven’t had any substantive interaction with. … I think it’s wonderful to have strong female voices out there, but I don’t know her.
I love the First Lady. It’s perfect: no irony, no snark; do not inflate or take the bait; neutralize and move on. Welcome to the adults’ table. (via savingpaper, southpol)
reblogged from southpol
[President] Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist. Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.
Bob Herbert, “Obama’s Credibility Gap”, New York Times
By whose authority do the Standing Rules of the Senate govern the Senate? By the Senate’s alone. But what is the Senate, exactly? It is part of a larger entity, the Congress, that expires every two years after the entire House and one-third of the Senate stands for election. We currently have the 111th Congress. In Jan. 2011 we’ll have the 112th. In Jan. 2013 we’ll have the 113th. And so on. The first step in exercising the nuclear option, then, is for the president of the Senate (i.e., Vice President Joe Biden) to state, in effect, “Previous Congresses can’t tell this Congress what to do. Senate Rule 22 has no force because it was never agreed to by the current Senate.” Biden would then state, “Under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, this current Senate may ‘determine the rules of its proceedings.’ I say we change Rule 22 to eliminate the filibuster.
A risky parliamentary procedure might get health reform through the Senate. - By Timothy Noah - Slate Magazine (via indefensible)
reblogged from indefensible
Not treating Americans as adults has costs. For instance, it became the official policy of our federal government to try to make America “a drug-free nation” 25 years ago. After spending hundreds of billions of dollars and imprisoning millions of people, it’s slowly beginning to become possible for some politicians to admit that fighting a necessarily endless drug war in pursuit of an impossible goal might be a bad idea. How long will it take to admit that an endless war on terror, dedicated to making America a terror-free nation, is equally nonsensical?
From an excellent Wall Street Journal article titled ‘Undressing the Terror Threat’
How to choose a Vice Presidential Candidate: McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, spotted Sarah Palin while searching the Internet for possible female vice presidential candidates.
In public, Palin looked like the game changer McCain had wanted, but in private, the authors say she was struggling to learn too much too fast.
“Her foreign policy tutors are literally taking her through, ‘This is World War I, this is World War II, this is the Korean War. This is the how the Cold War worked.’ Steve Schmidt had gone to them and said, ‘She knows nothing,’” Heilemann told Cooper. “A week later, after the convention was over, she still didn’t really understand why there was a North Korea and a South Korea. She was still regularly saying that Saddam Hussein had been behind 9/11. And, literally, the next day her son was about to ship off to Iraq. And when they asked her who her son was going to fight, she couldn’t explain that.”
(via zoewithtwodots)
reblogged from zoewithtwodots
I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by [Fox News president] Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.
Rupert Murdoch’s son in law Matthew Freud, quoted in yesterday’s New York Times.
Look at this fucking idiot former mayor of New York. Rudy Giuliani: “We had no domestic attacks under Bush”. Think carefully Rudy.
On a manicured lawn within the grounds of the Arkansas state capital in Little Rock a Nativity scene is erected each advent. It is causing all sorts of problems. Shouldn’t other religions (or, for that matter, those who reject organised religion altogether) get their chance to show off? Doesn’t the display amount to a violation of the canonical separation of religion and politics.
…
The Arkansas Freethinkers do not want the Little Rock Nativity scene removed. They simply want the state to set up a “free-speech zone” and let them be part of it. Some say this will lead to chaos. In Olympia, Washington, the capitol’s all-inclusive free-speech zone became hopelessly overcrowded. Even the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster mounted a display.
…
The Arkansas Freethinkers do not want the Little Rock Nativity scene removed. They simply want the state to set up a “free-speech zone” and let them be part of it. Some say this will lead to chaos. In Olympia, Washington, the capitol’s all-inclusive free-speech zone became hopelessly overcrowded. Even the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster mounted a display.
From an article titled “No crib for a bed” in the Dec. 5th - 11th 2009 issue of The Economist. So good to see that everyone is solving the big problems. This article followed several pages of extremely bleak reporting on U.S. economic prospects.
EDIT: I should note that if I lived in Little Rock I would probably be a member of the Freethinkers - if only for laughs. My point is that the Arkansas state legislature has more important things to contend with than this. Also I was quite pleased to discover that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is more or less a real thing.
The New South Wales economy is in drastic need of reform. Its manufacturing base is collapsing. A long run of drought and climate chaos has left much of the state’s rural industry in a parlous state. It cannot call on a wealth of mineral resources to fill the Treasury’s coffers, while revenue-sharing arrangements negotiated back when the GST was introduced still favour the less populous states. The transport system, utilities sector and a host of big-dollar infrastructure projects are in need of urgent funding and attention. But the government that must attend to them is a government of the living dead. The Labor Party is shambling towards the polls early next year and the wrath of the electorate will be terrible to behold.
John Birmingham, “Failed State”, The Monthly (December 2009)
So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, “Well, I planted a bunch of trees.” And he says, “I’m talking about personal.” What I’m thinking in my head is, “Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective”.
Barack Obama (via dancroak) (via evangotlib)
reblogged from evangotlib
Let us in future be a bit more skeptical about the need to recreate the protest wheel. In almost all countries run by authoritarian regimes there is an untapped mass of activists, dissidents and anti-government intellectuals who have barely heard of Facebook. Reaching out to these offline but effective networks will yield more value than trying to badger bloggers to take up political activities. Western embassies working on the ground often excel at identifying and empowering such networks, and new media literacy should become part of diplomatic training. After all, these old-school types are the people who brought democracy to Central and Eastern Europe. And it will probably be them who win freedom for China and Iran too.
From Evgeny Morozov’s article “Dictators.com” in the Perspective section of today’s AFR. I don’t really agree with his conclusions but it is an extremely good read and an excellent reminder that we must not idealise social media as the answer to all of the world’s problems.
For the extreme left it [climate change] provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, sort of de-industrialise the Western world. The collapse of communism was a disaster for the left, and they embraced environmentalism as their new religion.
Liberals Senate leader Nick Minchin on ABC’s Four Corners. What a nutcase. This is the same guy who didn’t believe that cigarettes are addictive or that passive smoking is harmful.
To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China’s representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. “Why can’t we even mention our own targets?” demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil’s representative too pointed out the illogicality of China’s position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord’s lack of ambition.
…
All this raises the question: what is China’s game? Why did China, in the words of a UK-based analyst who also spent hours in heads of state meetings, “not only reject targets for itself, but also refuse to allow any other country to take on binding targets?” The analyst, who has attended climate conferences for more than 15 years, concludes that China wants to weaken the climate regulation regime now “in order to avoid the risk that it might be called on to be more ambitious in a few years’ time”. Mark Lynas in The Guardian: “How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room”
…
All this raises the question: what is China’s game? Why did China, in the words of a UK-based analyst who also spent hours in heads of state meetings, “not only reject targets for itself, but also refuse to allow any other country to take on binding targets?” The analyst, who has attended climate conferences for more than 15 years, concludes that China wants to weaken the climate regulation regime now “in order to avoid the risk that it might be called on to be more ambitious in a few years’ time”. Mark Lynas in The Guardian: “How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room”
← Older Posts
Page 1 of 3
