[ Posted Friday, June 6th, 2014 – 16:43 UTC ]
This week was notable in many respects in the political world, but one subject overwhelmed almost everything else. We're going to address the prisoner swap and Bowe Bergdahl in an unusual way this week, in lieu of our regular talking points at the end of the column. But first, we're going to take a very quick look at what else happened this week, and then hand out the weekly awards.
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[ Posted Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014 – 16:29 UTC ]
Today is primary election day in eight states across the land (including my own). The most media attention will be paid to the Mississippi Republican Senate primary, where the incumbent, Senator Thad Cochran, may be in trouble from a Tea Party challenger. So while the storyline a few weeks ago was "Establishment Republicans win big over Tea Party," the storyline tomorrow may be "Tea Party strikes back!"
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[ Posted Tuesday, May 27th, 2014 – 15:22 UTC ]
Today President Barack Obama announced the beginning of the end of America's longest war. This announcement was fully anticipated and therefore came as no surprise, seeing as how Obama was elected in large part to end two wars. He successfully withdrew all American troops from Iraq in 2011, and he announced today the schedule for withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan. From 32,000 current troops, we will draw down to 9,800 by the end of this year. This number will then shrink by half (to roughly 5,000) by the end of 2015. By the end of 2016, they will all be out (except possibly for a small force left for security, in the range of 1,000 troops or less). Thus will end a 15-year-long war effort -- the longest in American history.
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[ Posted Monday, May 26th, 2014 – 14:58 UTC ]
I was all set to write an original Memorial Day column today, and had a subject lined up and everything, but then the subject matter and research just got too depressing. So instead, I'm re-running a column I wrote last summer, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg (and the larger 150th anniversary of the Civil War, which we are still in the midst of).
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[ Posted Friday, May 23rd, 2014 – 17:45 UTC ]
Before we begin, our sincere condolences to the George W. Bush family for the loss of former White House pet Miss Beazley, who died this week. As always, we are strictly non-partisan in our love for "First Dogs" and "First Cats," because we feel the president's (any president's) humanity can only be improved by having a pet to play with on occasion (the photo of Bush with Miss Beazley which accompanies that article shows exactly what we're talking about). As Harry Truman famously put it: "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog." Our thoughts are with the Bush family in their time of loss.
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[ Posted Thursday, May 22nd, 2014 – 15:53 UTC ]
As has been noted, at times art imitates life and at other times life imitates art. This is one of those latter times, when what was purported to be a "Women and Colorado's Future" debate among Republican gubernatorial candidates seemed like nothing more than a Saturday Night Live sketch ridiculing the awfulness of the Republicans' continuing failure to reach out to women voters in any meaningful way. And that is actually the most polite thing I can bring myself to say about it: it seemed like satire, but (sadly) it wasn't.
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[ Posted Friday, May 16th, 2014 – 17:24 UTC ]
Karl Rove successfully manipulated the entire news media this week, so we are going to play along today. Rove's specialty is to take what could be considered a reasonable idea, and then twist it beyond recognition while dragging it through the swampiest mud he can dream up. Well, that's admittedly a terrible (and mixed) metaphor, but I think you get the general idea.
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[ Posted Thursday, May 15th, 2014 – 17:14 UTC ]
The Senate quietly made history on Wednesday night when it confirmed Diane Humetewa as a federal judge -- the first Native American woman to ever hold such a post.
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[ Posted Tuesday, May 13th, 2014 – 17:20 UTC ]
Right before the 2006 general election took place, I wrote a column titled "Celebrity Candidate Casting Call," which pointed out the disparity between the two American political parties when it came to fielding celebrity candidates. The reason why it was noteworthy was the imbalance tilted exactly the opposite direction that one would assume -- Republican celebrities had jumped into politics, often very successfully, in numbers that far outpaced Democratic celebrities. Since everyone knows Hollywood is a bastion of liberalism, the article was written in a "head-scratching" sort of tone. Why, I wondered, didn't Democrats actually stand up for their beliefs by running for public office, and why were there so many Republicans doing so?
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[ Posted Monday, May 12th, 2014 – 18:05 UTC ]
Since I did not lose a family member on 9/11, though, I do not even feel qualified to take a personal position on the issue. I simply do not know how I would feel if those unidentified remains contained fragments of one of my own loved ones, to put this another way. So I do not write today to stake out a firm position on the movement of the 9/11 remains this weekend, just to be perfectly clear up front. I'd rather try to make a larger point on the shift in what is considered proper for museums to study and display.
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