[ Posted Friday, April 10th, 2015 – 16:31 UTC ]
So, apparently, Jeb Bush used to think he was Hispanic. At least, that's the box he checked when he registered to vote, a few years back. While immediately created much online amusement (my favorite: "It's pronounced 'Heb' Bush"), it does raise an interesting but tangential question -- and not just for Bush -- in the upcoming presidential primary process: Do Republican ballots in all states require full legal names for candidates?
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[ Posted Friday, April 3rd, 2015 – 16:49 UTC ]
President Barack Obama is finally earning his Nobel Peace Prize, it seems. A few months back, he announced a major shift in U.S. policy towards Cuba, ending a half-century of frostiness, and this week the outlines of a deal to avoid a war with Iran were unveiled, thawing a relationship that froze over back in 1979. Both of these foreign policy accomplishments go a long way towards deserving the Nobel Peace Prize Obama was prematurely awarded in 2009. At the time, many (this column included) joked that the Nobel committee was really awarding the prize to Obama for the sole achievement of "not being George W. Bush." But it seems now that by the time he ends his term in office, Barack Obama will indeed have earned the world's foremost peacemaker's prize. Since this is Good Friday, perhaps a Bible quotation is in order: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."
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[ Posted Thursday, April 2nd, 2015 – 15:44 UTC ]
Barack Obama's job approval poll numbers slipped a bit in March, ending a streak of good news in polling for the president which reaches back to last September. But while the numbers turned slightly negative, the overall outlook for Obama was looking up by the end of the month. This means Obama has a better than even chance of gaining ground again in April. But before we get to predicting the future, let's first take a look at the chart of the recent past.
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[ Posted Friday, March 20th, 2015 – 16:20 UTC ]
It's tax season once again and I'd like to address a question that I rarely see addressed: Who do tax cuts benefit?
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[ Posted Friday, March 13th, 2015 – 16:56 UTC ]
For the uninformed, Pi Day is a yearly celebration of a date on the calendar, for its numerical significance. It ranks up there among geeky holidays with the fourth of May ("Star Wars Day," since you can go around wishing everyone "May the Fourth be with you!"). The significance is it will be "3/14" (at least in the United States, as Europeans write their dates differently). These are the first three digits in the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, or "pi."
But this year's Pi Day will be the best one for the next 100 years, because a whole bunch of digits will come into play. Pi's value is, to 10 digits: 3.141592653. This year's Pi Day will be 3/14/15. Taking it a step further, just before 9:30 AM tomorrow morning, the date and time will read: 3/14/15 -- 9:26:53. Woo hoo! Best Pi Day of the century!
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[ Posted Friday, March 6th, 2015 – 18:34 UTC ]
The February jobs report is out, and -- once again -- Obamacare has failed to kill all those jobs Republicans warned us about. But we'll get to all of that later, in the talking points, so you'll just have to wait for that.
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[ Posted Wednesday, March 4th, 2015 – 17:37 UTC ]
The radical Republicans just suffered yet another big defeat. President Obama today signed into law the "clean" budget for the Department of Homeland Security he had been demanding all along. For the last three months, we've all been watching the Kabuki drama play out, but the ultimate outcome was never really much in doubt. Like a badly-written detective drama where the audience spots the killer in the opening act, almost everyone knew the Tea Partiers were going to lose this battle. What is mystifying is that the battlelines were drawn by the very people who were going to lose. Perhaps mystifying is the wrong word to use. True believers are always mystifying to those who don't profess the same faith. Because this increasingly looks, from the outside, like nothing more than pure religious faith, after all. If I were to label this religious belief system, I would have to call it "All-Or-Nothingism." I would define it as: "An overpowering faith that refusing to compromise and refusing to accept partial or incremental victory will win over all your opponents in the end and give you 100 percent of what you seek."
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[ Posted Monday, March 2nd, 2015 – 16:41 UTC ]
This will be a rather busy week in the political world. We've got the Prime Minister of Israel giving a controversial speech before Congress tomorrow, and then at the end of the week we'll have another round of government shutdown follies, courtesy of the House Republicans. Between these two events, the Supreme Court is going to be busy with a few questions in the political arena. The most prominent of these cases is King v. Burwell, which puts Obamacare back on the docket.
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[ Posted Thursday, February 26th, 2015 – 18:27 UTC ]
Recently Republicans seem to have discovered the struggles of America's middle class. Out of nowhere, they're suddenly talking about this problem. Well that's great, but talk is cheap and when it comes to action, these Republicans seem to have amnesia about what they've actually done to hard-working Americans. Republican trickle-down policies created tax breaks and loopholes for the wealthy while leaving working families to pick up the pieces. I'll believe Republicans care about what's happening to America's middle class when they stop blocking legislation that would require billionaires to pay taxes at least at the same rate that teachers and firefighters do. Republican trickle-down economics blocked increases in the minimum wage that would have lifted 14 million people out of poverty.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 24th, 2015 – 16:57 UTC ]
Mitch McConnell has just defused the ticking Department of Homeland Security shutdown bomb, and signaled that the department will not have to shut down this weekend. No word yet on how John Boehner and the House Republicans are going to react (to say nothing of the right-wing media). But by acting this early, [...]
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