[ Posted Wednesday, December 4th, 2013 – 17:56 UTC ]
Last Sunday, Senator Bob Menendez suggested a fairly good idea for further economic sanctions on Iran. Menendez, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has come up with an answer which could possibly satisfy both sides -- those who support the diplomatic track and those who are pushing for harsher sanctions for Iran. The idea is to let the Senate go ahead and pass further sanctions, but to trigger them to the timeline of the ongoing negotiations, so that new sanctions wouldn't kick in until after the six month period of talks. If a permanent deal is struck before that time, then new sanctions (obviously) wouldn't take effect, but if no deal is reached by the deadline, then the sanctions begin automatically.
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[ Posted Monday, October 28th, 2013 – 15:58 UTC ]
Even though it took a long time to get to this point, it was an effort worth making. Which is why the nations of the world should now start a new conversation in some internationally-neutral city, with the expressed purpose of defining what is and what is not allowable for the future of warfare (and spying). Three major topics of such an agreement should be: passive cyberwar (spying on communications), active cyberwar (virus and other attacks), and robot warfare (drones and other automated weaponry).
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[ Posted Tuesday, October 1st, 2013 – 16:10 UTC ]
Obviously, there are other things happening today in the world of politics, but instead of commenting upon them, we're going to stick to the schedule and instead offer up an abbreviated Obama Poll Watch column. It'll be somewhat shorter this month, due to the results having been accurately predicted in last month's column, and due to the fact that the situation on the ground in Washington is changing fast -- not weekly or daily, but hourly. Until we see how this week plays out, it's really anyone's guess how it'll affect the polling.
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[ Posted Friday, September 27th, 2013 – 18:10 UTC ]
No, the big point missed in the midst of Senator Ted Cruz's talkfest was the moral of the story he read. By now, most people have heard that Cruz read, in its entirety, the classic Dr. Seuss children's book Green Eggs And Ham -- tucking his own kids into bed, long-distance, via C-SPAN. Cruz then doubled down on his point-missing by comparing Obamacare to the story's green eggs and ham. Cruz really has no excuse for this monumentally idiotic mistake, since (as mentioned) he read the whole story from the Senate floor.
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[ Posted Friday, September 6th, 2013 – 16:32 UTC ]
Due to the fact that Congress is still on vacation and also due to the fact that it has largely been a one-subject week in the political world, we are going to pre-empt our regular talking points for a discussion of where the country seems to be on the question of attacking Syria. But first, let's wrap up the week and hand out our awards, as usual.
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[ Posted Monday, August 19th, 2013 – 17:18 UTC ]
[T]he military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government. It was not an aggressively simplistic solution, clandestinely arrived at, but was instead an official admission [...redacted...] that normal, rational methods of international communication and commerce had failed.
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[ Posted Tuesday, July 30th, 2013 – 17:12 UTC ]
The news of Bradley Manning's conviction today on multiple charges (and his acquittal on the most serious one) has people lining up to either defend or denounce the verdict. We'll probably be hearing about it all week, in fact. When he is sentenced, it will spur another round of this debate, no doubt.
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[ Posted Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 – 17:07 UTC ]
In the midst of all North Korea's saber-rattling, the United States made a major military announcement yesterday which is going to change the future of warfare in significant ways. Not to put too fine a point on it, but America just unveiled the first working phaser weapon. The Pentagon doesn't call it that, they call it a "laser weapon system," but this is merely semantics from a bunch of guys who probably didn't spend a lot of time watching science-fiction as kids. Their loss. But no matter what the big brass wants to call it, the fact is that Captain Kirk's phasers are now a reality.
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[ Posted Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013 – 16:13 UTC ]
OK, with that out of the way, let's have a look at March's polling. President Obama lost almost all the ground he had gained late in the 2012 election season, and his numbers fell back to where he was roughly six months ago. This isn't as bad as some media have made it out to be, since it may represent Obama's true natural level of support. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, let's take a look at this month's chart:
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[ Posted Friday, October 26th, 2012 – 16:01 UTC ]
No matter what your political affiliations, I think we can all agree we're getting a little burnt out on Election 2012. "When will it end?" we wonder -- and we don't even live in a state currently under siege in the continuing television ad war. We can only imagine what Ohioans, Floridians, and Virginians must be experiencing right now.
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