[ Posted Wednesday, June 29th, 2011 – 16:16 UTC ]
California has just concluded its first test of a radical concept: if legislators can't manage to do one of the most basic tasks they are hired to do in a timely manner, then cut their pay. No on-time budget? No paycheck. Period. And while there's not enough data to draw any hard-and-fast conclusions, the idea seemed to work exactly as it was designed: this time around, the politicians were very personally motivated to do their job.
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[ Posted Friday, June 24th, 2011 – 16:13 UTC ]
Well, it's certainly been an eventful couple of weeks, hasn't it?
We're back on our regular weekly schedule here after returning home from our second trip this month (this one to Netroots Nation), after which I can firmly conclude that flying, these days, sucks. Big time. Sigh.
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[ Posted Friday, June 10th, 2011 – 15:40 UTC ]
Having just gotten back from a trip abroad where the news was dominated by the story of a politician facing severe consequences (and the end of his political career) for his sexual misconduct, I opened up the pages of the American news to find... well, pretty much the same thing.
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[ Posted Friday, May 20th, 2011 – 16:46 UTC ]
A word here about timing is necessary, I think. While the blog post is quite obviously meant as a semi-joke, wouldn't this have been more fun in, say, mid-October -- a few weeks before Hallowe'en? Instead of this week, with the "End of Days" prophesied for midafternoon this Saturday? I'm just saying....
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[ Posted Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 – 16:13 UTC ]
The Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives are supposed to -- according to their own statements -- absolutely revere the United States Constitution. They even opened their current congressional session by reading the whole text of the document aloud (or, at least, the non-embarrassing parts of it). So it's a little surprising that they appear not to understand one of the bedrock ideas enshrined within the Constitution -- how a bill becomes a law. House Republican leaders have announced they'll be voting on a bill this Friday (charmingly entitled the "Government Shutdown Prevention Act"). This bill reportedly contains a piece of legislative fantasy within it -- that the House of Representatives can declare something to be the "law of the land" without any input or action from either the Senate or President Obama.
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[ Posted Friday, March 25th, 2011 – 17:27 UTC ]
Anyone who sits in the Oval Office -- no matter what their name or political party -- is going to have detractors. As they should, since disagreeing with political leaders is almost the national sport in America, and always has been (sorry, baseball, but political bickering has been around a lot longer). Sometimes criticism of the president is for very principled and deeply-held beliefs. Sometimes, it is just knee-jerk-ism of the first order.
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[ Posted Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 – 17:30 UTC ]
Last week, President Barack Obama tried to make some news on the healthcare issue. Unfortunately for him, the story was all but swallowed by bigger news (Libya, the budget fight, Charlie Sheen...). But this is a story which deserves some attention, because it might prove to be the answer to the endless bickering on Capitol Hill on what to do about the newly-passed healthcare law. Obama, by backing a bill put forth by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and Republican Senator Scott Brown, has essentially tossed a gauntlet down in front of the Republican Party. The heart of Obama's challenge: "You think you can do healthcare reform better in your states? Fine. Go ahead and do it better."
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[ Posted Friday, March 4th, 2011 – 18:06 UTC ]
While technically true ("job growth" is not the same thing as the unemployment rate), but that last sentence could also have been written as: "the unemployment rate fell at the fastest rate in over fifty years -- since 1958, to be exact." Both are true, and yet they tell very different stories -- "a grim nine percent" versus "fell at the fastest rate in over fifty years."
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[ Posted Thursday, March 3rd, 2011 – 16:50 UTC ]
Phelps knows how to manipulate all of these categories, as he's been at his hatemongering for quite a while now, which has involved previous legal disputes. He has his own church, for instance, which cloaks (as far as he's concerned) everything he says as "religious speech." To back this up, he also knows that "political speech" is protected speech as well. Phelps himself used to be a lawyer (he has been disbarred) who took on civil rights cases, so he knows the legal landscape.
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[ Posted Monday, February 21st, 2011 – 18:29 UTC ]
The two formerly-individual holidays celebrating Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's Birthday have been merged into a single federal holiday -- a holiday which, while intended to honor both Washington and Lincoln, has now become somewhat "genericized" (in name, at least) into a celebration of all our presidents. But what about the forgotten presidents? [Or, to be scrupulously accurate, "presidents"?]
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