[ 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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[ Posted Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 – 18:15 UTC ]
Christina Aguilera is -- quite rightly -- getting a lot of grief these days, because she flubbed a line while singing the National Anthem at the start of last weekend's Super Bowl. But while her mangled version of the lyrics was pretty cringe-inducing, to me what was completely indefensible was her mangling of the tune itself. Because this is one song which really shouldn't be open to "interpretation" -- at least not during such a prominent event.
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[ Posted Friday, January 7th, 2011 – 18:18 UTC ]
Sometimes it is hard to come up with a metaphor to describe the week that was. This was not one of those weeks.
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[ Posted Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 – 16:41 UTC ]
The newly-Republican House of Representatives is going to start off their tenure with a gimmick. Or, to be slightly more charitable, a bit of political theater. They're going to read the entire United States Constitution on the floor of the House, as a sop to the Tea Party Republicans. Their aim is twofold -- to appease the Tea Party Republican faction, right from the get-go; and to provide stirring video clips of Republicans faithfully reading our country's founding document. There's one problem with this second goal, though: who gets to read the uncomfortable bits?
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[ Posted Monday, December 20th, 2010 – 17:46 UTC ]
Both houses of Congress have now passed the bill which repeals the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy (DADT), which did not allow gay Americans to openly serve their country in military uniform. President Obama has scheduled a signing ceremony for the repeal bill this Wednesday. While this is a significant achievement on the civil rights/gay rights front, it is also a significant political achievement. And one man stands out as the driving political force behind the successful effort to repeal this discriminatory federal policy. Which is why, today, I'd like to publicly thank Senator Joe Lieberman.
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