[ Posted Monday, July 22nd, 2013 – 17:36 UTC ]
[The Scene: A warm Philadelphia evening, 226 years ago. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention -- after a long and miserably-hot day of respectful debate (and quite a lot of just plain bickering) over the text of Article I, Section 10 of the proposed draft of the new United States Constitution -- take up the final item on the agenda. We join the Founding Fathers as they (somewhat-wearily) begin discussion of the final subject of the day. Since the debate was conducted behind closed doors, this re-creation uses no names for the participants, to protect their anonymity.]
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[ Posted Friday, July 19th, 2013 – 16:13 UTC ]
As usual this week, there were several stories the mainstream media was obsessing over which I am just largely going to ignore. The most inane of these was, of course: "This just in! It gets hot in the summer! Who knew?!?" The most ridiculous one was the foofaroo over Rolling Stone using a photograph on its cover which many other media outlets had used for front-page stuff, but which somehow Rolling Stone wasn't supposed to use, for some inexplicable reason. Even though -- on the same cover -- they called the guy "a monster." Lots of out-of-context outrage ensued, including one call to buy the magazine and then burn it. Um, yeah, that'll show them! Just hand over your money, in protest!
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[ Posted Wednesday, July 17th, 2013 – 16:40 UTC ]
But what if it works reasonably well? What if (gasp!) people actually like it?
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[ Posted Tuesday, July 16th, 2013 – 17:29 UTC ]
Harry Reid and John McCain apparently just cut a deal which will avoid the "nuclear" or "constitutional" option of changing the Senate's rule that allows filibustering presidential (non-judicial) appointees. Yesterday I wrote about the meeting which produced this deal, so I thought it was worth writing a followup article now that a deal has been reached.
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[ Posted Monday, July 15th, 2013 – 16:33 UTC ]
An extraordinary meeting is taking place today, which all 100 senators have been invited to attend. This should really not be an extraordinary thing -- you'd think that all senators meeting together would just be an actual floor session in the Senate -- but it is because it is actually a political meeting, with the doors closed. The senators aren't meeting to pass legislation, they're meeting to have a political showdown of sorts (hence the closed doors). Normally, each party's caucus meets separately behind closed doors to hash out party strategy, but what's extraordinary about today's confab is that both parties are meeting at once.
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[ Posted Friday, July 12th, 2013 – 17:19 UTC ]
OK, we've got somewhat of a backlog to take care of here, due to summertime laziness striking early this year. So we're just going to plow through the swirling storm of craziness as fast as possible. Insert your own "Sharknado" joke, if you feel so inclined.
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[ Posted Tuesday, July 9th, 2013 – 16:26 UTC ]
That's pretty stunning, isn't it? In 2013, the deficit will be less than half what it was when Barack Obama took office. In 2014, it will be approximately one-fourth the size of the 2009 deficit. Whether in absolute terms or in proportion, this is likely to be the best deficit-reducing record in all of American history, in fact.
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[ Posted Friday, July 5th, 2013 – 17:47 UTC ]
Maybe it's just envy. I'll fully admit it, up front. After all, who wouldn't want a job where you get one-third of the time you're supposed to be working as free vacation days? Nice work, if you can find it. So maybe there's a tinge of envy which propels me, on a semi-annual basis, to essentially air the same complaint. But the regularity of these rants is also due to the fact that not much changes in Washington, ever, and one of the reasons that Congress just doesn't work these days is that Congress just doesn't work all that much.
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[ Posted Tuesday, July 2nd, 2013 – 16:13 UTC ]
Welcome back to our monthly review of President Obama's job approval polling numbers. This is going to be an abbreviated version of our normal column, because it got squeezed out of the Monday slot by the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, so apologies for this month's brevity in advance. June wasn't a particularly good month for Obama's numbers -- in fact it was a fairly bad month for him, as his numbers went "underwater" for the first time in his second term. Let's take a look at this month's chart:
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[ Posted Monday, July 1st, 2013 – 17:51 UTC ]
Today, exactly 150 years ago, the Battle of Gettysburg began. Seen by most military historians as the turning point of the Civil War, the victory of North over South was indeed a profound moment in time. But I'm going to leave that sort of thing to the military historians who are much more informed about the battle itself, the meaningfulness of the victory, and all the rest of the arrows-on-a-map analysis. There should be plenty of such commentary this week to commemorate the battle, a three-day affair that left roughly 50,000 Americans dead. Instead, today I'm going to go off on a rather large tangent into the history of the American political world, so be warned.
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