There is big news from the Justice Department today, but I'm not talking about the announcement that Eric Holder will be stepping down as Attorney General (which I'll comment on tomorrow, most likely). Instead, the news comes from the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. James B. Comey is upset because Apple and Google have recently announced that they will be providing privacy -- via strong encryption -- as a feature in their personal computing products. Comey reached out to the companies to convince them to change their minds about their decision to, as he put it, "market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law."

My response to Comey is simple: Tough. That's the way the cookie crumbles, when government has been so proactive in vacuuming up every electronic signal they can from American citizens. Eventually, big businesses are going to realize that privacy is indeed a marketable feature -- even (and perhaps especially) privacy from government intrusion.

Continue Reading »

Wars always seem to produce inappropriately cute phrases in American culture. These usually have origins in military shorthand and are then picked up by politicians and pundits and used ad nauseam until everyone just ignores the inherent dehumanization of the language. Examples from the past abound: "domino theory," "Vietnamization," "limited warfare," "surgical bombing," and a more recent example that I always personally objected to (mostly for its "aren't pirates cute" nature) -- "blood and treasure." This time around, of course, the phrase now on everyone's lips is: "boots on the ground."

Boots on the ground -- no matter what ground -- is not actually any sort of problem. If a war could be solved with boots on the ground alone, then the United States would have no problem shipping tens of thousands of boots, combat-ready, to any conflict on the face of the Earth. Cartons of boots could be air-dropped into just about anywhere, and the fighting would then assumably soon be over and the war won by the heroic American footwear.

Continue Reading »

Zombies are in the news again. Not actual zombies, but instead the growing governmental awareness that the citizenry needs to be prepared against any possible future zombie attack. And, no, I'm not kidding. It's the time of the season.

The more astute of readers will notice that the previous sentence is a line from a song... by the 1960s British rock band "The Zombies," no less. This was today's gratuitous pop culture reference; or, in other words: "I just couldn't stop myself." Ahem.

It's pretty easy to poke fun at spending taxpayer dollars for zombie preparedness plans. Which was my first inclination upon hearing that Kansas Governor Sam Brownback is about to sign a proclamation which declares October to be "Zombie Preparedness Month" in the state.

Continue Reading »

The prosecution objects. That's one way to put it, at any rate.

Two news stories from the Pacific Northwest today pose an interesting question: are prosecutors beginning to get fed up with the War On Weed? The two stories are completely unrelated, I should mention -- one is about a current prosecutor at the local level, and one is about a former federal prosecutor making a noteworthy endorsement. Neither has anything to do with the other, but both show some common sense being applied in refreshing ways. It's too early to call it a trend (even a regional one), but it certainly is a step in the right direction, at the very least.

Continue Reading »

Congress followed up their recent five-week vacation with almost two whole weeks of actually doing their jobs, so to reward themselves they're now going to take off on another vacation. Until mid-November. The American people will show their disgust at this pathetic work ethic by returning upwards of ninety percent of them to office, if this year is anything like a typical one. The big question on everyone's mind is whether the Democrats will hold onto control of the Senate, which will mean two years of gridlock with the Republican House, or whether Republicans will gain control of the Senate, which will mean two years of gridlock with both the Tea Party and the president.

Sorry to start off on a negative note, but there is indeed little positive to be seen in the biannual frenzy of congressional campaigning which is about to begin in earnest. There is one bit of comic relief to be found in this midterm dance, and it is coming from an unexpected state: Kansas. The Democratic Senate candidate just won a court case which will keep his name off the ballot. The Republican official in charge of elections, after arguing in this court case that he legally needed to print the ballots starting today, is now saying he's going to wait a week so that the Democrats can call a convention and name a replacement to the ballot. Democrats are not going to do this, however, so like I said we've got at least one more week of amusement from the heartland in store. The "What's the matter with Kansas?" jokes just write themselves, don't they?

Continue Reading »

[In all fairness, I have to warn readers that this is going to be an awfully silly column. Pondering quantum mechanics always makes me a bit loopy, so you'll have to forgive me.]

In the world of political punditry, the horserace is king. To put this a bit differently: issues and truths are complicated things to report on, while "who is up and who is down in the polls" is a lot easier to expound upon. And yes, I do realize the irony of beginning a column with sneering contempt for horserace-watching the day after I devoted a column to the current Senate horseraces, so I'll thank you to not bother pointing this out. Ahem.

Where was I? Oh, horseraces -- right. Let's give this metaphor free rein, and further state that there are horseraces and there are horseraces... and then there is the Kentucky Derby. In the political world, the presidential race leaves all other political contests at the post. Nothing whips the political chattering classes into a froth more than the biggest race of all. They chase the story at full gallop, starting approximately ten minutes after the previous presidential election is over, in fact, because it is the one horserace that most Americans also love to speculate endlessly about, no matter how much time remains before the next contest. Which means that even though a midterm election looms in mere weeks, there are still plenty of reporters quite willing to breathlessly cover a race which hasn't even really begun yet.

Continue Reading »

It is time to once again take a broad look at the upcoming Senate midterm elections. As always in non-presidential election years, I seldom pay much attention to the House races, for a number of reasons. First, there are a lot of them -- too many for one person to reasonably keep track of. Second, this year seems like a pretty foregone conclusion: the House will remain Republican, and the only two real questions are whether (and by how much) they will increase their lead, and how strong the Tea Party faction will be after the dust settles on election night.

The Senate, however, is much easier to keep tabs on, and is where a partisan power shift may happen. As always, my election predictions can be taken with the appropriate grain of salt, since while I do pay very close attention to the polling, in a lot of close races I tend to factor in a large portion of nothing short of gut feeling. Your gut may feel a different way, of course. Let me know your thoughts in the comments (it's a game the whole family can play!).

The current makeup of the Senate is 45 Republicans, 53 Democrats, and two Independents who caucus with the Democrats. For control to shift to the Republicans, they would have to pick up six seats (a 50-50 tie would go to the Democrats, with Vice President Biden casting the deciding vote). Earlier in the year, the punditocracy (and the wonkocracy, if I might coin a word for Nate Silver and his ilk) had all but decided that Republicans were a lock to take control. In recent weeks, however, many poll-watchers have begun predicting a much closer contest, and have seen signs of improving chances for Democrats to weather the storm. With all the recent news on the polling front, I thought it was time to make my own picks for the upcoming races.

Continue Reading »

Scotland is set to vote two days from now on whether to remain a part of Great Britain and the United Kingdom or whether to declare itself an independent nation. Ironically, one of the unanswered questions in the vote will be whether Scotland (should it choose independence) will be allowed to remain in the European Union or will have to reapply to be admitted as a new state (which could force them to use the Euro as currency, rather than sticking with the British pound). Will Scotland stay together within the E.U. while it declares itself apart from the U.K.?

I have to state, up front, that I have only a superficial grasp (at best) of the issue of independence for Scotland. I cannot advocate for either side of the question, because I simply don't have enough knowledge of the many issues surrounding Thursday's vote. Also, I have no idea what the outcome of the vote will be, but at least in this I am not alone, as the polling has gotten so close that few are now predicting which way it will go. About all anyone can say with any certainty is that it will be a historic vote no matter what happens, since if Scotland leaves Great Britain it likely won't ever return and (conversely) if it stays it will likely be a long time before another such referendum is held.

What I find interesting in the debate over Scottish independence is the larger question of whether Europe itself is coming together or flying apart. Or, perhaps, whether it could manage to do both at the same time.

Continue Reading »

This past Saturday and Sunday marked the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Baltimore, which occurred towards the end of the War of 1812. Tomorrow will be the bicentennial of Francis Scott Key completing the now-immortal lyrics he titled: "The Defence Of Fort M'Henry" -- later more famously known as America's national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner."

The War of 1812 was one of (if not "the") most pointless wars America has ever entered. American schoolchildren, of course, are not taught this; instead they are taught about the few American victories in the war -- most notably, the Battle of Baltimore (or the "Battle of Fort McHenry") and the Battle of New Orleans. Left mostly untaught are the disastrous campaigns to conquer Canada and the biggest wartime occupation of American territory in any war we've ever found ourselves in. Also unmentioned is the fact that the treaty which ended the war (the Treaty of Ghent) gave neither side much of anything, and in fact returned both the United States and Great Britain to the status quo ante bellum (or, for non-Latin speakers: "right back where we started from").

The War of 1812 was more significant for the domestic fallout and aftermath than for any actual military or diplomatic victories. The war essentially killed off one of the first American political parties -- George Washington's "Federalists." Two of the biggest military victories on land gave us two future presidents -- Andrew Jackson, who won the Battle of New Orleans, and William Henry Harrison. The war did also convince American politicians of the need for an actual United States Navy, which had never really previously existed (due to the fact that it cost a lot of actual money). And, of course, it did gain us our national song.

Continue Reading »

This is a special edition of this column, for a number of reasons. The first is that we're back after a one-week vacation hiatus, but the most special reason (to us, at least) is that this is the seventh anniversary of the launching of the "Friday Talking Points" column, which first appeared both on my site and the Huffington Post on September 14, 2007. The more mathematically-astute among you may notice that 52 times 7 equals a lot more columns than 319. This is true. Twice a year we are pre-empted by our year-end awards columns, and then the rest of the time we were just on vacation or otherwise doing something else. Like last week, for instance. This has led us to count the column's birthdays using the calendar, rather than the metric of "every 52 columns."

Back in 2007, I thought it would be a good idea to write congressional Democrats a memo, in the hopes they could begin to learn a skill Republicans seem to be born with: the ability to stay on-topic and present your political ideas and agenda items succinctly and memorably to the public. I had grown tired of watching the Sunday political shows where Republicans all sang off the same songsheet while Democrats were easily led into the weeds with long rambling tangents to what they should have been saying that particular week. This early effort grew, in the following weeks and months, into the format we now use weekly: a quick rundown of amusing items in the political news of the week, the awarding of the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week and the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week, and then seven numerated talking points suggested for all Democrats to use to explain the Democratic position to all and sundry (especially on Sundry morning talk shows... so to speak...).

Continue Reading »