Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Blogs

Some Obama supporters are apparently taking advantage of Google's terms of service to silence anti-Obama blogs, Simon Owens of Bloggasm reports. The company automatically shuts down sites upon receipt of TOS violation claims until they're able to do a human audit, a rather slow process with given little priority on the free BlogSpot service. After some digging it became apparent ...

BLM Freezes New Solar Development for Two Years

The Bureau of Land Management has placed a two year moratorium on new solar power projects proposed for building on public lands. Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two ...

McCain on Gas Prices: ‘I Don’t See How it Matters’ (Corrected)

In a recent interview with the Orange County Register's Martin Wisckol, John McCain said that, not only doesn't he know how much gas costs, it doesn't matter. (Tangentially related: "Nothin' Matters and What If It Did" was an excellent album title. The album itself was so-so.) When was the last time you pumped your own gas and how ...

Subsidizing Home Ownership

Ezra Klein jumps on a growing meme the home ownership isn't all it's cracked up to be and that the government should stop subsidizing it. He points to Paul Krugman, who argues in today's NYT that it's time to rethink our decades-long bipartisan consensus that home ownership should be encouraged. While everyone stresses the advantages of owning ...

George Carlin Dies at 71

George Carlin, a comedian known for his combination of raunchy language and intellectual humor, died of heart failure last evening. He was 71. Carlin was an interesting guy, combining brilliant observational humor with political activism. Like too many comics in the HBO era, though, it often seemed that he was vulgar and outrageous simply because he could rather than ...

Age More Important than Race: WaPo-ABC Poll

WaPo fronts a new poll they've commissioned in partnership with ABC News under the headline "3 in 10 Americans Admit to Race Bias Survey Shows Age, Too, May Affect Election Views." While it's somewhat surprising that nearly a third of Americans admit to "at least some feelings of racial prejudice" (30 percent of whites, 34 percent of blacks, ...

Obama Has 15 Point Lead in Newsweek Poll

A Newsweek poll of registered voters shows Barack Obama with a whopping 15-point lead over John McCain, 51 to 36. Newsweek's Michael Hirsh is stoked. Barack finally has his bounce. For weeks many political experts and pollsters have been wondering why the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain had stayed so tight, even after the Illinois senator ...

5 Reasons to Love $4 Gas

The gang at Foreign Policy wants you to know that, "Sure, it’s ruining the global economy and making everyone miserable, but there’s an underappreciated upside to the high price of oil." They'd have to be awfully good to offset ruining the economy and making everyone miserable, no? Well, here they are: Slightly more people may be taking mass transit. ...

The Economic Benefits of Drilling in ANWR? Negligible.

As the debate over opening up more avenues to domestic oil production continues, it's worth noting that last month, the Department of Energy, at the request of Senator Ted Stevens, produced an economic forecast about opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. The overall benefit? Well, not much, really.Additional oil production resulting from the opening ...

Senate’s Death Spiral

Bob Novak writes about the depressing death spiral of the United States Senate. He uses a floor speech from Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter to illustrate the point. Specter departed from Senate self-congratulation: "The American people live under the illusion that we have a United States Senate. The facts show that the Senate is realistically dysfunctional. It is on life ...