Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
Apparently, Ronald Reagan’s blood isn’t the only odd thing being auctioned off these days: Queen Elizabeth’s dirty, old undies will have a new home … after a mystery panty raider snatched ‘em up at an Internet auction for $18k. The knickers had been placed on eBay by the estate of the late ”Baron” Joseph de Bicske [...]
This has to be one of the oddest auction items I’ve seen in quite awhile: Thirty-one years after Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin, an online auction house on the island of Guernsey (an autonomous British protectorate and controversial tax haven just off the northern coast of France) is making available to the highest [...]
The Catholic Church has fired a legal shot across the bow of the Affordable Care Act.
You probably only need to turn on C-SPAN to realize this, but a new study finds that the level of discourse on Capitol Hill has gotten dumber: Most congressional observers agree that the level of discourse on Capitol Hill is coarser and more partisan than ever before. A new study suggests it’s also dumber. Congress [...]
After two false starts, the most recent being just last week when an engine sensor caused a launch abort at the very last second, SpaceX succeeded with a launch that promises open an entirely new era of commercial development of space travel: CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private cargo rocket headed to the International Space [...]
One California Democrat is making a rather unusual campaign promise: Andy Caffrey, a candidate for Congress in California, has made a rather unusual campaign promise: If he wins, he’ll smoke a joint — right on the steps of Capitol Hill. The 54-year-old is running on a seven-step platform that prioritizes battling the climate crisis, but [...]
A surprisingly short sentence in a case that caused a nationwide sensation.
Yesterday, Cory Booker committed the rookie mistake of saying what was on his mind.
Google may be anticipating some interesting First Amendment issues it will have to deal with in the future given who it hired recently to advise on First Amendment issues: IS Google search an intermediary like the phone company — simply connecting people with the information they seek? Or is Google search a publisher, like a newspaper, which [...]
Alan Dershowitz thinls the charges against George Zimmerman should be dropped. With due apologies to the good Professor, he’s wrong.
Innocent people have gone to jail, and some of them are still sitting there.
Robin Gibb, who along with his older brother Barry and twin brother Maurice, comprised the Bee Gees died today in England after a long battle with cancer: Robin Gibb, one of the three singing brothers of the Bee Gees, the long-running Anglo-Australian pop group whose chirping falsettos and hook-laden disco hits like “Jive Talkin” and [...]
Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the only man ever convicted in the terrorist attack that took down Pan Am Flight 103, has died in Libya: BENGHAZI, Libya — Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer who was the only person ever convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, died Sunday nearly three years after he was released from [...]
It’s been 34 years since the world of Thoroughbred horse racing had a Triple Crown winner, since then 11 horses have won the first two legs of the test only to fall short at the Belmont. This year, a horse with a name that appeals to bar patrons everywhere has a chance: The 2012 Preakness [...]
Well, to be more precise, his official portrait: George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, are expected to return to the White House later this month to be honored by President Barack Obama with the unveiling of their official portraits that will hang at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House confirmed on Friday that the [...]
One of those things you learning in history class that isn’t necessarily true: It is a little-known but undisputed historical fact that Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the printing press. Though the Gutenberg Bible was certainly the first mass produced printed work, it was hardly the first printed book — nor was it even the [...]
The blind Chinese dissident who set off a diplomatic broohaha after seeking refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Bejing is headed to the United States: BEIJING — Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal defender who made a dramatic escape from house arrest and whose decision to seek refuge in the American Embassy here jolted American-Sino relations, [...]
The Romney campaign is out with it’s first ad of the General Election season, and it essentially stands as a statement of what a President Romney would do on his first day in office: It’s no mistake that the Keystone Pipeline gets prominent mention here, because we’ve seen several polls showing that approval of the [...]
Republican politicians have largely avoided the topic of same-sex marriage since President Obama’s announcement. Why?
The Arizona Secretary of State is apparently a birther: Arizona’s top election official said in a radio interview Thursday that it’s “possible” President Obama may not make the state’s November ballot due to unanswered questions about his birth certificate. Ken Bennett, a Republican who is eyeing a bid to succeed Gov. Jan Brewer (R) in [...]
Here’s why nobody in Washington will allow the Bush Tax Cuts to expire.
Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Biden has just inserted himself into another news cycle: Look, I come from a household where whenever there’s a recession, somebody around my grand-pop or my dad’s table lost a job. “A brother, a sister a friend, a neighbor. When you’re out of work, man, it’s a depression. And a lot [...]
House Republicans yesterday rejected an effort to limit the authority of the President, military, and law enforcement to indefinitely detain terror suspects captured on United States soil: In two votes Friday morning, the House backed the president’s powers to indefinitely detain terror suspects captured on U.S. soil. Lawmakers rejected an amendment that would have barred [...]
Eduardo Saverin has become a political whipping boy.
During yesterday’s controversy over the Fred Davis proposal to bring Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Mitt Romney was asked about comments that he himself had made about Wright on Sean Hannity’s show back in February: “Without question, the legal code in this country is based upon Judeo-Christian values and teachings, Biblical teachings, and for the president not [...]
Your tax dollars should not be paying for this.
All the available evidence suggest that the Occupy movement has fizzled away into virtual nothingness.
Politico reports that Joe Ricketts has released the following statement: Joe Ricketts is a registered independent, a fiscal conservative, and an outspoken critic of the Obama Administration, but he is neither the author nor the funder of the so-called “Ricketts Plan” to defeat Mr. Obama that The New York Times wrote about this morning. Not [...]
The Romney campaign is, not surprisingly, distancing itself from the purported SuperPAC plan to revive the Rev. Wright story in a series of ads: Mitt Romney’s campaign says it wants no part of a plan by Republican strategists to attack President Obama by highlighting his ties to pastor Jeremiah Wright. “It’s clear President Obama’s team [...]
After he lost the primary to hold on to his re-districted Ohio Congressional seat to fellow Democrat Marcy Kaptur, there was some speculation that Dennis Kucinich would move to Washington State and run for office there. As it turns out, we’ve seen the Last Hurrah of Dennis Kucinich: Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) will not seek [...]
A pro-Republican SuperPAC may be bringing the Jeremiah Wright story back. That would be bad news for the Romney campaign.
Before last month’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner Jimmy Kimmel apparently ran a few of his jokes by regular attendees, one of them smartly advised him to skip a joke that likely would have caused some serious embarrassment: Jimmy Kimmel delivered a barrage of edgy jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner (WHCD) late last [...]
A National Institutes of Health study appears to show that people who drink coffee live longer than people who don’t: Your morning cup of coffee may start to taste even better after a major government study found that frequent coffee drinkers have a lower risk of dying from a variety of diseases, compared with people [...]
A new poll of the Wisconsin recall race shows Scott Walker and his Lt. Governor leading their Democratic opponents: A new Marquette Law School Poll shows that with three weeks to go until the recall election Governor Scott Walker has taken a six-percentage point lead over Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, 50-44 percent, among likely voters. [...]
An object lesson in the problems with our intellectual property laws
Common Cause has filed a specious lawsuit alleging that the filibuster is unconstitutional.
It’s been nearly twenty years now since I read The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 and The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940, the first two volumes of what was supposed to have been historian William Manchester’s planned three-volume biography of England’s iconic war time Prime Minister. They remain among [...]
James Joyner has made note of the fact that the records of the autopsy of Trayvon Martin have been made public, so it seems relevant to note the other story in the news today, which is the release of the medical records of George Zimmerman: A medical report compiled by the family physician of Trayvon [...]
There are still surprises in politics, and we saw one of them last night when Nebraska State Senator Deb Fischer came seemingly out of nowhere to win the Republican Party nomination for Senate despite the fact that the entire race had been a fight between two of her competitors: State Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska [...]
The battle lines are being drawn for another showdown over the debt ceiling.
This video was created for the annual New Jersey Press Association Legislative Correspondents Club Show: The fact that Christie and Booker could possibly end up facing off together in an election in 2013 makes it amusing. The probability that national conservatives will call Christie a RINO for daring to make a joint appearance with a [...]
It’s another round of security theater: Seems no one is immune from the tender mercies of the TSA pat-down. First, we learned that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was subjected to a handsy search. And now we learn of the latest high-profile search-ee: former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. [...]
Given the number of things one can do with a smartphone, this is perhaps not suprising: In 2009, the United States crossed a digital Rubicon: For the first time, the amount of data sent with mobile devices exceeded the sum of transmitted voice data. The shift was heralded in tech circles with prophetic fury: “The [...]
Ordinarily, a story about the confirmation of a trial court judge in Virginia wouldn’t get my attention unless it was happening in one of the jurisdictions I usually practice in, but yesterday’s developments in the Virginia House of Delegates are yet another example of what’s wrong with the Republican Party: Virginia’s General Assembly rejected a [...]
Commentary’s Seth Mandel finds that the White House has done some odd things to the Presidential history entries on the White House web site: The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper tweeted that Obama had casually dropped his own name into Ronald Reagan’s official biography on www.whitehouse.gov, claiming credit for taking up the mantle of Reagan’s tax [...]
Following up on the statement his campaign released yesterday that was ending an future campaigning, Ron Paul conceded today that he isn’t going to be the nominee, and appears to be asking his supporters to cease some of the disruptions they’ve been causing at state party conventions: Texas Rep. Ron Paul (R) has conceded that [...]
