Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
New Orleans Times-Picayune writer Bill Walsh notes that Barack Obama isn’t the only politician whose legal name has been used as a coded slur: another notable case is Louisiana GOP congressman and gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal, whose given name “Piyush” is regularly used by Louisiana Democrats, presumably to emphasize his “foreignness.” Democrats say it’s a [...]
A new academic paper by Justin Wolfers and Joseph Price finds evidence of subconscious racial bias by NBA referees, although the effects are rather small: Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined whether otherwise similar black and white players had fouls-per-minute rates that varied with the racial makeup of the refereeing crew. “Across all of these [...]
Dale Franks has a link to a story in Thursday’s edition of The Hill that may torpedo John McCain’s presidential campaign: according to former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle and a member of the Democratic House leadership at the time, McCain’s top political strategist approached the Democrats about a potential defection in early 2001, which [...]
Famously incompetent Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco will not be seeking reelection after seeing poll numbers that would even make President Bush blanch: Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, politically battered by a shaky post-Hurricane Katrina performance, announced Tuesday that she would not seek election to a second term this fall. The Democratic governor’s announcement ends months [...]
A recent survey of South Carolina voters conducted by Winthrop University indicates that national frontrunners Rudy Guiliani and Hillary Clinton are also leading in this key primary state. With the S.C. Democratic presidential primary set for Jan. 29 next year, and the Republicans tentatively planning to hold their contest on Feb. 2, independents may end [...]
The Associated Press reports on Al Sharpton’s reaction to the news that one of his ancestors was a slave of late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond’s first cousin, twice removed: “It was probably the most shocking thing in my life,” Sharpton said at news conference Sunday, the same day the [New York Daily News] revealed [...]
If a California assemblyman gets his way, the Golden State would be the first jurisdiction in the world to ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs in favor of replacement technologies, primarily compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs)–although LED light bulbs, which are more energy efficient than fluorescents and lack their color-emission drawbacks, may be similarly priced [...]
Fresh on the heels of Duke’s offer of reinstatement to former lacrosse players Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty comes additional legal action involving a team member: Kyle Dowd has filed suit against a Duke professor and the university, accusing visiting professor Kim Curtis of giving him a failing grade in a course: Kyle Dowd filed [...]
Gerald R. Ford, 38th president of the United States, passed away Tuesday at the age of 93. Gerald R. Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon’s scandal-shattered White House as the 38th and only unelected president in America’s history, has died, his wife, Betty, said Tuesday. He was 93. Ford had battled pneumonia [...]
Ilya Somin argues on the basis of a recent New York Times article that Texas’ “10 percent” admissions plan is worse than the race-conscious affirmative action plan replaced, particularly at UT-Austin, the state’s flagship campus. According to the Times: [T]he formula has also had unintended consequences that the Texas Legislature is now wrestling with; it [...]
In today’s Washington Post, Manhattan Institute fellow Tamar Jacoby points out a little-noticed irony in Tuesday’s immigration raid against Swift & Co’s meat processing plants: many of the workers hired illegally got their jobs because the government wouldn’t allow Swift to investigate the credentials of suspect applicants. Seen in one light, the raids were perfectly [...]
WorldNetDaily writer Jim Rutz has found the enemy… and it is soy: There’s a slow poison out there that’s severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture. The ironic part is, it’s a “health food,” one of our most popular. Now, I’m a health-food guy, a fanatic who seldom allows anything into [...]
Two University of Chicago economists have taken a new tack at measuring media bias and come to two conclusions that are doubtless shocking: first that media bias exists, and second it can be attributed to telling readers what they want to hear: [The authors] showed that the main driver of any slant was the newspaper’s [...]
Incoming House majority leader Steny Hoyer dropped a bombshell on his 434 fellow representatives this week: they’re going to have to give up their four-day weekends. Next year, members of the House will be expected in the Capitol for votes each week by 6:30 p.m. Monday and will finish their business about 2 p.m. Friday, [...]
Life keeps getting more interesting for conservative talk show host Dennis Prager, who is in hot water for his dopey objection to Muslim representative-elect Keith Ellison’s request to use a Koran during his formal swearing-in ceremony. Now the Council on American-Islamic Relations blunders onto the scene with a bizarre demand that can only backfire on [...]
NASA’s manned lunar exploration plans now include a permanently-occupied base near one of the lunar poles–which might just come to fruition before the 60th anniversary of humans setting foot on the satellite, if all goes according to plan: An international team of astronauts will be living and working at a permanent moon base to be [...]
The 2008 presidential campaign officially kicked off on Thursday with Tom Vilsack, outgoing governor of Iowa, announcing his plan to seek the Democratic nomination. Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (D) launched his campaign for president here Thursday with a jab at President Bush’s leadership, a warning that America’s way of life is threatened, and a pledge [...]
A federal district court judge in Washington has ruled that Federal Reserve Notes must be redesigned to allow the blind and visually impaired to more easily distinguish between denominations: U.S. District Judge James Robertson said keeping all U.S. currency the same size and texture violates the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of [...]
Various news sources are reporting that Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman died today at the age of 94. Friedman, of course, has been one of the leading figures in both academic and popular discussions of free-market economics for over half a century. The most fitting memorial I can see to Friedman is for Congress and [...]
US Airways, still devouring (or, technically speaking, being devoured by) America West Airlines, has decided to launch a hostile $8 billion bid for bankrupt Delta Airlines: The combined company would carry more passengers each year than any other airline in the world, eclipsing American Airlines, the current leader. The offer, extended to Delta’s bankruptcy lenders, [...]
A discussion is brewing around the economists’ side of the blogosphere over the related questions of whether or not it is truly rational to vote, and whether or not voters are well-informed enough to cast rational ballots (assuming they make it to the polling place to begin with). Andrew Gelman and Ilya Somin contribute their [...]
To virtually nobody’s surprise, the first trial of Saddam Hussein on war crimes charges has ended in a guilty verdict: Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced Sunday to death by hanging for war crimes in the 1982 killings of 148 people in the town of Dujail, as the former leader, trembling, shouted “God is great!” [...]
Sunday’s Washington Post rounds up the evidence supporting a Democratic takeover of both chambers of Congress: Two days before a bitterly fought midterm election, Democrats have moved into position to recapture the House and have laid siege to the Senate, setting the stage for a dramatic recasting of the power structure in Washington for President [...]
Radley Balko‘s allegiances in the competition for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Bill Frist have shifted due to an unlikely event: the public revelation of a Facebook photo showing Julia Corker, daughter of Republican nominee Bob Corker, apparently making out with another young woman with some dopey looking frat guy kissing air in [...]
In the wake of yesterday’s New Jersey Supreme Court ruling, the heat is likely to be turned up further on Democrats’ efforts to distance themselves from the same-sex marriage issue. An inadvertent case in point: David Greenberg’s attempt to show that Democrats aren’t really that pro-gay-marriage after all at Open University, complaining about a New [...]
In a decision that may have nationwide implications, the Supreme Court has vacated a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals injunction that stopped Arizona from enforcing its new voter ID provision–a decision at odds with recent court decisions regarding other states’ voter ID laws, including Missouri’s, which is not likely to be affected directly by this [...]
Today’s WaPo reports on at the defection of high-profile GOP moderates in Kansas to the Democratic ticket in this year’s election season: Paul Morrison, a career prosecutor who specializes in putting killers behind bars, has the bulletproof résumé and the rugged looks of a law-and-order Republican, which is what he was until last year. That [...]
David Adesnik of OxBlog finds Nancy Pelosi running away from the term “liberal” in the run-up to the November elections. The president’s approval rating hasn’t seen the brighter side of 50% in years. Confident liberals installed Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic party and threw their weight behind a successful anti-Lieberman insurgency. So, has [...]
Former Texas Governor Ann Richards, perhaps most famous for her quip that former president George H.W. Bush was “born with a silver foot in his mouth,” passed away Wednesday at the age of 73 after a six-month fight with cancer. It’s not often that a one-term governor makes as large a splash on the national [...]
Fresh on the heels of a sharp decline in oil and gasoline prices comes news that Chevron and two partners have discovered an oil field apparently containing 3-15 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico in U.S. territorial waters off Louisiana: Oil analysts and company executives said newly released test results from a [...]
Widely-respected legal writer Stuart Taylor takes to the pages of Slate to thoroughly evicerate a rather pathetic effort by the New York Times to rehabilitate the efforts of Durham’s Keystone Kops and bumbling DA Mike Nifong in the interminable Duke lacrosse investigation. Quoth Taylor: Like the headline, the piece cultivates a meretricious appearance of balance. [...]
Former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador Andrew Young has landed in hot water after making racist comments in an interview with a Los Angeles newspaper: In an interview published in Thursday’s Los Angeles Sentinel, Young was asked to comment on whether he is concerned that Wal-Mart causes mom-and-pop stores to close. “Well, I think they [...]
Madonna is causing a bit of a stir in Europe with her latest concert stunt–appearing in a mock crucifixion as part of her concert tour–leading German officials to consider pressing charges against the pop star: German prosecutors are threatening to monitor Madonna’s weekend concert in Duesseldorf to see if she repeats her mock crucifixion scene. [...]
Two separate cases (one of which I noted Monday) of young Muslim men buying pre-paid telephones in bulk in the Midwest are ending without charges against the men involved: Two alleged terrorism cases involving men of Middle Eastern descent and bulk purchases of cell phones were in tatters Monday, and Arab-American leaders said the arrested [...]
Three Palestinian men from Dallas were arrested over the weekend in Michigan after a Wal-Mart employee found their purchase of 80 prepaid TracFones suspicious and authorities found over 1,000 of the phones in their van, along with photos and video of the Mackinac Bridge: If the hundreds of prepaid cellular telephones found in the minivan [...]
A joint U.S.-French effort to pass a resolution calling for an end of hostilities in Lebanon was unanimously approved Friday by the U.N. Security Council: The Security Council agreed unanimously on Friday on a measure calling for a full cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, deploying 30,000 Lebanese and United Nations forces in southern Lebanon and [...]
Monday’s New York Times carries an article on immigration hearings planned by the House that rests on a rather odd premise–that the only people who care about immigration reside in states along the Mexican border: When House leaders announced their plan to hold 21 immigration hearings in 13 states during the August recess, they said [...]
As Daniel Drezner notes, Mexico’s electoral tribunal has ordered a partial recount in the country’s recent presidential election, falling short of demands by left-leaning presidential candidate Andres Manuel López Obrador for a full recount: In Mexico City’s central Zocalo square, thousands of Mr Lopez Obrador’s supporters chanted “Vote-by-vote!” as they watched the tribunal’s session on [...]
Former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker won Thursday’s Republican primary for the Senate seat being vacated by Bill Frist, handily defeating former representatives Ed Bryant and Van Hilleary; Corker will face Memphis’ Harold Ford, Jr. in the November general election. What does this matchup portend? On the one hand, Mike Hollihan thinks Bryant or Hilleary would [...]
The Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party has decided that the presidential nominating process needs to be compressed even more in 2008: The [committee], in a decision that is likely to alter fundamentally the way the party chooses its nominee, voted for early contests in two new states — a caucus in Nevada [...]
A group in Arizona wants to give everyone a chance to win $1 million—but only if they vote: There’s going to be a new reason for Arizonans to go to the polls this year: They could win $1 million. The Secretary of State’s Office certified Thursday that backers of the voter lottery plan had submitted [...]
It’s officially time for U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders (DI-Vt.) to admit what the rest of us—even the Vermont Democratic Party—already know: he’s a Democrat in Socialist clothing: Vermont’s Democratic Party is maneuvering to keep the Democratic candidates for the state’s open US Senate seat off the November ballot, as party leaders seek to clear the [...]
It turns out that the pardon of hip-hop producer Dallas Austin on drug charges in Dubai was the result of personal lobbying by Orrin Hatch, the GOP senator from Utah not known for his sympathy for recreational drug users: U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a musician in his own right, helped secure the release [...]
Felipe Calderón, the candidate of incumbent president Vicente Fox’s National Action Party (PAN), has been declared the winner of Mexico’s presidential election by the country’s independent election commission: After days of uncertainty, election officials declared Thursday that Felipe Calderón, a conservative, had won the race for president by less than 1 percent of the official [...]
The Senate is holding hearings this week on President Bush’s practice of attaching presidential signing statements to legislation he signs into law: Sen. John McCain thought he had a deal when President Bush, faced with a veto-proof margin in Congress, agreed to sign a bill banning the torture of detainees. Not quite. While Bush signed [...]
Porkbuster weiners Glenn Reynolds and Ed Morrissey are hyping alleged windfall profits by GOP congressmen Dennis Hastert, Ken Calvert, and Gary Miller they received after selling property proximate to highway projects they have championed in Congress… if by “proximate” you mean “possibly within the same county”: House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) made a $2 [...]
Austin Bay is all over news that the Iraq Survey Group has discovered hundreds of “degraded” munitions containing weaponized mustard and sarin gases. The munitions, although apparently dating back to the first Gulf War, would seem to further undermine claims from the anti-war fringe that Iraq had declared and destroyed its stocks of non-conventional weaponry. [...]
President Bush, at a US-EU summit in Vienna, told his European counterparts that his administration plans to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp, apparently confirming reports from European papers three months ago: Speaking to journalists following the talks at the EU-US summit in Vienna on Wednesday (21 June), Mr Bush confirmed he shared a [...]