Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
Most of us above a certain age can testify that time seems to move faster as we age. As a kid, a 15-minute drive seemingly takes hours and the last few days before Christmas seem to take years to pass. In middle age, you can’t believe how fast the last twenty years flew by. But [...]
Yesterday, I noted that now that Rand Paul has gone from a primary race to the general election that: “Paul is now facing a very different kind of campaign” because he is now going to be scrutinized in new ways and will have to explain himself to a different kind of electorate if he is [...]
Via the NYT: Specter Defeat Signals a Wave Against Incumbents: Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who left the Republican Party a year ago in hopes of salvaging a 30-year career, was rejected on Tuesday by Democratic primary voters, with Representative Joe Sestak winning the party’s nomination on an anti-incumbent wave that is defining the midterm [...]
Via the LAT: Iran agrees to exchange of nuclear material In what could be a stunning breakthrough in the years-long diplomatic deadlock over Iran’s nuclear program, Tehran has agreed to send the bulk of its nuclear material to Turkey as part of an exchange meant to ease international concerns about the Islamic Republic’s aims and [...]
Last month, French President Nicolas Sarkozy became the latest European leader to take the lead in an ongoing fight against Muslim women wearing Islamic garb, specifically the full-face veil, or niqba, and the burqa, in public when he promised to introduce a bill that would ban both items in France. But, it’s not just France [...]
“It is more than a little ironic that NATO has committed itself to defining a new strategic concept at precisely the moment the transatlantic relationship counts for less than at any time since the 1930s.” So begins an FT op-ed by CFR president Richard Haass. I assess this argument in “Goodbye to Europe?,” a lengthy [...]
Greetings to the readers of OTB. My name is Steven Taylor and I will be joining the regular stable of bloggers here at the site. I have been blogging at my own site, PoliBlog, for seven years starting a few weeks after James started this site—indeed, his foray into the then new world of blogging [...]
Ezra Klein points us to this Gary Lauder TED Talk on making driving more efficient: He correctly points out that roundabouts are much more safe, efficient, and cost effective than stop signs or traffic signals. He acknowledges that sometimes they’re not practical and illustrates in amusing fashion why stop signs cost us a lot of [...]
An otherwise very good piece by CSM’s Christa Case Bryant detailing Lindsey Vonn’s impressive third straight World Cup victory drifts into one of my pet peeves: This is Vonn’s third straight overall title, a feat unmatched since Austria’s Petra Kronberger won her trio from 1990-92. Vonn’s 11 World Cup wins this season make her second [...]
Time for the Thursday OTB Caption ContestTM REUTERS/Marco Fredes Winners will be announced Monday PM
Kay Bailey Hutchison’s bizarre campaign to beat incumbent Texas Governor Rick Perry in the Republican primary has ended in embarrassing defeat. Gov. Rick Perry won a decisive victory over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Texas GOP primary for governor Tuesday night, bringing a bruising fight between two of the state’s most popular Republicans to [...]
Time for the Monday OTB Caption ContestTM (AP Photo/CBS) Winners will be announced Thursday PM
Glenn Reynolds, Stacy McCain, Jim Hoft, Lonely Conservative and others continue to point to rather thin evidence that UAH mass murderer Amy Bishop was a “socialist.” She went to Harvard after all. And one kid on a prof rating website called her one. QED! As I’ve previously noted, her politics seem rather irrelevant. Certainly, [...]
Time for the Thursday OTB Caption ContestTM (AP Photo/CBS) Winners will be announced Monday PM
A recent Gallup poll shows that the American public agrees with the Supreme Court that campaign contributions are free speech but that most nonetheless want to limit said speech. Fifty-seven percent of Americans consider campaign donations to be a protected form of free speech, and 55% say corporate and union donations should be treated the [...]
Time for the Monday OTB Caption ContestTM (AP Photo/Michael Probst) Winners will be announced Thursday PM
Two tangentially related stories that have gotten a lot of play in the blogosphere this week are Pat Robertson’s declaration that Haiti’s horrific earthquake was punishment from God for an alleged “pact to the devil” [sic] and the revelation that Sarah Palin wasn’t the bit nervous about being under the sudden spotlight of a national [...]
A new CDC study suggests that Americans may have reached the limits of human obesity. Americans, at least as a group, may have reached their peak of obesity, according to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Wednesday. The numbers indicate that obesity rates have remained constant for at least five years among [...]
Time for the Monday OTB Caption ContestTM (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, FILE) Winners will be announced Thursday PM
The L.A. Times has a fascinating article about the difficulties in accounting for estimated costs in a troop surge in Afghanistan. The calculations so far have produced a sweeping range. The Pentagon publicly estimates it will cost $500,000 a year for every additional service member sent to the war zone. Obama’s budget experts size it [...]
Barack Obama has been president for just under 10 months but he’s added two trillion to the national debt and will double it by the end of the decade. CBS’ Mark Knoller: This latest milestone in the ever-rising journey of the National Debt comes less than eight months after it hit $11 trillion for the [...]
The Supreme Court hears oral argument today in Pottawattamie County v McGee, wherein they will have to decide if prosecutors have immunity from lawsuits even if they frame someone for murder. On one side of the case being argued are Iowa prosecutors who contend “there is no freestanding right not to be framed.” They are [...]
Time for the Thursday OTB Caption ContestTM REUTERS/Eliana Aponte (MEXICO SOCIETY) Winners will be announced Monday PM
Greece’s Socialist Party has defeated the New Democracy Party in the country’s national elections with enough seats to form a government: ATHENS (Reuters) – Greece’s Socialists, who campaigned on a promise to inject a 3 billion euro ($4.36 billion) stimulus package into the economy, have won Sunday’s national election with enough seats to form a [...]
In my early morning Teddy Kennedy Dead at 77 media roundup post, I observed, “That the Chappaquiddick scandal didn’t make the first several paragraphs — or even first page — of several of these obits is quite remarkable. It would be like writing an obit for Richard Nixon that didn’t mention Watergate or one for [...]
“[I]f Pakistan collapses, the U.S. military is primed to enter the country and secure as many of those weapons as it can, according to U.S. officials,” report’s TIME’s Mark Thompson burying his lede three paragraphs into a story whose headline asks, “Does Pakistan’s Taliban Surge Raise a Nuclear Threat?” As I explain in my New [...]
Craig Henry surveys two pieces from the recent “How to save the dying newspaper industry” meme that’s been going around and sounds a much more optimistic note than generally seen in the blogosphere. He points to a February TIME piece by Walter Isaacson (“How to Save Your Newspaper”) that advocates a micropayment system. While pretty [...]