Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
Mark Steyn reports that the only McCain supporters he spotted at CPAC were illegal aliens disguised as college kids: I arrived at CPAC just before Mitt began to speak and was struck by the number of young student-ish types milling about in McCain T-shirts. While my minder went off to check her coat, I was [...]
A man who mistakenly brought a load gun to Ronald Reagan National Airport was arrested by the TSA. At first glance you might think, “Well duh. Sounds like government is doing its job for once.” Not so fast. WASHINGTON (CNN) — A passenger who went through an airport security checkpoint — before remembering that he [...]
While Mitt Romney’s victory last night in Michigan was hardly a shock in the way Hillary Clinton’s “comeback” in New Hampshire was, his nine point victory margin in a race that was too close to call exceeded expectations and should certainly give him a boost ahead of Super Tuesday. How Romney Won Romney was born [...]
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has issued a call for Democrats to come out in droves to influence the Republican primary in Michigan: In 1972, Republican voters in Michigan decided to make a little mischief, crossing over to vote in the open Democratic primary and voting for segregationist Democrat George Wallace, seriously embarrassing the state’s Democrats. In [...]
Many people travel during the holidays, and this year I decided to take my son to visit with my mother and step-father. While I am close with my mother, I wasn’t always all that close with my step-father. My son however, considers my step-father to be one of his grandpas. And given that my step-father [...]
Granting that it’s not much money in the grand scheme of things, I was nonetheless rather bemused by a report that the Transportation Security Administration spent $10,000 producing a 60-second video demonstrating tips for packing a suitcase. Among the insightful hints: -Have boarding pass and identification out when in line. -Take off shoes and outerwear. [...]
For a military family, where is home? You move every three years, possibly to other countries (Korea, Japan, England, Germany, Germany, Germany [because so many were stationed in Germany]). Maybe the Philippines, maybe diplomatic schools in Burkina Faso. I lived in Iceland. The children have disruptions of changing schools. But for some, it doesn’t matter [...]
Earlier this week, news that Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga would be given a regular Newsweek column created quite a stir in the blogosphere. Now, the other shoe has dropped, with an announcement that Karl Rove would be his right-wing counterpart: Newsweek has signed the president’s former deputy chief of staff as a commentator [...]
Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto has been released. Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was freed from house arrest late on Friday, hours after she was stopped from leaving her Islamabad home to lead a rally against the president’s imposition of emergency rule. [...] Bhutto, the politician most capable of galvanizing mass protests against Musharraf’s [...]
Karen Hughes has announced that she’s leaving her post as Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Karen Hughes, who led efforts to improve the U.S. image abroad and was one of President Bush’s last remaining advisers from the close circle of Texas aides, will leave the government at the end of the year. [...]
The chief opposition party has won a plurality in Poland’s parliamentary elections but is apparently short of an outright victory. Voters appeared to have ousted the prime minister, one half of Poland’s wonder-twin team, in parliamentary elections on Sunday. The challenger, Donald Tusk, declared victory for his pro-business party, Civic Platform. The prime minister, Jaroslaw [...]
Bowing to organized outrage from religious groups, the TSA has reversed itself and will allow passengers to keep their turban on while going through airport security. Air passengers will no longer have to remove bulky headwear such as turbans at screening checkpoints if doing so makes them uncomfortable. A revised federal guideline, effective Oct. 27, [...]
Daily Kos diarist Sally Kohn has come under some understandable fire for her confession of having “a little crush on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I know I’m a Jewish lesbian and he’d probably have me killed. But still, the guy speaks some blunt truths about the Bush Administration that make me swoon… She thinks he’s “cuddly” and [...]
Washington Examiner columnist Melanie Scarborough believes the recent tasering incident at a John Kerry speech at the University of Florida, and particularly the students’ passive reaction to it, is a sign of something truly depressing. Try to imagine that happening on a college campus in the 1960s. In fairness, the Florida students had little time [...]
Senator Larry Craig apparently likes to make creepy advances on strange men in airport bathrooms. Unfortunately for him, one of his random targets was a Minneapolis airport policeman. Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested in June at a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes police officer investigating lewd conduct complaints in a men’s public restroom, according [...]
Bill O’Reilly has been railing against Democrats and corporate sponsors who are associating themselves with the YearlyKos convention, on the grounds that there is a lot of filth and hate spewing from the DailyKos website. While the former is his right and the latter is likely true, virtually all the examples cited come from commenters [...]
From Markos Moulitsas Zúniga. Reasonable people, including progressives, can disagree on many of the big issues we face today — from which candidate to support in the primary, to whether impeachment is the best way to hold this administration accountable, to the merit of gun control or free trade agreements, to how to handle immigration, [...]
Susie Madrak, under the attention-grabbing headline “No More Dead Bloggers,” laments “the utter injustice of a Democratic political system that is very, very happy to take the money and volunteers the blogosphere sends its way” and yet returns only “Bubkis” to the non-A-listers. There is not even a little doubt in my mind that, if [...]
This week has been a tough one for Chinese imports. Early in the week there was a recall of truck and SUV tires made in China. The tires were made without gum strips—the thingummies that keep the strips of tire together. We import more tires from China than anywhere else (32% of our imports of [...]
Mark Tapscott thinks the combination of historically low poll numbers for President Bush and the drop in Congressional job approval to a mere 27% may signal that the public is finally fed up with “business as usual.” In other words, the moment may be approaching for an independent, trans-partisan political party, a citizens party if [...]
To this point I have been fulfilling my guestblogging duties here at OTB by mostly cross-posting stuff from my blog, PoliBlog. So to remedy that to some degree, I thought that I would try to do a little true value-added blogging and recommend some blogs that are perhaps not well known to OTB readers. The [...]
Cross-posted from PoliBlog: Last week I noted that Turkey’s president had vetoed a proposal to make the presidency in Turkey an elected office. Now, according to the BBC, the legislature has thrown down the gauntlet: Turkish MPs force reform showdown Turkish MPs have defied a presidential veto by approving for a second time controversial reforms [...]
Jonathan Chait has a longish cover piece in TNR entitled, “The Left’s New Machine: How the netroots became the most important mass movement in U.S. politics.” What particularly struck me was this: The most significant fact of American political life over the last three decades is that there is a conservative movement and there has [...]
Megan McArdle tries to board an airplane carrying 3.5 ounce bottles of shampoo that are not in a government approved Ziplock back. Hilarity ensues. As asinine as TSA regulations are, however — and they are incredibly asinine, by the way — I’m with the commenters who argue against requiring TSA agents to make a lot [...]
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is skeptical of the widespread claims of death threats aimed at blogging, thinking most are ploys for attention and the rest are “just the rantings of a lunatic.” For my part, I’ve gotten my fair share of such vile emails. Some of them have threatened my children. One or two actually crossed [...]
Beccah Golubock Watson has a longish piece at the Nation highlighting the plight of lefty bloggers who are unable to sell advertising space for $10,000 a week and quit their day jobs. As bloggers become some of the progressive movement’s most effective voices, the left still has not figured out how to provide them with [...]
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, argues that the phrase “war on terror” has “created a culture of fear in America” which is wasting billions of dollars, innumerable man hours, and aiding the terrorists. The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life [...]
Conservatism treats humans as they are, as moral creatures possessing rational minds and capable of discerning right from wrong. There comes a time when we must speak out in the defense of the conservative movement, and make a stand for political civility. This is one of those times. Ann Coulter used to serve the movement [...]
While there are current arguments that the Medal of Honor has become a posthumous event only, sometimes bureaucracy (and stupidity, we won’t talk about the TSA here) is in the way of honoring those who have been awarded the Medal of Honor. It turns out in Oregon, there is only one Medal of Honor recipient, [...]
Democratic Representative Ellen Tauscher has apparently replaced Joe Lieberman as Netroots Enemy #1, according to a front page story in today’s WaPo by Juliet Eilperin and Michael Grunwald. The Democratic majority was only three weeks old, but by Jan. 26, the grass-roots and Net-roots activists of the party’s left wing had already settled on their [...]
A scientific panel reports that global warming is man’s fault, there’s nothing we can do to stop it, and that we’d better act now. Scientists from 113 countries issued a landmark report Friday saying they have little doubt global warming is caused by man, and predicting that hotter temperatures and rises in sea level will [...]
Matthew Shugart and Steven Taylor have interesting posts on the subject, currently topical because of uncertainly surrounding the health of South Dakota’s Senator Tim Johnson, on the process for replacing vacancies in the Senate. Both argue, persuasively, that the ability of governors to appoint replacements for the remainder of a given Congress is anachronistic. Shugart [...]
Amanda Terkel has a scary post detailing what she terms “John McCain’s War On Blogs.” — Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.” — Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under [...]
The E.P.A. has again changed its formula for calculating fuel economy to lower its mileage estimates. The Environmental Protection Agency rewrote one of the great fictions of American life on Monday by changing the formula for calculating miles-per-gallon numbers on the window stickers of new cars, to take account of higher speeds, more aggressive driving, [...]
Bill Jempty is thankful that our TSA professionals are protecting us from the possibility that Ohio State running back Troy Smith might hijack an airplane using his Heisman Trophy.
Scott Adams recounts having his 4 ounce bottle of shampoo confiscated at the airport because it exceeded the maximum 3 ounce allowance, even though the sign at the airport said it could be 4 ounces and there was only about an ounce left in the bottle anyway. The money quote: For a fleeting moment I [...]
Former Virginia Governor Mark Warner has announced he will not be a candidate for president in 2008: I have decided not to run for President. This past weekend, my family and I went to Connecticut to celebrate my Dad’s 81st birthday, and then we took my oldest daughter Madison to start looking at colleges. I [...]
Over at Cato Unbound Markos Moulitsas attempts to make the case as to why Libertarians should vote for Democrat Candidates next month. The reason I say he attempts to make this case is because he basically wants people who have a strong libertarian streak to think that up is down and black is white. Moulitsas [...]
Key Democratic Party leaders are angry at Joe Lieberman for running against their nominee and there is now talk of stripping his seniority within the caucus. A group of Senate Democrats is growing increasingly angry about Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (D-Conn.) campaign tactics since he lost the Democratic primary last week. If he continues to alienate [...]
The TSA is experimenting with machines for airports that can determine whether travellers have hostile intent for their flights. At airport security checkpoints in Knoxville, Tenn. this summer, scores of departing passengers were chosen to step behind a curtain, sit in a metallic oval booth and don headphones. With one hand inserted into a sensor [...]
In response to my TCS article and blog post yesterday on why the US has maintained a Democrat-Republican two party system since 1860 and likely would for the foreseeable future, UCSD political scientist Mathew Shugart, co-author (with Rein Taagepera) of the award-winning Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems, offered some interesting [...]
My latest for TCS Daily, “Two Parties, Like it or Not,” is up. The thesis: It is no accident that our Republic has had a two party system in place in virtually every election cycle since the founding and that the Democrats and Republicans have taken turns governing since 1860. The Constitution all but assures [...]
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga rightfully gloats over last night’s victory by Ned Lamont over Joe Lieberman. While it has seemed inevitable for a few weeks now, it wasn’t long ago that it seemed unthinkable. Indeed, many of us were chuckling over Kos’ appearance in a Lamont television ad and making fun of the netroots for whooping [...]
Over at The Corner today, Byron York wonders if a Lamont victory tomorrow will “truly be the Triumph of the Blogs” and provides some interesting numbers concerning the netroots and Lamont’s campaign war chest: A new poll of the Lamont-Lieberman race has Ned Lamont ahead in Connecticut, 51-45. A look at the lefty blogs shows [...]