So, a member of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors – Jeff Stone, a Republican – has proposed splitting the state of California, with San Diego and the largely rural, Republican-leaning south east of the state becoming “South California,” and LA remaining with the liberal coast and northern part of the state. You can follow the link to the LA Times for the map of | Read More »
You too can ask President Obama a question on Twitter, using the hashtag #askobama. Of course, the tiny fraction of those tweets to be answered will doubtless be carefully screened, and the answers vetted before posting them. I’d say Saturday Night Live should satirize this, but it already did, the last time something like this was tried as if it was a totally brand-new idea, | Read More »
Expecting consistency from left-wing political activists is folly, but rarely does one get such a glaring example as the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen on presidential “signing statements.” Watch, and your head will spin. During the Bush years, liberal commentators suddenly discovered that they didn’t like the longstanding practice of “signing statements” by which the President offered his own interpretation of legislation he was signing, in | Read More »
So often, the problem with the New York Times op-ed page is not just the left-leaning politics, but the poor quality of the contributors, despite the fact that they occupy some of the highest-paid and most-visible perches in the punditocracy. And the hallmark of poor quality punditry is the failure to think through the implications of one’s arguments. So it is with today’s column from | Read More »
As a practicing lawyer, I naturally have a professional interest in vague and/or complex legal rules that require lots of expensive legal research, training and experience to understand and explain. But complexity isn’t just costly to consumers of legal services, and thus a burden on business as well as on citizen access to the courts. It’s also a drag on the economy and on personal | Read More »
I told you last month that Herb Kohl, Wisconsin’s Democratic senior Senator, hadn’t raised even a penny in the first quarter of 2011, leading to questions about whether he would run for re-election in 2012. Kohl was best known for being not known – he kept an extremely low profile in the Senate, and the best you can say of his Senate career is that, | Read More »
In case you missed it, Jay Cost had a great piece on Friday on “the Food Stamp recovery”, laying out the ways in which the currently-underway “recovery” is the weakest in memory. His bracing conclusion? [I]f the economic recovery does not begin to show substantial improvement, the likes of which we have not really seen in the last two years, and if the GOP nominates | Read More »
If you click on the URL www.gutsycall.com, you will notice that – as of this writing – it redirects you to the Obama 2012 re-election campaign website. The URL was apparently purchased yesterday, although the purchaser seems to have covered its tracks. It would appear that this is being done with the intention of using “Gutsy Call” as a campaign slogan for Obama’s 2012 campaign, | Read More »
One good rule of thumb if you are arguing politics – or practicing law, as I do – is that if your argument requires you to prove that something never happens or somebody does nothing good or right, you have started off with two strikes against you. Never is a hard thing to prove and an easy one to disprove. In the real world, bad | Read More »
If there is one thing we should have learned from the 2008 primary and general elections, to say nothing of 1996, it’s that being a good presidential candidate on paper is useless; you have to want it – want it badly enough to hire a serious staff, badly enough to trim a few positions and hard edges to fit the various demands of the primary | Read More »
With the recent debate over federal taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood bringing the abortion debate back to the surface, it is sometimes useful to look at the numbers to get a little perspective on why this issue is such a large one. (All of these are estimates, and sources vary, but there’s no serious debate as to the scale of the numbers). Number killed or | Read More »
PLEASE BE IT TO YOUR ATTENTION URGENT MESSAGE OF BUSINESS MY NAME IS MR HERBERT KOHL AND I AM A UNITED STATES SENATOR OF THE STATE OF WISCONSIN. I NEED YOUR ASSISTANCE IN AN URGENT TRANSACTION OF BUSINESS TO REMOVE $1 MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS FROM MY CAMPAIGN FOR RE-ELECTION IN 2012.
I had intended to write up a longer or at any rate more organized essay about Libya, but for now, here are my two cents: 1. I was open initially, at least in theory, to the U.S. arming the rebels and enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya, on the theory that we could tip the balance in favor of the rebels without the need to | Read More »
The Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures and demands that judicial officers issuing search warrants do so only on a showing of probable cause, is an important guarantee of our civil liberties, designed to protect personal privacy – especially in the home – from random governmental snooping. The Fourth Amendment tends to get a lot of bad press because it is | Read More »
The biggest political story of 2011 is at the state level, where new Republican governors like Scott Walker and Rick Snyder have followed in the footsteps of Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie by seeking not only to cut short-term spending to address their states’ immediate budget crises while resisting tax hikes, but to attack the #1 source of their states’ long-term fiscal problems: excessive long-term | Read More »
Greg Sargent, the Washington Post’s in-house left-wing activist, has a hilarious post up analyzing the latest WaPo poll. (The post was originally entitled, “The pubic agrees with Dems, but they don’t know it,” although eventually someone caught on and fixed the typo.) Everybody has typos; what’s more enduringly amusing is Sargent’s effort at spin:
As many of you may recall, I am not the biggest fan of Mitt Romney. Contra streiff, I don’t really expect Romney to be the last man standing in the 2012 primaries, even if they go relatively badly in terms of who gets in and who gets their act together once in. Romneycare, atop his many other defects, is too big a problem for too | Read More »
Today is a day for joy. Hosni Mubarak has stepped down immediately as President of Egypt. Following on the heels of the departure of Ben Ali in Tunisia, we are witnessing the hitherto unprecedented spectacle of the people of a Muslim Arab state rising up in protest, of their own initiative, and throwing off a remarkably well-entrenched dictator. We rejoice in the spectacle because we | Read More »
As anyone who has spent any time reading them knows, left-wing bloggers and activists tend to live in a world of their own, in which the most outrageous sorts of allegations against conservatives and Republicans are not required to be supported by any evidence. This is especially true when it comes to accusing conservatives and Republicans of bigotry and other improper motivations; left-wingers feel free | Read More »
A little history can be a dangerous thing, and in advance of Tuesday’s State of the Union Address by President Obama, political commentary will be focusing on Obama’s ability to replay 1995-96, when President Clinton rebounded from a similar rout in the midterm elections to more or less coast to re-election (while Clinton finished below 50% of the popular vote, it was only a “coming | Read More »
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