Occasionally, presidential candidates are going to embrace bad, unpopular ideas. That’s to be expected, I suppose; no candidate is going to get every issue exactly right. But Bill Richardson’s support for a Balanced Budget Amendment is just bizarre. He not only supports a bad policy, but he brags about it, as if he assumes others […]
A few weeks ago, Gallup conducted a national poll and found that three out of four Republicans (74%) believe Rudy Giuliani would make an “acceptable” GOP presidential nominee. None of the other Republican hopefuls came close. The conventional wisdom suggested that these results, mirrored in other polls, spoke to a key development in Republican politics. […]
We’ve known for quite a while that the political affairs office at the White House conducted partisan, political briefings, despite the Hatch Act’s prohibitions on politicking in government buildings with government employees. In April, we learned there were at least 20 private briefings on GOP electoral prospects before last November’s elections, for senior officials in […]
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) sat down this week with Salon’s Walter Shapiro, which was a bit of a surprise, given that the magazine and the senator don’t agree on too much right now. Most of Lieberman’s comments were about what you’d expect, but one exchange stood out. JL: I worry that whoever gets the Democratic […]
It’s disappointing, but not surprising. After the president scuttled a compromise between Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and congressional Democrats, Senate Dems did what many expected they would do: they caved. The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government’s terrorist surveillance laws, approving […]
It’s been a dispiriting week in Iraq. The largest Sunni Arab bloc quit the Maliki government. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was admittedly discouraged over the lack of political progress in Iraq and conceded the administration “might have misjudged the difficulty of achieving reconciliation between Iraq’s sectarian factions.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs nominee Navy Adm. […]
The God Machine produced so many great religion-related news items this week, it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s kick things off with a fascinating item about how, and whether, a public university can accommodate the religious practices of observant students. When Majed Afana needs to pray while attending classes at the University of […]
Guest Post by Morbo James Dobson of Focus on the Family just can’t hide his disdain for the Girl Scouts. His propaganda arm, Family News in Focus, attacked them yet again July 31, claiming that girls are leaving the Scouts in droves for a Christian fundamentalist alternative called American Heritage Girls. Somehow I doubt it. […]
Guest Post by Morbo Here’s some embarrassing news: Low-paid Americans are being sent to Australia to warn workers there not to let their country become more like ours. The Australian Council of Trade Unions brought what were described as three “low-wage” workers Down Under to perform a sort of “scared straight” function. The workers warned […]
Guest Post by Morbo Although there has been much speculation about the health of Chief Justice John Roberts, I’m more worried about another member of the high court. Every day I wake up worrying that I’ll unfold the paper and see a headline reading, “Supreme Court Justice Stevens Announces Retirement.” John Paul Stevens is 87 […]