When Trent Lott lamented about Strom Thurmond losing the 1948 presidential race, running on a segregationist platform, the Republican Party saw its outreach efforts to African American voters fall apart almost overnight. The GOP’s attempts didn’t appear to be working anyway, but having your Senate Majority Leader announce that the U.S. would have been better […]
There was an article in the Wash Post last week about the rising prominence of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), and the respect she has earned from her colleagues. While I was glad to see the report — I’ve always greatly admired Sen. Clinton — my interests in the article were a little more parochial than […]
This morning I expressed some concern about why Congressmen Ney and Jones had time to be so concerned about french fries in the House cafeteria, and assumed they had better things to do. After checking some congressional records, I’m left to conclude they didn’t. I haven’t been checking in with C-SPAN lately, but part of […]
I really was going to let this go, but the more I think about it, the more irritating it is. (That, plus today’s papers are filled with procedural wrangling in the U.N. regarding war in Iraq, and I don’t have much to add to the subject) Reps. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) and Walter Jones (R-N.C.) have […]
By any reasonable measure, a majority of states are facing their most serious fiscal problems in recent memory. Ray Scheppach, the executive director of the National Governors Association, recently told David Broder the situation represents “the worst crisis in state finances since World War II.” From coast to coast, the consequences of these budget crunches […]
Imagine I were to tell you about a criminal justice system in a Third World country in which a murder defendant, who is black, was accused of a killing a white teenager. Imagine that the defendant was convicted by an all-white jury after a one-day trial in which prosecutors had no fingerprints, no witnesses, no […]
Good people can disagree about affirmative action. It’s controversial, complicated, and often misapplied. While Carpetbagger is wholeheartedly a supporter of affirmative action policies in workplaces and universities, I understand that opponents are not necessarily racists. But, while I can appreciate differences of opinion on this issue, recent hypocrisy from Republicans is intolerable. Earlier this year, […]
In case you missed it over the weekend, several papers ran stories detailing the reaction from Republicans in Congress to President Bush’s attempt to sell them out over domestic security funding. To review, Bush told the nation’s governors a couple of weeks ago that he really wanted to increase funding to the states to help […]
The transformation is complete. The Republican Party, once positioned as the fiscally responsible party that didn’t want the federal government spending more than it took in, has successfully turned 180 degrees. Mitch Daniels, director of President Bush’s Office of Management and Budget, more or less made the party’s change official on Friday when he said […]
If you’re like Carpetbagger, you consider Sunday the week’s best night for TV. Two things caught my attention that I thought deserved comment. First, 60 Minutes debuted the much-hyped “point-counterpoint” debate between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. If you missed it, CBS has kindly put the whole segment online. This wasn’t a real debate, of […]