Category: politics
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Health of the Republic: Down 3% to 12%
Calling Orwell…. Calling George Orwell… Or maybe Kafka is a better target. US military prosecutors have asked for — and now have been granted — a blanket order preventing the defense counsel of a Gitmo detainee from discussing the identity of any prosecution witness with anyone, the defendant included. The defense argues (correctly!) that this…
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Proud of My Congressman
How often do you get to write a headline like that these days? I happen to be served by Rush Holt (Democrat and former nuclear physicist), and Congressman Holt has been — unlike almost all of his peers — quite active in protecting the rights and the security of all Americans. To be colloquial, Rush…
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Worthy of note
Just another “me-too” blog post 🙁 but I saw this at Talking Points Memo and thought it worthy of being flagged. My God, has there ever been a worse administration? What we know makes them as the worst ever, and now we see, there’s a whole lot they’re trying to make sure we never know…
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Dishonest or just dumb?
An article in today’s NY Times caught my eye: “FCC Planning Rules to Open Cable Market” says that the FCC has laid the legal groundwork to re-regulate the cable industry. It struck me because this is quite atypical for the FCC and for the Bush administration in general. Apparently, in the Cable Communications Act of…
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Recycled: What’s So Wrong About Military Tribunals, Anyway?
Another piece written some time ago (circa 2002 January) that reads chillingly a propos today. This was written before the series of judicial rebukes to the President’s overreaching constitutional “doctrine” of unlimited executive power. Sadly, those rebukes have not rendered the points raised moot.
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Waterboarding
I don’t like me-too blogs but every once in awhile, someone writes on a topic in a way that exactly captures my own feeling, a way that I could never match, much less trump. This piece by Joe Galloway is one such. My God, how did we come to a point when Senators and Representatives…
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Recycled: Just Wrong
Long before this blog, I kept an equally-erratic literary journal called A Voice in the Wilderness. And while nothing written there was particularly world-shattering, I don’t want it to get lost in the mists of cyberspace. So to do my part to save the planet, I’m going to recycle and reuse that content, putting the…
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Alternate History: The Speech that Wasn’t
In preparing my second Convocation speech, I spent most of the summer at a loss. Once I had changed apartments, I sat down in earnest. Eventually, I ended up jettisoning my original effort and producing the speech as given. But in case you wonder what could have been, below I’ll post the speech I nearly…
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Faith in an Age of Fear
Today the Hun School had its second annual Convocation to commence the year. As the current holder of the Distinguished Faculty Endowed Chair, it fell to me to present a speech. (I did this last year, too; you can find that speech online.) The text of this second speech can be found below the fold.
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Worrisome Phrase
In reading this AP News story on the upcoming speech by the President, I came across the following: Bush and his senior advisers are likely to hear the initial thinking from Ryan Crocker, Bush’s envoy in Baghdad [emphasis added] Isn’t Ryan Crocker the accredited ambassador to Iraq? Confirmed and empowered, one would hope, by the…