Category: Health of the Republic
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Texas approves explicitly conservative curriculum
The writing was on the wall for a while, but Texas just approved a revision to its history curriculum. It has an explicit conservative bent — I mean, literally, students are to learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority…
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Our (Even More) Broken Senate
News comes that Senator Richard Shelby has placed a blanket hold on Obama administration appointments, apparently as part of a plan to extort pork for his state. With Scott Brown having been seated, the chance of cloture on these holds seems remote. So the Senate is even more broken. The danger is that this will…
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A well-deserved smack-down on trials of terrorists
Adam Serwer at TAPPED has a nice response to Richard Cohen’s latest hyperventilating bed-wetting over the upcoming trial of several terrorists. I’m disappointed that NYC has successfully lobbied to have the trials held elsewhere, though I’m glad that the main reason seems to be that the extra security would be overly disruptive to city life…
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We Are All Californians Now
This is the day. This is the moment that some clever historian — not the first to consider this sweep of time, but rather someone turning over the leaves looking for a more subtle causation — will draw a slash on the timeline of history and write: Here began the fall of the American republic.
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The Democratic playbook
in convenient cartoon form. I got this via Ezra Klein’s fantastic blog, but apparently it’s by Tom Toles.
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My congressional lobbying
I haven’t really gotten involved in haranguing my elected representatives before, but the possibility of health care reform is so tantalizingly close — and the apparent drift of the Democratic so-called “leadership” is so grindingly predictable and frustrating — that I’ve felt compelled to contact my representative several times. Below the fold is the email…
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What Michael Steel Won’t Let Me Post
OK, that’s melodramatic. All that’s occurred so far is that their mediocre site has choked several times since I’ve tried to post a comment in response to a blog post there. The post blames President Obama for the jobs lost in the past 11 months and worries what it would mean if he does a…
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Security v. Security Theater
Not surprisingly, Bruce Schneier has an excellent piece talking about the psychological dimensions of terrorism and what a strong, stable industrial democracy can do in the face of amorphous threats… without sacrificing its principles, its freedoms, or its citizens. If you live in an advanced country, you should probably read this — before the next…
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Knowing is Half the Battle
I was cruising TechDirt and saw a neat post on “Is The Federal Government The Most Interesting Tech Startup For 2009?” The idea is that the recent data.gov initiative has led to an outpouring of with-it and effective apps allowing anyone to get a handle on the vast trove of information compiled by the federal…
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“We are not a people who fear the future. We are a people who make it.”
In general, I’m not overly impressed with the Presidential Saturday radio address (now of course really a YouTube address). But I liked today‘s, probably because it resonates with something I’ve said before (twice, even). Happy Birthday, America.