Category: politics
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Speculation on why Gonzales lied
It’s pretty clear that there’s only one reason why Alberto “Fredo” Gonzales didn’t commit perjury: Because GOP senators arranged for his March testimony to not be under oath, and an oath is required for perjury. It’s equally as clear that he lied to Congress, and he should suffer for it. But it demands we consider:…
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Health of the Republic: Down 10% to 15%
With exactly 18 months left to go in office, this President has made a sweeping and unprecedented play for unchecked power. According to a Washington Post article, the President intends to claim that Congress cannot pursue its investigation into the political firing of 9 US Attorneys, because the President has exerted a broad “executive privilege”…
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Re-cap on the posters
It’s become clear that I’ve mis-tagged some of these, and I thought it was about time — 1/3 of the way toward a book! 🙂 — to collect them in one place. More below the fold.
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Shameless me-tooism
Generally, I don’t like posting a simple link to someone else. But today, I feel compelled, because Glenn Greenwald has done such a masterful job outlining the facts and the reasons behind the catastrophic collapse of American support throughout the world. We’ve allowed this President and his cronies to change what America is, and we’ve…
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Scooter Libby and the Rule of Law
OK, first off, what the President did — commuting Libby’s sentence so that he serves no jail time — is itself well within the law. Perhaps unwisely, the Founders did vest that power in the President and he gets to use it, even when it’s unseemly. Let’s leave that aside. But if the President thinks…
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Irksome metric
Today, there’s a piece by Maya Jasonoff in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times on the Americans loyal to Britain during the Revolution, and it has me irked. It’s not the thesis, which I agree with, that we should be more aware that the “self-evident” truths were anything but, to about 20% of…
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Another criminal escapes justice on a technicality
Interestingly, that’s not how the right-wing noise machine is approaching this story, about how some of the indictments against Tom DeLay have been thrown out. You’d think that people who have spent literally four decades decrying “judicial activism” and unjust outcomes of people “clearly” guilty, would be a-twitter that a judge and then an appeals…
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The Appeal of Apocalypse
What is so seductive about the end of the world? Evidence of the eschatonic impulse are around us everywhere. Disaster movies often reign supreme in the theaters — and the bigger the disaster (Independence Day, Armageddon, etc.) the more successful the movie. Foreign policy seems more and more a push for one last throw of…
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Are you safer?
In today’s NY Times, Richard Cohen writes a piece that praises Hilary Clinton for having the “courage” to assert “I believe we are safer than we were” (before 9/11). Mr. Cohen lambastes what he sees as the knee-jerk reaction of her Democratic rivals, who (he says) reflexively bash everything associated with Bush, even those things…
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Ubi Dubium
There’s a nice little piece (“Better to Be Hamlet than President George” by Peter Birkenhead) in Salon today on the value of doubt and its sad lack in today’s political culture. It’s worth a read. (Perhaps I’m a bit biased, as I chose to name my original domain “ubidubium”, from the Latin “ubi dubium ibi…