As always I watched tonight’s presidential debates with great interest. Here is my high-level review of the event. It was great to see Ron Paul on stage with the other heavy-hitter Republican candidates. There’s no question that he deserves to be there based on his support among voters. This even as Fox News is foolishly…
Category: Politics
Pelosi, Loser of the Year
So says Don Surber: At the end of the year, the pacification of Iraq and the destruction of al-Qaeda in Iraq have come despite the House Speaker. She came into office saying she was going to accomplish all these things in her first 100 hours. She was sworn in on Jan. 4 and 100 hours…
Fox Should Not Censor Paul
Josh Marshall: As we get deeper into the campaign, I do not have a problem with excluding candidates who are not generating any substantial public support. Gravel, I think, was an example of that in the Democratic debates. But I think the Paulbots have a pretty good case for outrage with Ron Paul’s exclusion from…
Obama’s Real Muslim Issue
The question of whether Barack Obama was a Muslim as a boy is still lurking around in some people’s minds, as demonstrated by Daniel Pipes’ Christmas Eve questions about Obama’s potential apostasy and Ben Smith’s reply calling the article a smear tactic. In a country of John Smiths, Barack Obama’s name carries with it an inherent…
Fox News Vetoes Paul
Don Surber says that Fox is in the right for not allowing Ron Paul’s participation in the final pre-primary debate in New Hampshire. His justification? The fact that Paul’s fans “stuff every online poll on the Internet”. Whoop-ti-doo. First, polls are a joke anyway, particularly in a close election cycle like this one. Nothing is…
Immigration Answers
In the NY Times, Julia Preston writes that the immigration problem is defying politicians’ attempts to answer it easily. Coinciding with the mood of apprehension following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the new immigration has provoked more than the traditional suspicion that foreigners are taking jobs from American workers. For many voters in the…
John Edwards’ 4 Steps
Edwards, running a reasonable 3rd in the Democratic primary polls, today published a 4 step program to a healthier America in the Boston Globe. But would following his recipe really make America a better place to live? The first thing we need to do is create more jobs and make sure those jobs pay enough for people…
Ah, Intellectuals
David Frum recently wrote about what he thinks is a disturbing trend among conservatives, dismissing too intellectual positions without properly understanding them while advancing popular, even common, causes and people instead. While it is true that progressive points of view are given short shrift by conservatives there are often valid reasons for their dismissal. As…
Obama’s New Ad is Half Right
The Politico has a transcript of Barak Obama’s new Iowa ad here: Ordinary people all across the country are struggling from paycheck to paycheck. If the plant moves to China, and you’ve been working there for 20, 30 years and suddenly you have the rug pulled out from under ya… And you don’t have healthcare,…
Ron Paul to keep Racist’s $$$
When this issue came up again my first reaction was to think, like the little kid in the legend of Shoeless Joe Jackson of Black Sox infamy, "Say it ain’t so, Ron. Say it ain’t so." But as Frank James writes and his comment section elaborates on quite eloquently: As Paul’s campaign explained, it plans…