Category Archives: Politics

Bush busy dumping the grown-ups

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Sydney Blumenthal had a remarkable article in the Guardian last week, outlining more of how Bush/Cheney and the neo-cons are busy consolidating power and tossing out the last remnants of Bush Sr.’s old guard realists. They’re all about the ideological purity in the White House these days, and they live in a fantasy world. A few choice ‘grafs: The transition to President Bush’s second term, filled with backstage betrayals, plots and pathologies, would make for an excellent chapter of I, Claudius. To begin with, Bush has unceremoniously and without public acknowledgement dumped Brent Scowcroft, his father’s closest associate and friend, … Continue reading →

Heartbreaking

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Bush won. Get over it. Ever since George Bush was re-elected, conservatives have been telling liberals to “get over it.” Excuse me? “Get over it?” This wasn’t a baseball game. This wasn’t the Super Bowl. We’re not sobbing in our beers because the Steelers whipped the Packers. We’re at war. People’s lives are at stake. Every day, families are being destroyed, both here and in Iraq. To treat this election so dismissively is an insult to them and to the soldiers who gave life and limb in this war.

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Supreme Court declines to rule

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The Supreme Court has declined to hear challenges to the Massachusetts gay marriage ruling. The Massachusetts Supreme Court had ruled last year that gays should have an equal right to marry under state law, and this is the second time the high court has refused to intervene. Opponents of same sex marriage had asked the court to intervene against what they call “judicial activism”, or the practice of courts ruling on which laws are constitutional. Of course, the Supreme Court considers judicial review a basic right of the courts, so you can imagine they’d be unwilling to rule otherwise. But … Continue reading →

Native lands

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David Neiwert is worth reading no matter what he’s writing about. His regular blog, Orcinus, is the best site on the web for keeping in touch with the activities of home-grown American hate groups and various groundswells of racism and terror in the U.S. He has a piece up this week at The American Street, which addresses a different subject, one I haven’t read about before: various attempts to reclaim land from Indian tribes in the western U.S., land given in treaties long ago and since grabbed away at every chance. These are things I figured were settled long ago, … Continue reading →

Did Bush lie?

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Maybe he was just confused. Word is he wasn’t very lucid back then. From an NBC Nightly news interview with Billy Graham: That’s something the current president says he did during a now-famous talk with Billy Graham, at a time when drinking and carousing threatened to lead George W. Bush astray. It

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55 per cent

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That’s Bush’s current approval rating according to CNN/Gallup/USA Today. I thought he hadn’t been above 50% in at least a year. So what’s up with that? It’s certainly not because he’s solved the deficit problem (he hasn’t) or because the war in Iraq is going well (it’s not). He couldn’t even get intelligence reform passed when his party controls both houses of Congress! Indeed the American people must be a little bit delusional. “We voted him back in, therefore he must be doing a good job.” Definitely not reality-based.

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The Colorado success story

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Both Colorado Luis and Western Democrat point us to an article in the Washington Post on why Democrats made such good progress in my very purple home state of Colorado this year. Then add their own thoughts on the subject, which are well worth reading. I think the future of success for Democrats will be found in the Rocky Mountain states, which are already purple and trending bluer all the time. But the kind of pragmatic, solution-oriented work the Dems did in Colorado this year has to be key. The fact that local Republicans suffer the same divisions we’re seeing … Continue reading →