Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
The local Sioux Falls paper notes that the voting percentage in the most recent school board election was 3.55% in an editorial asking for voting to be made easier by eliminating precinct voting in favor of at-large polling places scattered around the city. Personally, I think that’s more likely to confuse the heck out of [...]
My favorite conservative columnist, Daniel Larison, is hitting it on the head and out of the ballpark this morning about the mindless OMG’ing in the Beltway press and elsewhere about political dishonesty on national security issues. He brings up two main directions on this: if Group A is out of office, then Group B (who [...]
…is only indicative of local situations, really – with two caveats. If you run a crappy candidate and a nasty, dumb campaign, don’t be surprised when you lose. If you spend a lot of money and should have won or just barely won, that says more about your campaign and your candidate than anything else. [...]
(taken from the teabagger protest in DC this weekend) Lesson #1: Anyone who is not a Republican is not a Marxist. Really. Lesson #2: The last Czar in Russia gave up the throne in 1917, and the Russian Communists took over Russia in 1918; I don’t think you understand that there were no Czars in [...]
I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all. But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]
I have my own suspicions, but the Californians who have opinions who regularly read my journal can read this posting in the Mahablog (which I regularly read) and see if they agree about the breakdown of the political process in the Golden State. Here also is a quick breakdown of who is paid in IOUs [...]
If you want an idea of why the idea of mixing church and state is a bad one, look at Iran. You can’t challenge the state without challenging God’s word, you heathen. Die in hellfire! And which church gets to call the shots? The largest church in the USA is the Catholic Church, and I [...]
…which is the Organization of American States’ irregular meeting of the leadership of the OAS states (34) countries). Interesting news coming out of it, of course. Discussions between Obama and the US delegation on the one side, and some people Bush would never deal with on the other…discussions with the Cubans and Venezuelans and so [...]
Speaking of the seriously rich are still pretty much the seriously rich unless they put their money in the seriously stupid, the Chinese Prime Minister is getting nervous about the safety of US Treasury securities with all of the talk about spending lots of newly printed dollars. Dude. There’s no real place to go with [...]
Now that the Republicans don’t seem be be getting any leverage out of calling Democrats a buncha liberals (‘socialists‘ seems to be the term in use, and I’m waiting for ‘pinko Commie’ any day now), they are now starting to go after each other; Rush Limbaugh and Michael Steele are going at each other for [...]
The new African American head of the Republican party making racist comments about Indian-American Governor Bobby Jindal, going on about ‘slum love’. Same guy who was talking about his hip-hopization of the face of the GOP (I want to watch Boehner and Cantor do hip-hop in the well of the House, yes I do) and [...]
Anyone here got a good explanation as to why the heck the Liberal Democrats (who are niether) ended up in charge in Japan for the last 54 years? My understanding is a combination of gerrymandering and fear of the opposition party as a buncha Commies. There’s also the whole business over the drunk Finance minister, [...]
Took this political-spectrum test that’s been floating around on Live Journal; it marked me down and a moderate-liberal sort. Or as they put it: left moderate social authoritarian. Only VERY minorly authoritarian, but I certainly don’t think that way. I mean, I’d probably be a Liberal Democrat in the UK, but that’s a way different [...]
Limbaugh et al: The Democrats invented / created the recession and so on so as to gain control over the business world. As in nationalize it all, the dirty Marxists. *background music: The Red Flag*
Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by. Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set [...]