Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
A new book on the 2008 presidential season with lots of behind the scenes goodies has a lengthy excerpt bit on the New York magazine size, where John and Elizabeth Edwards get seriously toasted: entitled “Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster” if that gives you a heads-up. It’s pretty brutal. The line that kept coming [...]
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. [...]
Weird – the guy who transported me up to my room from the ER last night was going on at length about the horrible injustices done to former Congress critter James Trafficant; I hadn’t heard that name for a while. Most of the rest of his blurb was a odd and incoherent rant about the [...]
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 am frequently dismayed by various Truthers out there who insist on a Grand Conspiracy theory of the universe; stories about how the moon landing was faked, the world is flat, that 9/11 was an inside job and how Obama is some kind of Manchurian candidate smuggled into the country as a very small baby [...]
Two prominent Cook County politicians who are black will be running in the next election for President of the Cook County Board; this article discusses how that could split the black vote in the election and let Candidate #3 in the door, a reverse of what happened when Washington beat Byrne and Daley for the [...]
The short version seems to be that it’s unlikely without further explosions that Gov. Sanford of South Carolina will be forced to quit his job over the whole affair-affair, but it’s pretty certain that his political future is totally destroyed. This review from the South Carolina paper The State puts it in a nutshell, without [...]
Dick Durbin and some other Senate Democrats are saying – dudes, you Democratic senators who don’t wanna vote *for* a bill we ‘re putting through don’t have to do so, but fer pete’s sake, nobody lost their seats for voting to shut off debate and bring the bill to a floor vote. The ‘close debate [...]
Gov Sanford of South Carolina admits that his mysterious disappearance over the last week was to go off to Argentina to see his mistress. Well, there’s always the Sanford / Ensign ticket for the GOP next time, with the motto: “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.” And yes, that is Gary Hart [...]
The attacks on Sotomayor are not going to help this, especially in the face of the further radicalization of the Republican Party: No matter what the specific amounts are (somewhere between a net of 6% and 8%), roughly half of the Democratic electoral improvement since the dark days of 1988 has come from demographic change, [...]
Interesting observation on the coming Supreme Court selection (which I am otherwise ignoring all the thrash over) in this blog; in short, the base demands that hell be raised and impossible demands be made on Obama to appoint another Scalia, which will never happen. Nor will he appoint a pot-smoking hippie. But the level of [...]
Here’s a map from AP of the major stimulus projects on a county-by-county basis. Zoomable flash. In my case, the big project in my area is the resurfacing and repair of a major nearby road that we use on a daily basis that is pothole city (which is unfortunately a widespread problem in the Chicago [...]
Another note on torture issues. This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say [...]
Well, the Senate can filibuster a Supreme Court nomination. And I have no idea who Obama will pick. But you can rest assured that the confirmation will be messy no matter who he picks, considering what’s been going on over the last little bit. I’m not looking forward to it at all.