Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
He’s expressing his rather strong opinions on how the Vancouver Olympics are a money pit in a downturn period, cutting off funding for other public things in favour of high-end expense for the Games. (NSFW re strong language)
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. [...]
Discussion about a bailout bill for newspapers if they reorganize as 501c3 not-for-profits; the President had this to say about it: Obama said that good journalism is “critical to the health of our democracy,” but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting — especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Daniel Larison thinks that the Republican leadership in Congress is rotted out and has to go:
If you’re looking for canned news on this, that’s going to be hard, as most news organizations have been shut down by the Ayatollahs. Here’s the best I can come up with: Wikipedia (terms and background info): 2009 Iranian election protests term: Ansar / Ansar-e-Hezbollah term: Basij militia Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the theocratic [...]
Daniel Larison on the state of the Republican Party and why (read the whole thing): One the reasons why the GOP has so little credibility left is that its members and its spokesmen spent the better part of the fall concocting exaggerated, if not absolutely ridiculous, narratives that put all of the blame for the [...]
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.
…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 [...]
Conservative writer and pundit who, as he put in in reference to another conservative pundit: Worst of all, he is someone whom liberals do not automatically dismiss as an idiot. If you’re looking for a conservative writer who has a good connection to the reality-based universe, try him. I’ve had good luck with him so [...]