Destor on Ordering a Pizza Conservatively in Texas
Ramona: Hatred in a Lovely Church
Gallup: Obama 46, Romney 46
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Destor on Ordering a Pizza Conservatively in Texas Ramona: Hatred in a Lovely Church Gallup: Obama 46, Romney 46 |
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12. Romney's inability to raise money from small donors shows the lack of enthusiasm for Romney, and will make it hard for Romney to compete in the fall except as a fairly obvious extension of the crowd that funds SuperPACs, because Romney is going to be broke when the campaign ends, and while Obama will have less cash than in 2008 to work with, Romney will have far less. [Read more]
I love basketball, so I love Jeremy Lin. He's awesome. I also love to write about basketball, so I was waiting until I had seen more of Lin's play to write a blog about his fascinating rise to celebrity status and into the upper echelon of NBA guards. I was not waiting to blog about Lin until idiots thought it was cool to use the ugly and out-of-bounds racial slur "chink" in prepared text to refer to him. Nonetheless, we have been exposed this week to ESPN making wordplay with this racist slur, and to boxer Floyd Mayweather and even columnist Jason Whitlock joining the racist foot-in-mouth comment club. So before we get back to enjoying the Linsanity where it belongs, on the hardwood (where Lin scored 28 and dished out 14 assists in a nationally televised Knick win over the Mavericks today), let's recognize the teaching moment our culture suddenly finds itself in about the not widely paused upon subject of antiAsian racism. [Read more]
That darn Tea Party is at it again, by saying what it means and meaning what it says. The February 7 Santorum trifecta, in which the AntiRomney du jour thumped Mitt Romney by 30 in Missouri, 27 in Minnesota, and 6 in substantially Mormon Colorado (wow), is more of what has been the primary point of this 2012 Republican nomination contest: that the Tea Party wants what it considers a real conservative, and not Mitt Romney, to run against Barack Obama. While I picked Newt Gingrich to win the Republican nomination because he was the last AntiRomney standing, my error was not in assessing the Tea voters. It was in failing to notice that the Republican Party still had a viable AntiRomney to whom it could turn -- former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. Santorum became the eleventh Republican to lead national primary polling during this election season when PPP's national poll released Friday read Rick 38, Mitt 23. So can the Romney Inevitablists finally pipe down? How wrong do you have to be before you see it? [Read more]
Dirty Dancing teaches us a lot. Nobody puts Baby in a corner. There is joy in the upstate New York summer camp experience. Sometimes it is possible to hear the pop music of the distant future if you just break into dance during an emotionally charged moment in your upbringing. Stuff like that. But the deepest wisdom in this Kahlil Gibran-like wellspring of profundity came from Baby Houseman's dad, Dr. Houseman, when he apologized to Patrick Swayze's Johnny, who he had cruelly misjudged. Taking back his incorrect assessment of rough-hewn Johnny's pure motives toward Baby, Dr. Houseman set a shining example for us all by saying, "When I'm roo-wawng, I say I'm roo-wawng." [Read more]
One of my favorite Onion headlines is South Postpones Rising Again For Yet Another Year. As Homer Simpson once said, it's funny because it's true. And there is a parallel truth in the failure of the Tea Party to control a party in which it seems to command a majority. How does Mitt Romney, of Romneycare and abortion rights, win a Florida primary? Because the Tea was strained into two cups -- a Newt, and a Rick. With Establishment carpet bombs a-bombin', and Newt lacking any defenses against Air Romney, that was just enough. The RINO beat the Newt.  [Read more]
12. I need to get working on that Newt's-going-to-lose mea culpa (a/k/a The Dr. Houseman Column). Before doing so, will have to write column explaining that Newt is still helping to re-elect Barack Obama. It will rest on the recent WaPo polling showing that independents have now flipped from leaning Romney over Obama to leaning for Obama over Romney now that Romney is getting defined. This, as much as the slow reduction in unemployment, is why Obama is just about even on approve/disapprove, which is bad news for Romney. [Read more]
I told you so. Back in November, I posited that the primary lens through which one should view this Republican primary cycle was not as a contest among positive options, but as a contest among Romney and whoever was the most compelling alternative to Romney. (You know, the AntiRomney.) After Romney convincingly won his home state, I argued again in this space that if Gingrich remained in the teens nationally (which he did at all times), he would win South Carolina. And now with Gingrich's resurgence through two debates and a decisive triumph in South Carolina, he is well poised to win Florida, and with it, assume the mantle of the front runner in the GOP race. All of which shows that the Tea Party has taken control of the Republican Party, and also, that Barack Obama is likely to be re-elected nine months or so hence. Why? Three reasons: [Read more]
Three weeks into this weird, compacted four month NBA season, the experts who rated the Chicago Bulls less likely than the Miami Heat, Oklahoma City Thunder, and even the Los Angeles Lakers to win the championship look pretty dumb. The Bulls are 12-2 (and an eye-popping 7-2 on the road), and are easily the class of the league to this point. Here's why the Bulls look like they are set to repeat as the best regular-season team, and have the best chance to win the 2012 NBA championship. [Read more]
During the last month, there has been a lot said, written, and assumed about the National Defense Authorization Act that is either untrue or overstated. There are several reasons for this. One is that it's a law, and laws can be complex and ambiguous. Another is that President Obama signed it, which means it triggers the automatic Obama Bad-Obama Good discussion. The discussion about it to me largely misses the point, focusing too much on questions of citizenship, for example, and too much on scoring points for and against Obama. This blog presents my critique of the NDAA, which differs substantially from others you have likely read. [Read more]
What a weird year. I set out to write the blogging year through recaps of ten blogs that strung together what the year was to me (at least the year as concerns subjects about which I write), with further commentary on how those issues have played out and where they are. So far so good, though it took way too long to write. Unfortunately, like 2011 itself, my subject selection is all over the place. As organizational fiat, I sorted my blogs and treatment of the year roughly by subject or blog-type: Tucson Shooting (1); Politics (2-5); Law (6-8); 9/11 Forevermore (9-11); First Person Stuff (12-16); Fun (17-20); and Sports (21). This was my blogging year that was. Thanks to all of you for all the great comment threads and for sharing it with us at dag. [Read more]
By Elizabeth Weingarten, ForeignPolicy.com, May 23, 2012
It was 2009 in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Mossarat Qadeem was sitting on the floor of a house with about a dozen young Pakistani men -- some of whom had nearly become suicide bombers. Qadeem's goal: to undo the destructive brainwashing of the al-Qaeda and Taliban teachers who trained them in extremism, in part by asking the students to narrate their life stories.
"We were handling one of the boys, and he just came, put his head here in my lap, and he started crying and weeping," Qadeem recalls. "I was taken aback. It is very unnatural in my country that a man that tall can just sit at your feet and put his head here. [The other men] were all crying with him, and I was looking at him, and thinking, ‘my God.'"
All in a day's work for Qadeem. She's the national coordinator of Aman-o-Nisa, a coalition of Pakistani women that convened in October 2011 to combat violent extremism in Pakistan at the grassroots level. [....]
The issue of sexual assaults on American Indian women has become one of the major sources of discord in the current debate between the White House and the House of Representatives over the latest reauthorization of the landmark Violence Against Women Act of 1994.
.......
“We should never have a woman come into the office saying, ‘I need to learn more about Plan B for when my daughter gets raped,’ ” said Charon Asetoyer, a women’s health advocate on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, referring to the morning-after pill. “That’s what’s so frightening — that it’s more expected than unexpected. It has become a norm for young women.”
The difficulties facing American Indian women who have been raped are myriad, and include a shortage of sexual assault kits at Indian Health Service hospitals, where there is also a lack of access to birth control and sexually transmitted disease testing. There are also too few nurses trained to perform rape examinations, which are generally necessary to bring cases to trial.
By Ismail Kahn, New York Times, May 23/24, 2012
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A Pakistani doctor who helped the Central Intelligence Agency pin down Osama bin Laden's location under cover of a vaccination drive was convicted on Wednesday of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison, a senior official in Pakistan said.
A tribal court here in northwestern Pakistan found the doctor, Shakil Afridi, guilty of acting against the state, said Mutahir Zeb Khan, the administrator for the Khyber tribal region [....]
By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2012
MOSCOW — Stiff new penalties aimed at opposition protesters were given preliminary approval Tuesday by Russian lawmakers loyal to President Vladimir Putin, the target of mass rallies and demonstrations before his March election victory.
The bill, which opposition parliament members termed draconian and protested by threatening to file out of a legislative session, calls for fines of up to $50,000 and up to 200 hours of community service for organizers of rallies and demonstrations that grow violent or exceed the approved number of participants.
The sanctions were approved on first reading by parliament's lower house, which is controlled by Putin's United Russia party. They mark a return by the Kremlin to a tough stance against critics after concessions during the recent election campaign [...]
Also see:
Russians back Putin, strong leadership
Washington Post, May 22, 2012
A Pew survey of 1,000 Russians found that President Vladimir Putin is well-liked by more than 70 percent of citizens, especially older adults.
Associated Press, May 21, 2012
HAVANA — It was all sunshine, smiles and celebratory speeches as officials marked the arrival of an undersea fiber-optic cable they promised would end Cuba's Internet isolation and boost web capacity 3,000-fold. Even a retired Fidel Castro had hailed the dawn of a new cyber-age on the island.
More than a year after the February 2011 ceremony on Siboney Beach in eastern Cuba, and 10 months after the system was supposed to have gone online, the government never mentions the cable anymore, and Internet here remains the slowest in the hemisphere. People talk quietly about embezzlement torpedoing the project and the arrest of more than a half-dozen senior telecom officials.
Perhaps most maddening, nobody has explained what happened to the much-ballyhooed $70 million project....