A sad, troubling, rage-inducing story from The Canadian Press: A critically-ill premature-born baby from Hamilton is all alone in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital after she was turned away for treatment at local facility and transferred across the border without her parents, who don’t have passports. Ava Stinson was born Thursday at St. Joseph’s Hospital, 14 weeks premature. A provincewide search for an open neonatal intensive care unit bed came up empty, leaving no choice but to send the two...

I haven’t written anything on the Mark Sanford saga since Thursday morning, when I commented on his humanity and hypocrisy — what he did was all-too-human, however bizarre the contortions of his trip to Argentina and the lies of those close to him, but also, given his conservative Republican moralism, deeply hypocritical as well. Since then, more has come out. For example: – His wife, Jenny, now says she’s known about the affair since January. – Fox News, hardly a media...

Well, what more is there to say? One of the genuine icons of our time, which says a lot about our time (more for bad than for good, I would argue), has died at the age of 50. Like him or not, there is no denying Michael Jackson’s significance in global popular culture. He was a star above stars, as outsized a celebrity as we have ever seen. He was an artist, I’ll give him that, but he was so much more, and over the past twenty years or so his art, his music, receded further and further...

“Mark Sanford is no longer missing, but he’s obviously lost.” So writes Slate’s John Dickerson to open an article on the Mark Sanford saga that, in light of what we learned yesterday, adds some much-needed humanity, largely out of respect to Sanford’s own humanity, to what has been, in some circles, a case of gleeful Schadenfreude. It’s an article that really got me thinking last night. Hopefully this makes sense. I and many other bloggers and political commentators...

I have defended Obama on Iran, I continue to defend him, and I’ll defend him here. I tend to be quite hawkish (as a liberal) on democracy and freedom, and I would love to see Iran shake off the shackles of theocracy and tyranny and embrace liberty and diversity and the sovereignty of the people, but, unlike war-now neocons and the many other hawkish conservatives, I also realize that the world, and Iran especially, is complicated, and not so easily reducible to categories of good and evil....

The other day, TNR’s Michael Crowley effectively captured the contradiction at the core of the conservative assault on Obama over Iran: So Now Obama Really Is Moses? For more than a year conservatives have ridiculed the alleged belief that Obama’s special rhetorical powers can do anything, including parting the waters. Now they’re all clamoring for him to change he course of Iranian history by leveraging what Paul Wolfowitz calls “his enormous political prestige.” In...

It’s just getting weirder and weirder. The State is reporting this morning that Sanford was not hiking the Appalachian Trail (as his office claimed), nor writing (as his wife claimed), but amusing himself in and around Buenos Aires, Argentina. He may even have taken a cruise. “I wanted to do something exotic,” he said. Okay, fine. So he went to Argentina for a short, “exotic” vacation. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s not really the point....

Yes, it’s quite amusing that (white nativist) Pat Buchanan and “white nationalist” Peter Brimelow spewed their bigotry and ignorance beneath a banner that misspelled the word “conference” — it was spelled “conferenece,” with an extra ‘e’ (for eugenics?) — but what’s rather more serious, if not genuinely disturbing, is that this sort of bigotry and ignorance still plays so well on the right and throughout much of America. Indeed,...

So apparently Mark Sanford, the AWOL Republican governor of South Carolina, is hiking the Appalachian Trail. (UPDATE: Sanford staff is now saying that the governor will be back in the office on Wednesday. Still, it’s all very, very troubling.) So, case closed, right? Story over? Well… For all I know, Sanford may very well be hiking. And he may very well have been hiking these past several days. Perhaps it all came about quite suddenly, like a trip to Vegas with your buddies. Maybe one...

Well, they made peace in the Republican Party, putting aside their differences for the sake of electoral success, the neocons and the theocons and the paleocons and the neo-libs, and that worked fairly well for them, largely because, for a long time, the desire to win overcame the obvious differences, and because the neocons, led by Krazy Bill Kristol, and the business-oriented, anti-tax-crazed neo-libs put up with the moralism and nativism of the theocons and paleocons in a quid pro quo to get what...

What can one say about adulterer John Ensign, Republican senator from Nevada? Like my friend Steve Benen, and so many other liberal-minded adults, I really don’t care what Ensign does with his personal life, as long as it doesn’t involve animals or children — or, rather, I do care, insofar as people may have been hurt by his actions, but whatever he did really isn’t my, or our, business. He did what he did, and now it’s between him and his wife, and him and his conscience,...

From Swampland: For two years now, John McCain has been entirely consistent on Iran: every last statement he’s made–at least, those that I’ve seen — has been (a) fabulously uninformed and (b) dangerously bellicose. He’s still at it, apparently. There is no question that President Obama’s more prudent path is the correct one right now. There is also no question that the neoconservatives are trying to gin up this situation into an excuse for not engaging with the...

My friend Barbara O’Brien (a.k.a. Maha of the very fine Mahablog) runs the Mesothelioma Law & Politics blog at the Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center and has been writing extensively on health-care reform. Take, for example, this must-read post on the American Medical Association’s appalling (if all-too predictable) opposition to a “public option,” that is, to a government-sponsored system (or even part of a system). Here’s a key passage, laying bare...

The right has been all over Obama’s measured response to the Iranian election — seriously, what was he to do? push America’s weight around with the situation still unclear, and with allegations of corruption and vote-rigging unproven, however credible, thereby likely driving the wedge between Washington and Tehran deeper at a time when the U.S. is seeking to open up diplomatic relations with Iran over its nuclear program? no, open meddling in internal Iranian affairs would hardly...

Joe Lieberman, non-Democrat, is always just in it for himself, isn’t he? He’s with McCain and the Republicans before the ‘08 election, campaigning vigorously against Obama, then he’s with Obama, if not so much with the Democrats, whom he formally rejected following his loss to Lamont (becoming an “independent”), when Obama wins and the Republicans are reduced to an extremist minority with little hope of reaquiring power anytime soon. Indeed, he only crawled back...

I haven’t blogged on it, but I’ve been following the Iranian election, and post-election, closely — and it’s pretty clear that Iranian democracy is a sham. Here’s Andrew Sullivan, bringing it home with some of the best analysis I’ve read (making a point that is sure to freak out the right): Ahmadinejad’s bag of tricks is eerily like that of Karl Rove – the constant use of fear, the exploitation of religion, the demonization of liberals, the deployment...

Dear Reverend, Please. Stop. I didn’t hold Obama’s long association with you against him, and I still don’t. He was a congregant, yes, but so were so many in the community. Your church was a sort of community center. He was an active member of the community, and he was there. And you were important to him, an important figure in his life. Whether he agreed with you or not is another matter, however. He agreed with you on some things and not on others. Given what I know of him, I...

In his most recent NYT column, occasionally interesting conservative pundit David Brooks came out in support of Sonia Sotomayor and even had some nice things to say about her: If you look at the whole record, you come away with the impression that Sotomayor is a hard-working, careful-though-unspectacular jurist whose primary commitment is to the law. She is quite liberal. But there’s little evidence that she is motivated by racialist thinking or an activist attitude. ***** Looked at in her...

At the Palin-and-Gingrich-blessed Republican Congressional fundraiser the other night, Jon Voight — the actor, not the periodontist — called President Obama a “false prophet”: Everything Obama has recommended has turned out to be disastrous. ***** We are becoming a weak nation. Obama really thinks that he is a soft-spoken Julius Ceaser. He thinks he’s going to conquer the world with his soft-spoken sweet talk. And really thinks he’s going to bring all the enemies...

I have been deeply disappointed with Obama’s overly pragmatic (to put it nicely) approach to foreign policy thus far. In particular, I am disappointed with his emphasis on stability over democracy and human rights, notably with respect to China, Saudi Arabia, and other appalling regimes. As well, like the editors of TNR, I have been “extraordinarily disappointed” with Obama’s apparent inaction over the ongoing tragedy and catastrophe in Darfur. I was also disgusted over his...

In case you missed it, make sure to check out this brilliant column from E.J. Dionne, published yesterday at the WaPo. While it says what many of us have been saying for a long time — namely, that the establishment media are effectively being manipulated by, and have for a long time been dominated by, conservative narratives that shape and frame how the media inform their consumers — it is nonetheless a powerful indictment of the media, and their relationship with the far right, from...

Yesterday was Obama’s big day in Cairo, obviously, but, in the sports world, or at least in the North American sports world, the big news yesterday, bigger (in my view) than Game 1 of the NBA Finals and Game 4 of the NHL Finals, bigger historically, was made in Washington, ironically enough, where one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history, The Big Unit, 45-year-old Randy Johnson, won his 300th game, with his San Francisco Giants beating the Washington Nationals (formerly my beloved Montreal...

Politico is reporting that “Conservatives are demanding that Senate Republicans take a harder line on Sonia Sotomayor”: In a letter to be delivered to Senate Republicans Tuesday, more than 145 conservatives – including Grover Norquist, Richard Viguerie and Gary Bauer — call for a filibuster of Sotomayor’s nomination if that’s what it takes to force a “great debate” over judicial philosophy. But in an interview with POLITICO, Manuel Miranda – who orchestrated...

So I get home from work yesterday evening, change, spend some time with my kids, make dinner with my wife, turn on the baseball game (one of our national sports networks was showing Yankees-Indians), and, plopping down at the computer, head on over to the Internets to see what’s going on. And, after checking my e-mail, and my fantasy baseball team, I happen upon this incredible headline at HuffPo: Cheney Offers Support For Gay Marriage (VIDEO). Incredible because not credible, because unbelievable,...

Liberal media? Yeah, right. Those of us who actually are liberals know just what a joke that is. Here’s another example of a major supposedly “liberal” media outlet regurgitating right-wing spin and enabling the Republican Smear Machine: It’s The New York Times on Sonia Sotomayor. Friday: “Sotomayor’s Focus on Race Issues May Be Hurdle,” by David D. Kirkpatrick. – The article claims, without substantiation, that Sotomayor has “championed the importance...