Official White House Photo by Pete Souza WASHINGTON – This is what happens when Candidate Obama is unleashed. From Art, who covers the movement progressive beat over at my place and runs a Democratic group in Texas. color me relieved frankly by his debt details… Relief isn’t exactly a rousing call to action, but perhaps it’s a new beginning. For David Brooks, it’s decidedly not. I’m...

Today marks the first day of the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. There are many issues to be explored on that topic, ranging from the ability of brave men and women to openly defend their country to the generally positive reaction from the rank and file. But perhaps this story tells it best. Shortly after midnight, 33 yr old Navy Lt.Gary Ross and his partner of 10 years married in a ceremony in Vermont.

The President has finally stepped up to deal with his personal pushback deficit by promising to veto any bill that cuts Social Security and Medicare without raising taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” Until now, the White House has been threat-free as the Boehner-McConnell gang holds the government hostage and sends all the ransom notes. The turnaround is long overdue. Now, let the Republican candidate...

In the founding days of the Republic, a highly literate and very politically savvy American citizenry would spend hours arguing the pros and cons of various governing ideas presented in a flood of pamphlets, and in tightly reasoned works such as The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist. The kind of political arguments impossible to fit in a 30-second TV special interest rant or a 140-character tweet — not that...

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole has denied celemency for convicted killer Troy Davis. This means he is set to be executed at 7pm on Wednesday. Davis was convicted of the 1989 murder of a police officer but questions have been raised about his guilt and some of the witnesses have recanted their testimony. I think this kind of case illustrates my concerns about the death penalty. I have absolutely no empathy...

The Days After 9/11 in New York City by Martha Randolph Carr The events on 9/11 at the Pentagon, in a field in Shanksville, PA and in Manhattan that claimed nearly 3,000 lives from the age of two to 85 were so enormous they gave off a ripple effect we still feel today. Even as life returns to a new state of normal with a routine that takes into account longer airport lines with ever-invasive searches or news...

A progressive Democrat and a conservative Republican were walking together one day on the sidewalk alongside a busy downtown street. They were arguing about various public policies, what to do about the growing number of unemployed Americans, and whether President Obama was partially or fully to blame for the current economy. Then they stopped and observed the following: An unemployed man was standing in the...

The young Marine, who has already done more than enough for his fellow Marines, for the Marine Corps and for his country, is now doing something for the families of Marines and Navy Corpsmen. Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer has partnered with the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation to raise $1 million by the Foundation’s 50th anniversary on May 28, 2012. He has also issued a “Challenge to America”...

For a competitive 3rd party to arise it will have to have a unifying theme that can be used to establish positions across a range of economic and social issues. To be effective, that theme will have to attract supporters from the right and the left. Perhaps the best candidate for that unifying theme is the growing disdain the general populace has for special interests. Conservatives and liberals alike complain...

Pakistan’s Energy Crisis and U.S. Interests by James Daley On 7 October 2001, the opening phase of “Operation Enduring Freedom” U.S. military campaign began, which quickly drove the Taliban and its al-Qaida affiliates from Kabul on 12 November. Since then, 1,760 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan along with 942 International Security Assistance Force soldiers, a total of 2,702 foreign...

Should Politics Be A Zero-Sum Game? by Robert A. Levine Otto Von Bismarck, the German chancellor in the late 19th century, responsible for unifying the independent states that now encompass modern Germany, once called politics the art of the possible. However, the political process in the United States is currently stagnant. The expected bargaining and compromise between the two parties has not succeeded in...

Today is Constutition Day and so I thought it worth recognizing since we rely on it for sites like this.

New updates: As is typical in cases like this the pilot appears to have been heroic in his last moments, fighting to steer the plane away from the crowd without any concern for his own survival. A plane has crashed at the Reno Air Races and the latest reports say 3 have died and over 50 are injured. A memorial has been scheduled for tomorrow and the remainder of the races have been cancelled. The plane was a...

A local radio show has a bit every week called Top Five Friday. They pick a topic and have you call in with your top five while presenting their own lists. This week the topic was Saturday Morning Cartoons…. So chime in, what are your favorite bowl of sugary cereal morning memories ?

When I say the Obama White House is “brain-dead,” which I do often these days, I don’t mean the folks working there are incapable of thinking. On the contrary. They think deeply about all sorts of things. It’s just that their thinking always seems to lead to new versions of old ideas that are either outdated, demonstrably ineffective, or just plain silly. The well-deserved trashing the...

Seventeen years ago, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun pledged “I will no longer tinker with the machinery of death.”  Blackmun had tired of the endless permutations of injustice that plague this arcane institution, ranging from innocent people convicted to methods of execution that reek of medieval torture chambers. We’re still tinkering.  In Texas, the world-wide capital of the death...

(Editor’s Note: This is part of an ongoing series to preserve on the Internet the “lost” poetry of Nunihal Singh Layal, the “Tradesman Poet,” who I met in New Delhi in 1974. Some poems contain his original introductions. I have a self-published book of his that is disintegrating and falling apart and over the next year or two I will run and preserve all of his poetry here. Joe Gandelman) Be United by...

A pending provision before the Senate Judiciary Committee would make it a felony to “exceed authorized access” on a computer.  As GWU law professor Orin Kerr notes, this is rife with potential for abuse. The problem is that a lot of routine computer use can exceed “authorized access.” Courts are still struggling to interpret this language. But the Justice Department believes that it...

President Barack Obama meets with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) WASHINGTON – Yesterday, the Financial Times laid out what has been talked about for months and months, with Pres. Obama set to deliver a speech on deficit reduction on Monday. The FT begins with the argument of how the...

WikiLeaks document dumps over the last year or so on the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and State Department diplomatic cables, among others, begs an important question: Are we still capable of outrage? The past decade has been a carnival of disasters beginning with the 9/11 attacks and followed by the fool’s mission in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the worst economic downturn since...

I suspect many of us have heard the story of the man who is suing White Castle for not having big enough booths.  Now setting aside the obvious jokes about eating at White Castle and being overweight, I think that this is an issue that requires serious examination. Every day we see about people suing for alleged disabilities and requiring special accomodations. Now of course we should require reasonable efforts...

It’s Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), taking the Hamas line of a one state solution with a single sovereign governing from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This, of course, would almost certainly result in the demise of Israel as a Jewish democratic homeland and, with it, the end of the Zionist dream. Since this eventuality is part of the reason why a two-state solution is the overwhelming consensus amongst...

I’ve posted this before but over the last few weeks we’ve had debates over what is conservative or liberal. The one concern I’ve always had is that we tend to assume ourselves and our usually like minded friends as average and thus skew our results. I’ve fallen into the trap before and so to test myself for real I have gone to several of the political ideology tests on the web to find...

A poll by the Associated Press and the National Constitution Center shows extremely high levels of distrust in most of the political, economic, and cultural institutions in America.  The “age of cynicism” that we live in seems to continue to intensify without limit. The poll contains a lot of fodder for bloggers interested in blasting various institutions.  Congress comes in at a record low.  Banks...

The campaign to paint Republicans as not only wrong but evil and dangerous keeps reaching new heights.  The latest is an effort to falsely accuse the Republican Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee of corruption. This points to a wider problem in politics.  There is a strong and persistent movement to literally blame the Republicans for everything.  When the Republicans are in charge,...