Flat-earthers object to school’s evolution T-shirts

20 comments August 31st, 2009

THIS is pretty funny, especially the part where the teacher — repeat: teacher — says, “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”

Longing for the days of Nixon

1 comment August 31st, 2009

 

 Paul Krugman SAYS the dysfunctional political debate over health-care reform makes him pine for the time when Richard Nixon was president.

 An excerpt:

[T]he Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.

No matter his slide in polls, Obama remains a favorite for re-election in 2012

5 comments August 31st, 2009

 

 It’s a little early — nay, a lot early — to be handicapping the 2012 presidential election, but Barack Obama’s prospects for winning a second term aren’t as dim as his critics would have you believe.

 As the always brilliant Nate Silver notes:

Obama can probably afford an approval rating below 50 percent and still be a favorite to win re-election in 2012. George W. Bush won in 2004 with an approval rating of 48 percent, and Harry Truman won in what was considered a huge upset in 1948 with an approval number that had last been tested at 39 percent, although that poll was several months old at the time of the election.

Read the rest of Silver’s comments HERE.

Reaganite explains why he has quit GOP

8 comments August 31st, 2009

 

 Bruce Bartlett (above), a former policy adviser to Ronald Reagan, shares his REPLY to a question from a prominent Republican about his political apostasy.

 An excerpt:

I think the Republican Party is in the same boat the Democrats were in in the early eighties — dominated by extremists unable to see how badly their party was alienating moderates and independents. The party’s adults formed the Democratic Leadership Council to push the party back to the center and it was very successful. But there is no group like that for Republicans. That has left lunatics like Glenn Beck as the party’s de facto leaders. As long as that remains the case, I want nothing to do with the GOP.

 UPDATE: In a similar vein, Sam Tanenhaus, who’s currently working on a biography of William F. Buckley, SAYS the conservative movement is in its death throes.

 An excerpt:

Today, conservatives seem in a position closer to the one they occupied during the New Deal. The epithets so many on the right now hurl at Obama—”socialist,” “fascist”—precisely echo the accusations Herbert Hoover and “Old Right” made against FDR in 1936. And the spectacle of citizens appearing at town-hall meetings with guns recalls nothing so much as the vigilante Minutemen whom Buckley evicted from the conservative movement in the 1960s. A serious conservative like David Frum knows this, and has spoken up. It is remarkable how few others have. The moon party is being yanked ever farther onto its marginal orbit.

Why do oldsters tend to oppose Obama?

7 comments August 31st, 2009

 

 Matt Bai EXAMINES a demographic curiosity.

 An excerpt:

The typical anti-Obama activist tends to be white, male and — perhaps most significant — advanced in age. A poll conducted earlier this month by CNN and Opinion Research showed a rather stark age divide when it came to health care: 57 percent of voters under 50 said they favored the outlines of a Democratic plan, but that number was a full 20 points lower among voters over 65. In three Pew Research Center polls going back to April, senior citizens consistently gave Obama’s job performance lower approval ratings than did than any other age group.

Disappointing news for the rest of us: Secession rally in Texas draws only small crowd

2 comments August 30th, 2009

Drat it all! I was hoping this movement would gain some steam, if only for the laughs it would provide.

Five biggest lies in health-care debate

13 comments August 30th, 2009

There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that THIS ARTICLE is going to deter the Obamaphobic wingnuts from spreading their falsehoods about health-care reform, but I offer it here on the slim chance that some open-minded person might come across it and thereby become better informed.

E. Pluribus Ignorant

15 comments August 29th, 2009

(Warning: This video includes a few mild vulgarisms.)

The next 100 years

Add comment August 29th, 2009

 

 George Friedman packs a whole lot of history — and a whole lot of geopolitical speculation — into THIS PROVOCATIVE ESSAY.

 It is well worth your time to read.

 A few excerpts:

For 500 years, whoever controlled the North Atlantic controlled Europe’s access to the world and, with it, global trade. By 1980, the geography of trade had shifted, so that the Atlantic and Pacific were equally important, and any power that had direct access to both oceans had profound advantages. North America became the pivot of the global system, and whatever power dominated North America became its centre of gravity. That power is, of course, the United States…

The ultimate prize is North America. Until the middle of the 19th century, there were two contenders for domination - Washington and Mexico City. After the American conquest of northern Mexico in the 1840s, Washington dominated North America and Mexico City ruled a weak and divided country. It remained this way for 150 years. It will not remain this way for another hundred. Today, Mexico is the world’s 13th-largest economy. It is unstable due to its drug wars, but it is difficult to imagine those wars continuing for the rest of the century. The heirs of today’s gangsters will be on the board of art museums soon enough.

TPM does the day in 100 seconds

Add comment August 28th, 2009