Category Archives: Politics

18 Long Years in the Senate: 3 Tiny Bills

In the Kali GOP Senate primary, Fiorina still trails Tom Campbell in the opinion polls, but it will be hard to take horse race numbers very seriously until late May. Additionally, the polls don’t measure whatever damage the Campbell campaign has sustained, or may still sustain, from the recent questions about the candidates’ flirtations [...]

The Real Progressive Speaks! (replying to the critics #1)

Our opponents like to call themselves “progressive,” and they have in mind a tradition of political activism that goes back more than a century.
That tradition includes some things that have become accepted, largely uncontroversial features of American politics and culture – such as voting rights for women, the direct popular election of senators, and [...]

Things you can learn from Wikipedia – defining the Left

When down in the weeds of a discussion trying to remember what the words we’re using meant before we started thrashing them, I find it useful to go to Wikipedia for the plain vanilla mainstream non-controversial standard definition.  Sometimes, in the descent of the prose, you can trace archaeological levels, though, as in the excerpt [...]

Iraq and Glaspie

The press is talking about the elections in Iraq. People are still debating whether it was good or bad for the United States to start the Second Gulf War. But what about the First Gulf War? To what extent was Ambassador April Glaspie following a plan laid out by President G.H.W. Bush [...]

The Rules of the Game

Let’s say that the Democrats ultimately pass their health care bill through the reconciliation process—as I understand it, insofar as the changes made in the reconciliation process are not fairly routine changes connected to lowering the budget deficit, such a move would be “unprecedented”; let’s go further, and say that that doesn’t work, and so [...]

CONTENTION OF THE DAY – PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATISM THEN AND NOW

Frustrated with his inability to control a sprawling government and anticipating a climate such as today’s, late in his second presidential term Reagan began arguing for a package of five constitutional amendments that he called his “Economic Bill of Rights.” (Once again he borrowed from FDR, who used the same label for a very different [...]

CONTENTION OF THE DAY – New Politics

Even as [Congressman Jim] Matheson basks in the glow of presidential bribery, Eric Massa, a renegade Democrat from the Southern Tier of New York State faces his wrath. Massa’s sin was to vote against Obamacare. So Pelosi and the ethically-challenged House Ethics Committee are investigating him for “verbally abusing” a male member of his staff. [...]

W.O.P. – dispatch from the HotAir beachhead

Just admit you’re wrong and shut up about progressivism
The Greenroom » Forum Archive » The Real Progressives
URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT prepare to repel boarders at ZC…
Under fire from land, sea, air, and sub-ether… perimeters holding overall, infiltrators captured and being held for enhanced interrogation, ammo in good supply… exchanges with JED begin here… expect update [...]

The Real Progressives

Note to Zombie Contenders – this essayistic post is meant to summarize and extend the discussion that we’ve undertaken over the last week from my point of view. It contains much content that will be familiar to anyone who has had the patience to work through our comment threads. I am very grateful [...]

The War on Progressivism

Michael Gerson, at Townhall and at the Washington Post, weighed in today on the ongoing debate over Glenn Beck’s WOP (War on Progressivism).  He attributes to Theodore Roosevelt, and by extension the Progressives, a particular view of capitalism and revolution: capitalism, left to its own devices, produces social conflicts and hazards so intolerable that if [...]

A Day at the Theater

With apologies to the Marx Brothers, whose hilarious movie A Night at the Opera was the source of this post’s title, today the nation was treated to a comedy of a different sort — a comedy of errors, all from Barack Obama and his band of misfits from Congress.
The first came from [...]

I’m a cancer, he’s a cancer, she’s a cancer, we’re a cancer…

Last night, J.E. Dyer replied to “The Point of Being Annoyed with Glenn Beck” (at HotAir here), and to related comments at her blog The Optimistic Conservative. (For anyone new to the discussion, “The Point…” was itself framed as a response to J.E.’s “Beck and the Legacy,” which had referenced my short “Bennett vs. Beck” [...]

The Point of Being Annoyed with Glenn Beck

In a post at the Optimistic Conservative, also featured on the HotAir main page, our friend and colleague J.E. Dyer asks, “What’s the point of being annoyed with Glenn Beck?” Obviously, J.E. is asking the question rhetorically, in order to respond to conservative criticisms of Beck that have been launched since his CPAC keynote [...]

CONTENTION OF THE DAY – want ad

(The conclusion of WR Mead’s must-read post on the Tea Party Movement):
At this point no national political leader has emerged who seems capable of providing the leadership the new populists seek. Sarah Palin stirred their hearts, but her appeal does not seem to grow as her exposure increases. Certainly there is no one [...]

Bennett vs. Beck

As between the Ph.D. in political philosophy (for whom I once worked) and a self-described rodeo clown, I’ll go with the former every time. If Glenn Beck were the future of conservatism, it would become a discredited movement. Fortunately, though, he’s not, and it won’t.
Peter Wehner “Bennett vs. Beck,” Contentions
Seems Rex and Narciso got the [...]

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