×
- Obviously, North Korea represents a unique strategic challenge for the United States, not to mention the DPRK's immediate neighbors. Fortunately for William Kristol, the choice is clear: targeted air strikes ought to put things back right. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is enlightening us with his big foreign policy ideas like the need for lavishly expensive and unproven missile defense systems. I realize Kristol's turn-ons include advocacy for projecting American military power, but Romney seems to be stuck in a permanent "squint hard and you'll see Reagan when I speak" campaign mode.
- I think the GOP's inability to discipline the conservative movement's relentless and disgusting attempts to paint Sonia Sotomayor as some sort of dim, hot-headed racist and beneficiary of preferential treatment is a point of no return for the Republican party as it careens towards representing a single demographic. It's not as if Gingrich, Rush and the gaggle of conservative commentators making these remarks are going to pay a price for their actions. It's the Republicans in Congress who will.
- Speaking of Sotomayor, it's pretty amazing that no one in the business of serious, trustworthy journalism has bothered to report on how she, you know, actually ruled on race-related cases during her long career on the bench. Nope, it's those angry, unserious and
anonymousbloggers who took the time to do the research. Jeffrey Rosen can whine all he wants that mean bloggers accurately criticized him for writing (and The New Republic for publishing) a lazy hit piece on Sotomayor before she was even the nominee. He still should have sought out the on-the-record opinions of her former law clerks -- who praise Sotomayor's intellect, among other things -- instead of relying on anonymous gossip. - The long campaign against and eventual murder of George Tiller has demonstrated that domestic terrorism can have as potent an effect on policy as its international counterpart. This, to my mind, was always the point of the controversial DHS report on right-wing extremism, which looks pretty prescient in light of yesterday's act of terrorism.
- California, it was nice knowing you: "The cuts Mr. Schwarzenegger has proposed to make up the difference [in the budget deficit], if enacted by the Legislature, would turn California into a place that in some ways would be unrecognizable in modern America: poor children would have no health insurance, prisoners would be released by the thousands and state parks would be closed."
- Weekend Remainders: Teams Franken and Coleman begin their final battle for Middle Earth; no one knows what's going on with the prisoner abuse photos anymore; American prisons already house more terrorists than the entire population of Gitmo; and a man with nothing but contempt for journalists gives away a journalism award.
--Mori Dinauer