Glad to see someone taking on the big issues. Wired has an article today on clamshell (or Oyster) packaging — those hellish sheets of thick, soldered-together plastic that entomb all manner of electronics and make extraction a project requiring enough sharp pieces of metal to fill a medieval armory. The little buggers are so irritating […]
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A Glimpse at the Uniter in Chief
The immigration debate is, among other things, a window on the kind of President George W. Bush might have been if he hadn’t been captured by the far right — a uniter, not a divider, as someone said. Bush, in seeking to satisfy internationalists as well as exclusionists, to respect immigrants as hard-working human beings, […]
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CAN’T WIN FOR…
CAN’T WIN FOR WINNING. LB is right — the conventional wisdom is shifting against the Democrats. As today’s Washington Post shows (and as Sam noted), the GOP is setting up victory as merely keeping Congress in 2006. Of course, with gerrymandered districts and the natural benefits of incumbency, losing Congress is a virtual impossibility. The […]
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WHAT DID DHS…
WHAT DID DHS KNOW? Jeff Stein reports that some members of Congress are asking questions about whether the Department of Homeland Security may have had access, via its NSA liaison, to the NSA’s illegal wiretap and phone record surveillance programs. This would be the same Department of Homeland Security, we recall, whose operatives were used […]
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Rohe’s Dissent
Publius has a fascinating post on the left’s capacity for effective dissent, focusing on Jean Rohe’s pre-buttal to McCain’s graduation speech. “I did,” Publius writes, “find her speech (and McCain’s heckling) troubling – not because it showed disrespect, but because of its utter futility as a method of dissent.” But Publius doesn’t actually mean “futile.” […]
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METAETHICS: THE SAGA…
METAETHICS: THE SAGA CONTINUES. I don’t want to get too bogged down in this, but since Jonah Goldberg‘s written some posts in response to what I said Friday on relativism, here’s a bit more. One thing, for the philosophers in the room, is that “relativism” per se is a vulgar term that just about everyone […]
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EXPECTATIONS GAME. Some…
EXPECTATIONS GAME. Some good times to be had reading through The Washington Post‘s write-up of the Bush administration’s bold plan for revival through GOP victory in November — with victory defined as “Nancy Pelosi not becoming Speaker of the House.” (From the article: “If Republicans retain Congress in November, Bush advisers note, he could assert […]
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GOREWATCH. It’s…
GOREWATCH. It’s getting a bit hard to keep up with Gore‘s press. He’s got the cover of New York Magazine this morning, under the heading “The UnHillary?” The story is written by John Heilemann, who received significant access to the man himself, and came back with the stories to prove it. “Eleven years ago, I […]
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Farm Aid
On September 16, 2004, 8,000 migrant Mexican farmworkers won the largest union contract in North Carolina and the first in the nation to cover non-U.S. agricultural workers. Hailed as a model of organizing in a region with a history of hostility toward unions, the agreement won farmworkers recourse against employer intimidation and abuse, unsafe working […]