The Abramoff cesspool certainly has stirred up the usual frenzy for reform that follows every scandal. In fact, Raw Story reports that Democrats are considering a plan that would ban all lobbyist gifts.
I have to say, I've lived through enough of these now that I have less faith in "bans" as a workable solution, but a growing belief that we need to make them--and I mean ALL of THEM (lobbyists, politicians, and anyone else buying influence) disclose every damn thing they do that could affect the public interest.
Disclosure--information--is a hell of a remedy. Why do you think the Bush administration loves secrecy and hates disclosure?
This is just beautiful! Real proof that no two snowflakes are the same...
Cute. Seems the New York Times is pulling the plug on the public email addys for their writers...
Convinced that we knew where Ayman al-Zawahri was, according to news reports, CIA-operated Predator drone aircraft carried out a missile strike inside Pakistan. Yesterday: much anticipation of consequences. Today: consequences seem pretty bad.
We've already posted stories on the intense pressure that recruiters now face and the advertising blitz that the military is using to help out, but this one was new to me.
If you thought it was bad that the No Child Left Behind Act (section 9528) requires most secondary schools to submit lists of students with pertinent info to military recruiters, you're going to love the news that the Department of Defense maintains its own database of info on American kids of prime military recruitment age.
The first stage of rolling back wages in this country was simply to cut American jobs and add overseas jobs at a fraction of the old cost. That left fewer jobs, but didn't lower the wages of the jobs that remained in America.
As I've said repeatedly, though, it was inevitable that this would be followed by a second stage in which the large employers used the threat of job loss to start rolling back wages on existing American jobs.
The president appeared on stage in Louisville on Wednesday, Jan. 11, to deal with, as the moderator said, "some tough and challenging questions." Tough and challenging, indeed. Who knew that so many Jeff Gannons could be in one place, at one time, in the form of women, men, children....
Makes you wonder who was asking the questions, don't it? Wasn't me, wasn't anyone like me, wasn't anyone I would ever recognize; I doubt it was you and yours.
A dear friend of mine who is slowly sliding further away from the grasp of the poisons of GOP pre-processed stuff asked me recently, as we were talking....and it came time to dispell some myths, to which this person was shocked...
National Review Online's subscription come-on says, "That's right . . . for 50 years NR has provided news, commentary, and insight (not to mention sanity) to hundreds of thousands of readers. If you aren't already one of the enlightened . . . take advantage of this very special 50th anniversary offer today!
For a magazine that likes to think it has an educated, intelligent readership to enlighten, National Review sure has some questionable thinkers on staff.
Editor Rich Lowry comes to mind. Just about every one of the admittedly few Lowry pieces that I've read have gaping holes in the logic and/or facts. Lowry took another shot last week at defending the NSA warrantless surveillance program in a piece titled "FISA Fallacies, Bush's unconstitutional critics".
President Bush has used the phrase "coalition of the willing" so often to describe the small band of nations that agreed to go into Iraq with us that the phrase is now part of the lexicon of anyone at all political.
Frankly, it never seemed like much of a coalition to me, certainly nothing like the united forces that our president's father mustered for the first Gulf War, and from what I'm reading, it's very little like a coalition now. It's smaller all the time, and there are some signs of serious breaks between the U.S. and the U.K., which have always been its main partners.
