Are you, by chance, a conservative? A Republican? Did you vote for John McCain last November, as well as the GOP candidate in your local congressional race?
If your answer to these question is yes, then you are very, very strange -- and perhaps not even fully American. At the very least, you're not one of the rest of us.
Read More
"Harry Reid abdicates his leadership role," reads the headline at the lefty Daily Kos Web site. "Why Joe Biden should resign," reads the headline at the Huffington Post. "Whiner in Chief," reads the headline at The Nation, referring to President Obama.
Read More
What does a hate crimes bill have to do with money for U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Nothing, except that the National Defense Authorization Act, which will win final passage in Congress and be sent to the president's desk this week, also contains the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which Democrats placed inside the defense measure over Republican objections.
Read More
Just when it seems congressional Republicans have finally gotten the message about standing on principle before grasping for power, they go and pull a Dede Scozzafava.
Read More
In trying to understand what is happening in the nation and world, we all employ narratives -- story lines that indicate where things are going and what is likely to happen next. We can check the validity of these narratives by observing whether events move in the indicated direction. If so, the narrative is confirmed. But if things seem to be moving in an entirely different direction, it's time to discard the narrative and look for another.
Read More
Years ago a friend advised me that I should think through well in advance what family rules I'd expect my teenagers, once I had them, to follow. I remember looking down fondly at the pack of little children around my ankles and thinking, yadda yadda, whatever, I've got ages - ages! - before I need to establish a grand system of Rules for Adolescents.
Read More
As Sen. Max Baucus tries to squeeze a health care bill out of the Senate Finance Committee, and as Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry let slip another deadline in their attempt to fashion a bill to reduce carbon dioxide, some Democrats wonder whether their congressional leaders and the president who has deferred to them have sought only limited changes rather than more fundamental reform on both health insurance and carbon emissions.
Read More
The U.S. government says Kevin Ring, onetime colleague of jailed influence peddler Jack Abramoff, was a crooked lobbyist who should go to jail for wooing lawmakers and their staff. But absent any evidence of a specific illegal act of corruption, prosecutors have been forced to try Ring for simply being a lobbyist.
Read More
Remember the controversy over the Pentagon policy of not allowing the press to take pictures of the flag-draped caskets of American war dead as they arrived in the United States? Critics accused President Bush of trying to hide the terrible human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Read More
The war in Afghanistan may be a situation with no good outcomes. This means Barack Obama faces the kind of decision every president dreads: choosing the lesser evil.
Public opinion is mostly divided into two camps -- one that holds that we must do whatever necessary and another that insists that victory as Obama has defined it -- the creation of a stable, Western-style nation -- is impossible.
Read More
URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/taxonomy/term/2530?page=22
