Doldrums, but still

Yes, this summer portion of the campaign is supremely boring. No doubt that has a lot to do with all of the candidate “gaffe” reporting you see both in print and online. I’ve tried to stay out of that fray to the extent possible, and the deal I made with myself in order [...]

RAND Corp. on counter-terror

The RAND Corporation, certainly no lefty or anti-military outfit, has a new study out on the U.S. counterterrorism strategy and how it is working against Al Qaeda. Their conclusion: not particularly well.
Current U.S. strategy against the terrorist group al Qaida has not been successful in significantly undermining the group’s capabilities
They studied the history of [...]

What McCain Had Ready to Go on Obama

According to David Kiley of BusinessWeek, the McCain campaign had a television ad script already prepared to attack Obama for visiting the wounded troops in Landstuhl. So either way, whether Obama had visited the hospital or not, John McCain was going to attack him for disrespecting the wounded troops.
What the McCain campaign doesn’t want [...]

Navarrette’s broken record

In his latest Pajamas Media article entitled “Getting Illegal Immigrants to Self-Deport,” columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. once again offers up his worn out arguement against enforcement of our immigration laws.
Navarrette alledges that our immigration law enforcement is simply Americans jumping “at pain-free solutions.”
And then there is this one: Worried that U.S. authorities can’t round up [...]

Sen. Stevens Indicted on Seven Counts

Ted Stevens, the longest-serviing Republican U.S. Senator, was indicted today by a federal grand jury in Alaska on seven counts of making false statements about more than a quarter-million dollars worth of home repairs and furnishings provided to him by an energy company with lots of business before federal and state regulators. Sen. Stevens, [...]

Prevention, Continued

In what looks to become a running topic, I have been writing about the government’s preventative health measures that seem to be centered on the food we eat. First, a quick recap.
The DNC has mandated that healthy food be served at its 2008 convention. New York City has banned the use of trans-fats from its [...]

Speech and Consequences

Court records reveal that the Knoxville Police Department found right wing political books along with weapons and ammunition when they conducted a search of the home of the guy who took a shotgun into a Unitarian Universalist church in Tennessee on Sunday and shot eight people, killing two. Knoxville media reports that officers found [...]

Surge as Republican Loyalty Test?

Dan Larison:
Speaking of the “surge,” I heartily recommend my TAC colleague Kelley Vlahos’ post on the “surge”-as-Republican loyalty test, but I would just add that there is nothing terribly new about this test. From the moment that the plan was announced, it became an article of faith among the tiresome enforcers of movement and [...]

Meatworld isn’t so bad

I’ve just experienced an entire week without cable TV, phone, or internet service.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t due to a vacation — It was a lightning strike directly on our cable box on the side of the house, and it also fried the NICs in my two desktop PCs (but not, for some reason, on the laptops, [...]

McCain stoops to using wounded G.I.’s as political weapon

John McCain has now put out an attack ad hitting Barack Obama for not visiting the American military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, as Obama had planned until the Pentagon raised questions about the propriety of a visit during what had become (once they went to Europe and the other two Senators dropped off) an Obama [...]