Month: May 2012

Alan Simpson is a Republican who was a Senator from Wyoming for 18 years. He's an appealingly crusty, straight-talking guy. He's the sort of conservative who now is looked upon by super-far-right Tea Party types as -- gasp! -- a moderate. Today I enjoyed listening to a podcast of his recent interview on Fareed Zakaria's GPS program. He appeared with his fellow co-chair of what's often called the Simpson-Bowles (or Bowles-Simpson) commission, Erskine Bowles.  (Full transcript can be read on the CNN site.) Simpson strikes me as a much more reasonable version of Ron Paul. Equally blunt, but without the…

Well, one more Republican untruth has been demolished by facts. Contrary to widespread belief (including me, I have to admit), federal spending has increased much less under Obama's leadership than under the last four presidents -- including Reagan. Check out Rex Nutting's excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal's Marketwatch, "Obama spending binge never happened." Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree. As would-be president Mitt Romney tells it: “I will lead us out of this debt and spending inferno.” Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided…

I have no idea why Oregon voters, or those in any state, should be electing judges. There has to be a better way to fill vacancies on the Oregon Supreme Court than to have voters, most of whom are clueless about both the judicial system and the qualifications of candidates, electing judges. Last Tuesday in Oregon's primary election, the best qualified candidate, Timothy Sercombe, got the least amount of votes among the three candidates. So the other two, Portland attorney Nena Cook and Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Richard Baldwin, will face off on the November ballot. A likely reason for this…

Listening to POTUS (great political talk programming) on satellite radio recently, a caller had a great response to the usual Republican line, "Are you better off today than four years ago, when Obama was elected president?" He said the question should be: Are you better off today than two years ago, when Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president"? The biggest problem our country has is Republican obstructionism. The not-so G.O.P. dislikes Obama and his policies so much, it seems that Republicans would…

Austerity to bring about prosperity is a ridiculous economic idea. So I liked how Mark Fiore makes fun of this notion in his News in a Nutshell animation, "Assaulting Austerity," or: "Why events an ocean away matter to you." Check it out. You'll never again believe Mitt Romney or other Republicans who say that cutting spending and jobs in a recession is the way to... here's the joke... get more spending and jobs! (Not that you ever should have believed them.) Hilarious. Or it would be, if right-wingers weren't so serious about pursuing wacked-out policies that would only benefit the rich.…

With the French elections happening today, Adam Gopnik's "Vive La France" piece in the May 7 The New Yorker is timely reading.  Like so much else in the magazine, it's wonderfully written and soundly reasoned. The piece touches on a question that baffles me: why conservatives/Republicans in our semi good-old USA have such a distaste for European social democracies. Those nations do a lot of things better than we do. Like health care. Modern transportation. Making it possible to move up the economic ladder. Providing essential social services to all of their citizens. At the end of his essay, Gopnik…