Hold Fast

Ending NASA’s control of manned American space flight and moving these responsibilities to private contractors sounds like as bad idea as is possible in the early twenty-first century. NASA has been successfully putting Americans into space for research and exploration for over half a century. Why would companies who are just beginning to experiment with [...]

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I wasn’t particularly impressed with President Obama’s speech last night. I thought it was lacking in big ideas and failed to push hard for Congress (and the Senate in particular) to get things done. It was an opportunity for Obama to really chastise Democratic leaders for failing to get legislation done and highlight the role [...]

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Anti-ACORN hit man James O’Keefe was arrested by the FBI yesterday with three other individuals for trying to tamper with the phones in Senator Mary Landrieu’s office, presumably with the intention of wiretapping the phone lines. Of note is one of the other people arrested, Robert Flanagan, is the son of the US Attorney in [...]

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Jed Lewison: Based on what Bernstein said about the freeze proposal, it appears the destructive policy impact of the plan may not be as great as many, including yours truly, initially feared. Seven-eighths of Federal spending won’t be impacted by the freeze, and within the one-eighth that will be impacted by the freeze, only the [...]

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Earlier this morning, I tweeted: “Someone needs to tell Obama that he’s allowed to break McCain’s campaign promises.” John McCain proposed an excise tax on health care benefits as a means of paying for health care reform legislation. Obama campaigned against this. And yet, the current health care legislation in the Senate and the version [...]

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The New York Times has a profile piece of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. It’s worth a read, as Stevens will likely go down as one of the great jurists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The article closes with a line from Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United. The last line, in [...]

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This is really funny, but really sad, too.

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It looks like Harold Ford Jr. has already decided to drop the lie about him being a life-long liberal. He has an op-ed in the New York Times in which he calls for Democrats to stop pushing for comprehensive health care reform and in its stead push for marginal insurance policy reforms and limitations on [...]

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Frank Rich: Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took [...]

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Well, democracy, such as it is in the US, was nice while it lasted. The Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court says money is speech and corporations are entitled to free speech under the Constitution. I must have missed that part of the Bill of Rights. The only real question is why the Court is [...]

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