While this week's House primaries and runoffs could not match the June 8th contests in sheer number, they made up for it in drama, intrigue, and good old fashioned controversy. Here are five quick takes from the most interesting of those races that were on the ballot Tuesday.
On Tuesday, political junkies were treated to the latest in a seemingly unending series of primaries. Several critical statewide nominations were determined in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Utah. Our updates, written by the voters more than us, are below.
Very few of my friends in their 40s talk about their impending retirements, but every last one of them works for government, be it local, state or federal. That's because they can collect plush pensions at tender ages that other workers can only dream about. Health coverage is often part of the bargain.
We didn't need this. By "we," I mean the large majority of citizens who want America to succeed in Afghanistan. By "this," I mean the Rolling Stone article that quoted Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his aides saying uncomplimentary things about Barack Obama, Joe Biden and other civilian officials.
Ponzi schemes rely on people falling for promises that are literally too good to be true – but the outcomes are never really in doubt for the perpetrators of these scams, are they?
When the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives in 1994, one of their main problems was the political terrain on which they had to fight. While many political observers find the present electoral environment to be eerily similar with that of 1994, not nearly as many House Democrats are as exposed as they were then.
During the most difficult days of the Mondale-Ferraro campaign in 1984, someone printed up a button that said: "There are no problems. Only opportunities."
Is it possible for an American president to carry out accidentally an isolationist foreign policy? That odd question crossed my mind last week as I talked with various foreign-policy experts about the Middle East, Russia and Afghanistan. There can be no doubt that by his words and his travels, President Obama intends to be anything but an isolationist president.
Here are some thoughts on a few recent and important money-politics headlines.
My magic wand is on the fritz, otherwise we'd have a big, new federal program to free America from its dependence on oil. Like other environmentalists, I'm sad that the calamity in the Gulf of Mexico hasn't spurred Washington to more vigorously promote America's exit from this curse.
"If you can't budget, you can't govern," Rep. John Spratt Jr., D-S.C., proclaimed in 2006 when the House GOP leadership chose to dispense with passing a budget resolution.
Thuggery is unattractive. Ineffective thuggery even more so. Which may be one reason so many Americans have been reacting negatively to the response of Barack Obama and his administration to BP's gulf oil spill.
Amidst all the political jockeying over the BP catastrophe, the main players are missing what is really uppermost on America's mind: It's the spill rate, stupid. It's jobs, stupid. It's the economy, stupid. And none of it is happening.
When activists (who are not necessarily students) were able to delay construction of a UC Berkeley sports center by living in trees for 21 months, there was no review of what went wrong.
When BP CEO Tony Hayward went to Capitol Hill this week, he got beat up on by all sides.
In its latest attempt to mitigate public outrage over out-of-control government growth, the administration of President Barack Obama has instructed a handful of federal agencies to cut their budgets by five percent.
If the right-wing chorus insists that the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is "Obama's Katrina," then let us hope the president will make the most of that slogan. The comparison between the utter failure of the Bush administration and the missteps and errors of the Obama White House is fundamentally false. Yet there is nevertheless a crucial parallel to be drawn as the fifth anniversary of the hurricane approaches.
Note to President Obama: The catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill did not happen because Americans -- actually, the industrialized world -- have an "addiction to fossil fuels," as you suggested in Tuesday's Oval Office address.
"Government in New York is too big, ineffective and expensive," the candidate's website proclaims. "We must get our state's fiscal house in order by immediately imposing a cap on state spending and freezing salaries of state public employees as part of a one-year emergency financial plan, committing to no increase in personal or corporate income taxes of sales taxes and imposing a local property tax cap."
A modest proposal: The federal government should take over Louisiana. Might as well, at this point.
