Entries for August 2008

A Pennsylvania woman filed suit against Adams Township for denying her a permit to run a lap-dance studio. Stephanie Babines and the ACLU say it violates her First Amendment rights; town officials say it's a matter of decency.

This week the United Nations released new statistics on Afghanistan's opium production, and the upshot is that the country will remain the world's top producer of opium by a country mile. This should hardly come as a surprise, and most might be tempted to throw away the report as useless. But read between the lines and it's clear why the stubborn Taliban insurgency is gaining ground and, more important, how those gains can be cut back.

There's quiet buzz in Washington this week that convicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and several colleagues—including scam-artist Michael Scanlon—will be sentenced soon for their roles in the 2005 tribes-and-bribes scandal. These rumors have circulated before, so perhaps it's the natural gossip of idle politicos during the Capitol's dog days. But individuals tangentially related to the case say the sentences could come as early as next week, during the Republican convention.

That's hardly good news for the GOP, but better now than, say, a week before the election. And since John McCain chaired the Senate's credible hearings into l'affaire Abramoff, with some clever PR work party officials could claim his nomination turns the corner on a particularly ugly chapter.

Well, the GOP could claim that—except for the (allegedly) corrupt Gentleman from Alaska. No, not Rep. Don Young. The other (allegedly) corrupt one, Sen. Ted Stevens. His trial is just beginning.

Among convicted felons, it seems pretty common to rationalize why they went to prison with fantastical mitigating circumstances. Usually this involves an element of personal responsibility, but looming behind it all is a sinister deus ex machina at work. "Sure, I did something wrong," they might say, "but The Man or The System had it in for me."

Four liberal economists got together on a lovely island in southern Germany Saturday last weekend and came up with the following: that globalization and technology have widened the gap between the rich and the poor around the world, and that governments should try to help those at the bottom. Actually, globalization's not the problem, it's the solution.

Human Rights Watch has a new study decrying spanking in public schools. Of course, HRW's authors don't call it spanking or paddling or hitting; they call it "corporal punishment." And in the 21 states that permit it, the schools are portrayed as little more than domestic Abu Ghraibs.

In the middle of this blog's home page is a section called "Seriously?" in which someone's comments are quoted incredulously. It currently features John McCain and his reply at Saturday's Saddleback Forum when asked to define "rich": "I think if you're just talking about income," McCain said, "how about $5 million?"

To be fair to McCain, his answer was more nuanced than that.