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Republican Grown-Ups Return--to the Tea Party's Irritation?
Tweet Share on Facebook December 2, 2010 Comment (2)Well look who strolled back into town? The Republican grown-ups.
And the Christmas presents they are bringing the country? A nuclear arms treaty with the Russians. Higher taxes. Earmarks. And a warm embrace of Hispanic immigrants, including the illegal ones.
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A New Constitutional Convention Would Risk Gun Rights, Abortion
Tweet Share on Facebook December 1, 2010 Comment (11)Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has restated his opposition to the death penalty in an analysis in the New York Review of Books.
I read it, by chance, after hearing the news that certain Tea Party Republicans—including allies of incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor—want to call a new Constitutional Convention to tear up and rewrite our founding document.
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Take WikiLeaks Global
Tweet Share on Facebook November 30, 2010 Comment (4)Anyone who has spent any time in presidential libraries, reading copies of State Department cables, knows their gossipy appeal. When I was doing research for my biography of the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill, I found some rich little morsels, like this one:
“As near as I can tell,” wrote one U.S. ambassador, when Tip, Dan Rostenkowski, and 10 other golf-loving members of Congress toured the Mediterranean on a fact-finding mission in 1980, “they are mostly interested in large expanses of green with tiny holes in them.”
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Unemployment Becomes Political Fodder
Tweet Share on Facebook November 29, 2010 Comment (16)In my suburban county, we are heavily taxed. In good times, that's okay. It is our choice. We live in a wealthy county, and we take pride and comfort in the value of our real estate, which is due in no small part to low crime, good schools, nice flowers and trees along the highways, and other amenities.
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Jon Kyl Slips $200 Million Past Tea Party Earmark Ban
Tweet Share on Facebook November 24, 2010 Comment (13)Okay, Tea Party Republicans. Here is an early report card on your party's elected officials and the heralded new era of federal austerity. They are not off to a good start.
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How to Fix the Federal Budget: Dimes for Deficits
Tweet Share on Facebook November 24, 2010 Comment (5)While putting in my road work the other day, I had a brilliant idea on how to close the federal budget deficit. I was ruminating over all the attention being paid to superfluous bores like Bristol Palin, Prince William, and Kanye West, or to manufactured controversies like the TSA pat-down crisis, and wondering how such a determinedly silly citizenry as ours could ever do anything as adult as balancing its budget.
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Palin, Gingrich Wrong About American Exceptionalism
Tweet Share on Facebook November 23, 2010 Comment (11)Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and others have suggested recently that President Obama and his fellow Democrats have abandoned faith in American exceptionalism.
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7 Best iPad Apps
Tweet Share on Facebook November 19, 2010 Comment (2)There appears to be a demand—if not, there is at least a supply—for top 10 iPhone apps lists. I have seen several pop up on the Internet in recent days.
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Bruce Springsteen's New Box Set Rocks
Tweet Share on Facebook November 19, 2010 Comment (6)I am not going to purchase the Bruce Springsteen $80 box set of the re-release of Darkness on the Edge of Town. It’s not that I don’t like the Darkness album. I’ve already bought it three times—LP, cassette and CD—and don’t feel the need to donate again to the Springsteen children’s college fund.
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Will Sarah Palin's TARP Flip Flop Haunt Her in 2012?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 16, 2010 Comment (5)I just finished reading Too Big to Fail, the best-selling account by Andrew Ross Sorkin of the economic crisis of 2008.
Sorkin’s book confirmed what I thought I remembered from those turbulent days: that the Republican administration of George W. Bush, led by a Republican secretary of the treasury, Henry Paulson, and Ben Bernanke, a Republican chairman of the Federal Reserve, conspired (in a good way) to steer a group of greedy and foolish and mostly-Republican Wall Street bankers to something like a safe landing.
