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Perhaps I am just being alarmist here. Perhaps I am wrong about all of this. Or perhaps we will look back at Jaynes in the future with horror, as our inboxes fill up with mudslinging about the candidates. I truly hope I am mistaken about this, and not prophetic.
In the era of Michael Steele, Sarah Palin, and Bobby Jindal, it's pretty hard to stand out in the world of conservative lunatic ravings. But Andrew Breitbart's recent opinion piece in the Washington Times truly raises (lowers?) the bar for the rest of the field in right-wing Crazytown. His thesis is that liberal blog commenters are ruining things for the conservatives' attempts to have a nice online chat.
"After 27 days, the best House Republicans could come up with is a 19-page pamphlet that does not include a single real budget proposal or estimate. There are more numbers in my last sentence than there are in the entire House GOP 'budget.' "
As opposed to, say, the process that Senator Dianne Feinstein's Presidential Inauguration Committee (PIC) used, which led to a multi-layered fiasco of epic proportions.
President Obama is taking your questions now, and will answer them tomorrow. In a move to make Obama more accessible and answerable to the public, the White House web site is soliciting questions from the public for Obama to answer on their new "Open For Questions" page. So, given the opportunity, what question would you ask the president? Personally, I would choose: "Will drug policy be included in your new science-based approach to government, or will you let politics continue to trump science in this arena?" Because there have been two specific news items in the past few weeks, and while they are almost completely unrelated, they both come from the "science/politics" debate on drugs. The first is the "morning after" pill, and the second is medical marijuana.
I waited to write this until after President Obama held his second prime-time press conference, so I could give my reactions. President Obama did his usual job of unflappably answering questions in an intelligent and adult manner. This will come as less and less of a shock to the media and the public as time goes on (as the memory of what preceded him fades).
It may already be too late to even suggest this, but I think we need a better term than "toxic assets" (or "toxic mortgages" or "toxic" anything else) if we're trying to convince people to buy them. I mean, has any marketing campaign in the history of advertising been successful using the word "toxic"? Even actual poison (bug spray, for instance) largely avoids this word, unless in some reassurance that the product is "non-toxic to pets."
I am an American citizen. Now, I truly belong.
The question that remains is whether Obama will continue to do so (perhaps even moving in a more populist direction than he outlined last night), or whether he will back off if he faces opposition in Congress (by "centrists" in his own party, even) to his call to populism. If public opinion backs Obama in such a showdown, this will only serve to strengthen his position politically. And weaken the entrenched Washington position (whether Democratic or Republican).
There will be no column today.
This is due to having spent all day dealing with the federal government in a way I and my wife never have before.
Because Mrs. Chris Weigant was sworn in today as a citizen of the United States of America.
I am trying to make up for today's lack of column by [...]