Having won a (temporary) victory in our now-endless budget battle, President Obama is now free to pursue the agenda that he’s laid out for his second term. As gleaned from various statements and media interviews, this includes: securing our withdrawal from Afghanistan, passing immigration reform, doing something about global climate change, doing something about gun Read More
Grab any time machine you can find, take it back to any year from the founding of the Republican party until about 1970, and show the bios of this year’s GOP presidential ticket to the party leaders of the past. No doubt, their first response will be, “Weren’t there any Christians available?”
After all, the very first Republican party platform grouped the Mormons in with slaveholders, labeling polygamy and slavery “twin relics of barbarism” and calling for their eradication. President Lincoln later tried to do just that, signing into law the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which specifically outlawed polygamy in the frontier territories. Its sponsor, Congressman Justin Morrill, called the practice “a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world,” and likened it to “cannibalism or infanticide.”
And that’s nothing compared with what some Republicans used to say about Catholics. Read More
That irrepressible scamp Larry Flynt is at it again and this time his target is Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. CNN reports that Mr. Flynt, chief porn viewer and publisher of infamous skin mag Hustler, will pay $1 million for access to “documented evidence concerning” Mr. Romney’s withheld tax returns–or even better, documents about the former Massachusetts governor’s “offshore assets, bank accounts and business partnerships.”
Hustler will officially advertise the offer in full-page ads slated for publication in the Sunday Washington Post and the Tuesday edition of USA Today. The ads ask “what is [Romney] hiding?” and promise to “publish your verified story” in addition to the $1 million. Read More
The blue-collar success stories piled up so fast at the Republican Convention in Tampa that one would have been forgiven for assuming that the party was made up entirely of the sons and daughters of garage mechanics, fruit pickers and removers of rotting animal carcasses from the nation’s highways.
Over and over again, speakers informed us of how they came from families of hard-working strivers, with parents who fought their way up from nothing. Such tales were almost de rigueur, especially if they involved “starting a small business.”
Before telling us how little girls now approach her with reverence and awe, Susana Martinez, the runaway egomaniac who is the governor of New Mexico, informed us that her mother and father started their security guard business by handing her—then an 18-year-old girl—a “Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum,” and posting her in the parking lot of a church during bingo games. There are those who might assume that this accounts for Ms. Martinez’s decision, as a prosecutor, to specialize in child abuse, but never mind. Read More
In a troubling development, the state missed an important budget deadline earlier this month when Governor Cuomo’s office failed to deliver a review of New York’s current budget along with tentative revenue projections for next year. Under budget reforms passed in 2007, the governor is supposed to deliver a mid-fiscal year budget report on Nov. 5. Legislative leaders follow-up with revenue projections of their own, and they and the governor sit down to hash out their differences. The idea is to create a more transparent, less rushed budget process.
Mr. Cuomo’s office said that turmoil in global markets has made the process much more complicated this year. That’s certainly plausible, but still, a missed deadline is a missed deadline. The mid-fiscal year review was established to ensure that the budget process is more transparent and rational than it has been in the past. So the missed deadline is a cause for concern. Read More
In their ideological zeal, the new Republicans on Capitol Hill seem eager to gamble everything — the financial reputation of the United States, the international status of the dollar, even the chance of a worldwide depression — on a showdown over the national debt ceiling. What has been mostly a routine if unpleasant debate in Read More
GENEVA—Bill Nojay, an upstate Republican activist and radio talk show host, said he sees a silver lining in Republicans losing the State Senate, which they had controlled all but one of the last 70 years.
"It used to be when a state senator walked into the room and laid something down, that was Read More
