• 
  

• Twitter Feed

• Recent Posts

  • Some Facts On Water For World Water Day
  • GOOD: Drinking Water
  • GOOD: Crocodile Mile (Dirty Version)
  • GOOD: Cool Hand Luke (Dirty Version)
  • GOOD: Psycho Shower Scene (Dirty Version)
  • Back In Action
  • The Most Bizzare Logic In History
  • The Black Republican Party (GOP And Race Volume 1)
  • Republicans And Race
  • Just How Unpopular Was President Bush?

• Authors

  • Aaron T. Sterling
  • Edward Wright
  • George Chaung
  • Matthew Gagnon

• Categories

  • 2008 Election Cycle
  • 2009 Election Cycle
  • 2010 Election Cycle
  • 2012 Election Cycle
  • Blogosphere
  • Bush White House
  • Congress
  • Daily Briefing
  • Debates
  • Democratic Politics
  • Endorsements
  • Entertainment
  • Essays
  • Exploration of Issues
  • General
  • Grassroots
  • International Affairs
  • Legislation
  • Mainstream Media
  • Major Events
  • Major Speeches
  • Obama White House
  • PACs and 527s
  • Political Issues
  • Political Scandals
  • Republican Politics
  • Republicans and Race Series
  • Rumors
  • State Politics
  • Supreme Court

• Government

  • Congressional Republicans
  • Federal Election Commission
  • US House
  • US Senate
  • White House

• Opinion From Libertarians

  • Andrew Sullivan
  • Cafe Hayek
  • Cato At Liberty
  • Chicago Boyz
  • High Clearing
  • Lew Rockwell
  • Marginal Revolution
  • Megan McCardle
  • Q and O
  • Reason
  • Samitz Data
  • The Agitator
  • Volokh Conspiracy

• Opinion From The Left

  • Crooks and Liars
  • Daily Kos
  • Democratic Underground
  • Eschaton
  • Fire Dog Lake
  • Huffington Post
  • MyDD
  • Not Larry Sabato
  • Talking Points Memo
  • Think Progress

• Opinion From The Right

  • Extreme Mortman
  • Free Republic
  • Freedom’s Watch
  • Hot Air
  • Instapundit
  • Jay Reding
  • Little Green Footballs
  • Mamacoke Think Tank
  • Michelle Malkin
  • Power Line
  • Red State
  • Stuck On Stupid
  • The American Mind
  • The Next Right
  • Town Hall

• Opinion From The RLC

  • Ace of Spades
  • Outside The Beltway
  • Patterico’s Pontifications

• Political Coverage

  • 270 To Win
  • ABC Politics
  • CBS Politics
  • CNN Politics
  • Drudge Report
  • Election Projection
  • Electoral Vote
  • Five Thirty Eight
  • FOXNews Elections
  • MSNBC Politics
  • Open Secrets
  • Political Wire
  • Politico
  • Real Clear Politics
  • Washington Watch

• Archives

  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007

• Latest Poll

  What Fictional President Would You Elect In 2008

  • David Palmer (24)
  • Andrew Shepherd (The American President)
  • Josiah ''Jed'' Bartlet (The West Wing)
  • Thomas J. Whitmore (Independence Day)
  • Jackson Evans (The Contender)
  • Harry Ashton (Vantage Point)
  • James Marshall (Air Force One)
  • Bill Mitchell/Dave Kovic (Dave)

  View Results

   Loading ...

• Recent Comments

  • wallnina@gmail.com on What The Hell Was Jeanine Garofalo Doing On 24?
  • Urban Politics of Virginia : Liberty’s Lamp on Republicans - Read This Article
  • The Genesis Of “The Lesser Of Two Evils” : Liberty’s Lamp on Political Identification - The Confusion Must End
  • The Myth Of The Center-Anything Country : Liberty’s Lamp on I Don’t Think Anyone “Gets It” More Than Michael Steele
  • The Concept Of The “Moderate” : Liberty’s Lamp on Political Identification - The Confusion Must End

• UserOnline

  • 1 User Online

Want to know why your water is so fresh and clean and you don’t have to worry about dying from water diseases, like people in third world countries do?  Chew on this:

• 100 years ago, Jersey City became the first U.S. city to routinely chlorinate municipal drinking water supplies. Over the next decade, more than a thousand U.S. cities adopted chlorination, helping to dramatically reduce infectious diseases.
• U.S. CDC calls drinking water chlorination “one of the most significant public health advances in US history.”
• Drinking water chlorination has helped to virtually eliminate waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever, and played a major role in increasing Americans’ life expectancy from 47 years in 1900 to 78 years in 2006.
• Harvard researchers investigated the role that clean water played in improving health during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Their study concluded that water chlorination and filtration were responsible for nearly half of the reduction in the death rate in major cities, including three-quarters of the reduction in infant deaths, and nearly two-thirds of the reduction in childhood deaths.
• Today, according to American Water Works Association data, 98% of water treatment systems in the U.S. use some type of chlorine disinfection process.
• Only chlorine-based chemicals provide “residual” disinfection to help protect drinking water all the way to consumers’ taps. EPA requires treated tap water to have a detectable level of chlorine.
• As the aging U.S. water distribution infrastructure degrades, leaks and breaks are becoming more common, heightening the importance of the chlorine residual in protecting the quality of water in transit.
• Chemistry provides other essential products for addressing drinking water challenges. For example, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipes provide a sustainable solution for water distribution. PVC pipes don’t corrode like metal and they resist microbial film contamination and leakage, conserving valuable resources while preserving water quality.

Ladies and Gentlemen, first of all - my apologies.

I had intended to continue my series on the GOP and race continuously, but had to take a short break from blogging for a while.

Why? Well - I’ve been busy at work - true story.

What have I been doing? Well, glad you asked. I’ve been working on getting ready for today’s festivities at World Water Day 2009.  Its been a lot of work, but it is for a great cause, so I hope you’ll all forgive me for taking a short break to work on it.  I promise I’ll continue my series as soon as possible.

So, to give you all an idea why this is important, stay tuned - I’ll be posting four great videos that should certainly explain a few things!

Back to politics as usual on Monday!  And happy World Water Day everyone…

So, Claire - let me get this straight.

Barack Obama inherited this problem.  Part of the problem was the wasteful spending, out of control earmarks, and irresponsible deficits of the Republican led Congress.  She seems to almost enjoy going back to the Bush administration and twisting the knife and beating the drum on the excesses of Republicanism.

What Thune doesn’t push back on, is the hypocrisy of her rhetoric.

If those excesses were such a sin, what in the living hell do you call what has happened in January and February?

I did rather enjoy watching McClaskill blather on, and at the same time, watching John Thune’s face.  Completely unimpressed with the nonsensical rantings coming out of her mouth, his face was made of complete stone.  Absolute stone.  Spoke more than words ever could have.

Democrats are going down the wrong path here.  If you want to attack the Republicans for waste, spending and deficits (which is justified), you had damned well better walk the walk yourself - not take the problem they created and multiply it ten fold.

Eventually, if you keep that nonsense up, somebody is going to call you on it.

Contrary to what most people in political circles believe, the existence of the Republican Party was not always defined by limited government rhetoric and social conservatism.

Talk radio hosts are rather fond of saying, “conservatives win when they are real conservatives” as though the current makeup of political war has always been as it is now.  Nothing could be further from the truth - so when you hear that, try to keep in mind you’re listening to somebody who doesn’t study much party history and has no interest in facts.

In the mid 1800s, when the Republican Party spawned itself as a third party, the battle lines were not drawn around high taxes or low taxes (especially since income taxation didn’t exist), big government or small government, deficits or balanced budgets - they were drawn around the defining issue of the time, slavery.

Indeed, the genesis of the party was opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which essentially was federal law intended to allow the spread of slavery into the new American territories.  Under the act, if the population of the western territories voted to institute the practice of slavery (a practice known as “popular sovereignty“), it was free to exist.  In essence, it repealed the Missouri compromise, which had created a “balance” of slave states and free, so as to not upset the status quo and incite a civil war over the issue. Read more

Over the course of the next two weeks, Political Capital will be examining the history of the Grand Old Party with a focus on the changing nature of its demographic appeal - most notably among African Americans.

It may surprise some to learn that it was not always labeled the “intolerant white male” party - indeed, for most of its history, it was the preferred political party of African Americans.

In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas would repeatedly refer to it as the “Black Republican Party”, and support among the community was nearly unbreakable.

So how did the party go from “Black Republicans” to the party of rich, old, white men exclusively?

Hint - its not because Democrats buy off the votes of the African American community.  That is an insulting and incorrect assumption that many Republicans tired of being labeled racists have believed for too long.

Yes, Democratic promises of assistance, government programs, and affirmative action have certainly helped, but its a much much deeper issue than that, which we will talk about more in the future.  If that were all it took, than basically every demographic should be in the Democratic column - it is obviously a lot more than that.

So, check back shortly - we hope you enjoy our analysis of what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what can be done to fix it.

We have short memories.  What we remember most recently tends to become our picture of reality, often times at the expense of the truth.

In regards to George W. Bush, polls have shown American’s do not approve of the job he has done as president for at least the last two years (more like three), so obviously the memory that is most burned into our heads is one of public dissatisfaction with the president.

Those of us who study this kind of stuff (ie geeks) see a tale of two presidencies - the first four years and the second.  The first four were wildly popular with the American people (at the time), and in the latter four, he was largely abandoned by the public. Read more

Or, so it looks.

And yes - its a serious question. He was awful during the campaign as a spokesman, he’s been a DISASTER for Obama’s communication department, and this is just one of the many embarrassing moments.

My colleague Liz Mair has rightly made the comparison between this and this epic scene (starting around 2:20) from The West Wing.

Seriously though - he’s getting really bad.  And I mean this in a non-partisan way - he’s just awful.

Its kind of sad, but the last really great press secretary we had was Ari Fleischer.

Scott McClellan was just horrendous - such a cold, grumpy guy who was abrasive with the press and never had that ability to coolly spar with them. Dan Parino was uninspiring and always struck me as something of a lightweight - even if that isn’t fair, she just never seemed like a wolf prowling around the press room, which is something you need as a PS.

And now Gibbs. Oh my god in heaven. He bothered the living hell out of me as a surrogate for Obama, with his arrogant, smarmy looks on his face as he regurgitated rather absurd talking points - but now that he’s press secretary, and not just a professional critic anymore, he’s failing, and failing fast.

It has always been my firm belief that part of what eventually sunk George W. Bush was his failure to communicate - and without a Fleischer like Press Secretary to really act as a visible spokesman who oozed confidence, he was doomed.

Obama is losing every battle he is fighting right now, and he’s losing against a rather weak, impotent Republican Party. Gibbs is part of that reason, because at this point and time, he is little more than an absurd joke.

keep looking »