Of all the lies in last night’s debate, I think the one that annoyed me the most was Mitt Romney’s massive, overbearing lie about green jobs. He claimed that Obama had put $90 billion in one year into loan guarantees for green energy companies like Solyndra, and that half of them had failed. Leaving debate […]
Well, could have seen this coming. The media appear to be anointing Romney as the winner of debate #1, just as they anointed Ronald Reagan the winner of his first debate, and Bush II the winner of his first debate. Not based on saying things that were true. Not based on actually landing successful and valid critiques […]
The Romney campaign has been busy leaking strategy to the media as we head into tonight’s debate. In a classic of low-expectations-setting, they say the goal is to “humanize” Romney (certainly not go into detail on his actual policy positions – an area they’ve been avoiding like the plague, since Romney’s actual policies are about […]
By David Brin Who among us doesn’t yearn to ask questions at the presidential fora? Poking at both candidates, shaking the routine of canned talking points and practiced answers? Sure, I have a firm preference. But separately, How I wish that I could ask the following: 1) Mr. President and Governor Romney. There is a crime afoot that’s been […]
By David Brin At their convention, the Republicans chose their theme: The coordinated message from two-thirds of their speakers would be American Exceptionalism. Unable to gain leverage by using the economy – which is slowly but clearly recovering from their own train wreck depression – and with the GOP suffering from devastating credibility gaps on everything […]
By BruceMcF When one first thinks about it, one would think the politics of not destroying civilization should be simple. It seems that Not destroy civilization, Yes/No? would get a very high Yes vote. In the immediate future in US political, however, its far more complicated than that, given that one party’s position is No, and […]
With Obama leading in all the polls (except for Rasmussen) and the GOP’s hope of taking the Senate dwindling like Arctic sea ice, there’s a danger that progressives and Democrats and environmentalists might get a bit complacent. And sit on their butts. And not work hard to elect people who care about the planet and […]
The Romney Rmoney juggernaut was supposed to be this invincible wave that would drown Obama and the Democrats in the final days of the 2012 election campaign. The Citizens United decision would free up the big-bucks corporate donors, and their free speach (in the form of unlimited campaign cash) would swamp Obama’s advantages of incumbency (and […]
Two years isn’t a long time. But its enough time to inflict some serious damage if you’re the new party in power in the House of Representatives. The Republicans, riding the lunatic fringe Tea Party wave in the 2010 election, seized a sizable majority of the House of Representatives and started their reign of terror […]
By Congressman Alan Grayson In all of the speeches that I heard in Charlotte last week, I didn’t hear anyone praise President Obama for what might be his greatest accomplishment – getting us through almost four years, without some terrible national tragedy. Consider some of the things that happened during the previous Administration: (1) The […]
Everything you think you know about the stimulus is wrong. At least, if you listen to the naysayers in the GOP. Talking with Ezra Klein about his new book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, Michael Grunwald points out that that, despite the GOP’s doom and gloom, the […]
By David Brin While the Democrats held their gathering, I kept getting messages: “How did you know offshore banking havens, like the Caymans, would become a big issue?”, referring to my 1989 novel EARTH, in which secret caches of stolen wealth became the world issue by the 2020s. Despite grim satisfaction from successful forecasting, I get no charge out of […]
It was a strange night at the Republican National Convention in Florida, what with Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair. But stranger still? The biggest laugh line (yes, he got a laugh) from Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech came from mentioning climate change, specifically President Obama’s attempt at alleviating its effects. “President Obama promised to […]
Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana is a rising star in the Republican Party (some even wish he was running for President right now), which is why he was chosen to respond to President Obama’s State of the Union (full text and video at this link) . But if anyone was expecting anything other than the standard […]
By David Brin Do you despise Congress? You’re not alone. The current Congress’s 11% approval rating is the lowest since polling began. Yet, because of gerrymandering and the resulting hyper-partisanship, people tend to support their own particular Representative, and to heap the blame on the other party. Is everything just a subjective matter of partisan opinion? Are there explicit […]