We are, I hope, at the beginning stages of a thorough and conscious debate about the nature of government intelligence gathering. There is, and there has always been, a tradeoff between our freedoms and the amount of security we demand. Rarely has the discussion been this open, and as events unfold, it is difficult to […]
Archives
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Freedom vs. Security–the Debate Continues
10 Jun 2013
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Dingell Enters (Fossil) Record Books
08 Jun 2013
John Dingell (D-Mich) has become the longest-serving member of Congress. The U.S. Rep. has held his position for 57 years, five months, and 26 days, breaking the record held by Robert Byrd (D-WVa). To put it in historic perspective, Dingell cast a vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Even more interestingly, Dingell took the […]
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Polarization in the U.S. Senate
06 Jun 2013
James Moody and Peter Mucha published a fascinating article recently on the polarization of the United States Senate. Given their findings (published in Network Science, 1:1, 119-121), senators are farther apart, and are more partisan than at any point since the early 1900s. To put it differently, there are more straight, party line votes than at […]
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Youth & the Republican Party
03 Jun 2013
No one does ritualistic self-immolation like the Republican Party. Still stinging from the 2012 setback, the Grand Old Party remains on the political couch, yearning for therapy and analysis. On Monday, the College Republican National Committee (CRNC) issued a lengthy report on the party and the youth vote. Politico‘s Katie Glueck published a nice summary […]
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The Perfect Storm
30 May 2013
I hope everyone has been watching the unfolding scandal at the IRS (that’s the Internal Revenue Service for the present). As I see it, this seems like the perfect convergence of several disturbing trends in recent decades. First, we see the increasing use by congress of “big” and “broad” statutes whose language is left (deliberately?) […]
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Right Track/Wrong Track Poll Numbers
28 May 2013
Public opinion experts–I do not consider myself one of them, mind you–use a variety of techniques to tap into how people perceive our nation’s health and welfare. One of the most popular is the right track/wrong track question, which is usually worded like, “do you think America is headed in the right direction or on […]
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Obama Administration: Scandals or Scams?
22 May 2013
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With public opinion polls low for Congress (independent of which party is in power) and support for the President seemingly at his base level, no real substantive work being done, and the only progress at all on our national debt is an approach that the President insisted on and now says is the worst way […]
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Lately it seems there have appeared more articles on the subject, known among Reformed folks as “The Radical Two Kingdoms Debate” or “R2K.” As near as I can tell, this debate is a resurrection of one that has been going on for centuries. It appears to be between those who accept the transformational model of […]
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Scandals: The Cumulative Effect
16 May 2013
The Obama Administration is, for the first time, mired in scandal. The IRS problems continue to irritate. Benghazi bubbles. The Department of Justice’s wiretaps rile. The most interesting article, for me, was Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei’s assertion that the DC political culture is turning on Obama as a consequence of these possible misdeeds. As […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach