edited by: Ted McLaughlin,
Texas Editor
This op-ed by Linda Greenhouse in the NY Times is worth excerpting:
Taken as a whole, the campaign finance picture is beyond dreary. It is particularly confused and tense as the year winds down. The Supreme Court justices left this week for a monthlong recess without accomplishing the one thing [...]
The NY Times has an article about the upcoming expiration of the estate tax, with this interesting nugget:
There is yet another wrinkle. When they scheduled the demise of the estate tax for 2009, the authors of the 2001 tax measure replaced it with a capital gains tax of 15 [...]
Well, I didn’t want to be depressed about the Cobell decision until I read this article (ht Xanthippas):
The tragedy of the Cobell settlement is that, apart from the possibility of establishing an educational trust fund, the money won’t likely change much of anything—it won’t raise Indians out of [...]
I just realized it’s been a while since I wrote anything about Irving. Two important things have occurred in Irving that may have wide-reaching consequences.
For the first story, I blogged a little bit about the race in Texas House district 105, which is one of two districts that cover most [...]
I get annoyed by loud commercials too, but as the article mentions, all you really have to do is hit the mute button and the problem goes away. Does the House really need to legislate this?
The House has voted to level off the abrupt spikes in volume felt by [...]
This Joe Klein piece is a doozy (via Glenn Greenwald):
Let’s start with a fact: the Indian Embassy in Kabul has suffered major, lethal bomb attacks twice in the past two years. There is little question in the intelligence community that these attacks were staged by terrorist allies of [...]
Danielle Pletka of the AEI argues in this column that we can’t let Iran have a nuclear bomb because they’re just going to find a way to use it at some point. First, she argues that deterrence won’t work on Iran:
…the common notion of deterrence is ill-designed for the [...]
At first these articles don’t seem to line up. The headline in the LA Times reads “Drone attacks may be expanded in Pakistan“, but Newsweek says Obama is firmly against any expansion of the attacks. Here’s an excerpt from the LA Times piece (via Kevin Drum):
Senior U.S. [...]
TXsharon @ Bluedaze: DRILLING REFORM FOR TEXAS helps you follow the money to see why Governor Perry and others want Texans to keep breathing toxic air.
BossKitty at TruthHugger is proud to give a Hat Tip to Houston – Annise Parker inherits a City of Progress.
The [...]
Fending off a Republican filibuster threat, the Senate passed an omnibus spending bill that includes “language that frees up Washington D.C. to use local money to implement a medical marijuana measure approved in a referendum by nearly 70 percent of voters in 1998, resurrecting an effort that has been [...]
Last night, our own Texas city of Houston became the largest to elect an openly-gay mayor. City controller Annise Parker defeated former city attorney Gene Locke with 53.6 percent of the vote in the hotly contested runoff election. She takes office as mayor Jan. 1. While we have long way to go [...]
Wow. Matt Taibbi has done it again, unleashing another furious and righteous broadside regarding Wall Street and the financial industry…only this time it’s aimed at an Obama administration that appears to be home-away-from-home for a legion of Wall Street expatriates and Clinton-era New Democrat-ish advisors who are determined to [...]
Sci-Fi writer John Scalzi has put together a list of the “10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.” I refuse to excerpt any of it because I demand that you follow the link and read the whole thing for yourself, but the titles include “Ayn Rand’s A Selfish [...]
I like to read Volokh Conspiracy. I enjoy their intelligent and thoughtful commentary on (mostly) legal matters from a conservative/libertarian perspective. But not all participants are cut from the same cloth. Take for example this post by Jim Lindgren, wherein he criticizes Diane Francis for making a pretty [...]
I want to say unbelievable, but of course it’s completely believable:
Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former [...]
It’s been a while since I blogged about Virgin Galactic but I was reading this article today and I figured it was worth doing a little something about. VG is almost ready to start flying passengers aboard their suborbital rockets. As is succinctly summarized in the article, [...]
A settlement has finally been reached in the thirteen-year old suit over mishandled Indian trust funds:
Tribal members have long contended that they are owed billions of dollars in unpaid dues for farming, grazing, timber-cutting and other government leases on their land dating back to the 1887 federal act that [...]
Most Texas businesses next year will pay nearly triple the unemployment-benefits tax that they paid this year, the Texas Workforce Commission announced today.
The minimum tax rate owed per worker will be nearly $65 in 2010, up from about $23 this year.
Two-thirds of Texas employers, or about 255,000, [...]
The IRS audited a single woman with two kids on the belief that since she wasn’t reporting enough income to support herself and her two kids, she must have been earning income on the side (via BoingBoing):
Rachel Porcaro knows she’s hardly rich. When you’re a single mom making [...]
I can only shake my head at this sort of nonsense (via DougJ.) Well, shake my head and blog about it! Apparently, Focus on the Family has a website that rates how “Christmas-Friendly” retailers are, wherein right-wing Christians are apparently invited to offer feedback on their holiday shopping [...]
Once again it’s time for the Texas Progressive Alliance to bring you the highlights from the blogs.
Power to the People! Head over to Texas Vox to learn more about the Fair Elections Now Act.
Bay Area Houston claims The Race for Houston Mayor is Now About Race.
The NY Times has a pretty interesting look at the process by which Obama and his senior civilian and military advisors arrived at the planned escalation of troop strength in Afghanistan. If you want some idea of what the administration’s strategy is in Afghanistan, this is probably as close [...]
I think I understand the rationale for cuts to Medicare spending as part of the overall health care reform package, but I have to admit I don’t understand the rationale behind this:
Home care shows, in microcosm, a conundrum at the heart of the health care debate. Lawmakers have decided [...]
FIFA drew the groups for next year’s World Cup today, and the United States caught a stroke of luck in avoiding not only a “group of death” but also in getting matches against two of the weaker opponents in the field. The United States will open against England on [...]
Paul Krugman, on what I believe is the single most powerful argument for health care reform:
… the proposed health care reform links the expansion of coverage to serious cost-control measures for Medicare. Think of it as a grand bargain: coverage for (almost) everyone, tied to an effort to ensure [...]
The House voted yesterday to preserve the estate tax at current levels, in an effort to avoid the expiration of the tax completely in 2010 and its resumption at 2001 levels in 2011:
The House approved a measure Thursday that would make the current estate tax rate permanent, setting it [...]
The NY Times reports that Congress is set to release a report by the Government Accountability Office that indicates that enforcement of civil and voting rights laws by the DOJ’s Civil Rights division dropped during the Bush administration:
When the Bush administration ran the Civil Rights Division at the Justice [...]
Thanks to Xanthippas, the Hubble Advent Calendar:
Once more, we enter the month of December and the traditional western Holiday Season, and once again, I’d like to present a Hubble Space Telescope imagery Advent Calendar for 2009. Keep checking this page, because every day, for the next 25 days, a [...]
Two different perspectives, both of which I think are reading. First, Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch, on the “inertia” of war:
If the fight in Afghanistan is really one of national necessity, then refusing to give the Karzai government a “blank check” and putting something like a timetable on [...]
It’s not exactly a surprise that Obama is set to announce an escalation of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan in his address tonight, for two reasons: one, McClatchy tipped us off last week and two, escalation almost seems like it was inevitable. For all the stories about Obama’s painstaking deliberations, [...]
The Texas Progressive Alliance welcomes everyone back from the Thanksgiving Holiday with these highlights from the blogs.
TXsharon has arranged by area 60 TCEQ fugitive emission videos obtained via the Texas Public Information Act. The videos were taken throughout the Barnett Shale area using a GasFindIR (Infrared) camera. Find the [...]
If you visit our blog regularly, you’ve probably noticed some changes here and there. We’re still in the process of settling down here, which means testing formats and adding widgets. There may also be another major overhaul to the look of the page in the near future…or maybe not, depending [...]
Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Probably no blogging today, unless one of us find something to be sufficiently outraged about and we can escape our families for a few blessed moments of precious alone time with the internet. But as always, we are most thankful for your kind attention, and the opportunity [...]
Wikileaks, an aggregator and publisher of sensitive corporate and government information, has somehow come into possession of over half a million texts sent in the period shortly before and immediately after the 9/11 attacks (via BoingBoing):
Site operators say they plan to start rolling out the texts beginning [...]
Sam Pizzigati regales us with the sad result of the decades-long conservative “tax revolt” that has gutted social welfare programs and let wealthy taxpayers off the hook while left middle and lower class taxpayers are left holding the bag (via Adam.) He’s worth excerpting at length:
Tax relief had become, [...]
Philip Carter, the Defense Dept. official whose job is to oversee the closing of Guantanamo Bay, has quit. Honestly, the only reason this note resonates with me is because Phil Carter used to run the blog Intel Dump (which eventually got him a gig doing the same [...]
I reluctantly supported last year’s various bailouts of the financial industry because I accepted the idea that, as distasteful as they may have been, they were necessary to prop up the troubled economy. I’m beginning to think that I was, ahem, naive:
A RAY of sunlight broke through the Washington [...]
“Citizen Sarah” being Sarah McDonald, the renowned energy blogger for Texas Vox, the blog for Public Citizen, and a fellow colleague in the Texas Progressive Alliance. We here at Three Wise Men heartily endorse her for the “Hopenhagen Ambassador”, to attend the International Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen as [...]
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid managed to hold his caucus together in order to get the 60 votes necessary to simply open debate on the Senate version of the health care reform bill. Unfortunately, several of the “moderate” Democrats who got on board have already said they won’t accept a [...]
1. Nicholas Kristof, on how Republican have been scare-mongering Americans into voting against their own interests for eighty years now. History has proven them wrong, every single time.
2. Perhaps you heard about the “Hand of Frog” that secured France a berth in the World Cup over poor [...]
Inspired by the example of Martin Luther King Jr., Christian culture warriors declare that they will stand together as one in an attempt to suppress the rights of those whose conduct they do not condone:
…45 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will [...]
…against my better judgment. But still, this NY Times article about Elizabeth Lambert, a soccer player for the University of New Mexico, bothers me for several reasons. I ran across the YouTube video of Lambert’s extremely aggressive (that is, downright dirty) play in a game against Brigham [...]
This excerpt, from an otherwise okay article about the (literal) evolution of religious belief, irkes me:
For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray [...]
The Texas Progressive Alliance is starting to feel an odd craving for can-shaped servings of cranberry sauce as it brings you this week’s highlights from the blogs.
TXsharon continues to follow the abuses of Aruba Petroleum in a Barnett Shale backyard and Wednesday the Wise County Messenger picked up the [...]
That is, no military commission for he and four of his confederates:
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and four other men accused in the plot will be prosecuted in federal court in New York City, a federal law enforcement official said early on Friday.
But [...]
A couple of interesting articles worth taking note of. First, this one from Gary Sick, who gives us a much-needed dose of common-sense on Iran’s nuclear program. After noting that for seventeen years, Iran hawks have predicted that in five years Iran would have a nuclear weapon, he goes [...]
At least, that’s how I read this report:
President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration [...]
I have a problem with Hanna Rosin. My problem is I think she’s a journalist who enjoys tweaking “conventional wisdom” with columns that are poorly researched, that overreach, and don’t make the grand point she wishes them to. The impetus for me to blog about something I’ve thought for awhile [...]
Some might’ve wondered how it is Blackwater managed to hang around in Iraq for so long after the Nisour Square shootings in late 2007 that killed seventeen Iraqis. The answer is simple; they bribed Iraqi officials to the tune of a million bucks:
Blackwater approved the cash payments [...]
After a long day of fighting over an abortion amendment and a Republican alternative, the House just passed their version of health care reform by a vote of 220-215. 219 Democrats and 1 Republican (Rep. Joseph Cao, whom replaced Bill Jefferson in his New Orleans district) voted in [...]
Congress overwhelmingly passed and President Oabama signed an economic stimulus bill giving tax incentives to prospective homebuyers and additional jobless benefits the unemployed.
The Senate rejected a measure that would have required prisoners charged with involvement in the September 11 attacks to stand trial in a military court rather than [...]
Republicans, doing their part for health care reform:
Late last night, the Congressional Budget Office released its initial analysis of the health-care reform plan that Republican Minority Leader John Boehner offered as a substitute to the Democratic legislation. CBO begins with the baseline estimate that 17 percent of legal, non-elderly [...]
Matt Taibi, our very own weapon of mass destruction against the bandits of Goldman Sachs:
Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself.
It only [...]
Republicans picked up two gubernatorial seats in New Jersey and Virginia. The GOP and the beltway punditry are heralding this as a “rebuke on President Obama” (though some are looking at Mayor Bloomberg’s surprisingly close re-election in NYC as evidence of an anti-incumbent mood), but is there much evidence to back up [...]
The Texas Progressive Alliance reminds you to get out and vote on Tuesday. Here are this week’s highlights.
Aruba Petroleum is drilling a Barnett Shale gas well in the backyard of Tim and Christine. Their property was taken, it’s value diminished, they were threatened and now Aruba Petroleum spilled toxic [...]
The results of the massively fraudulent Afghanistan Presidential election will stand:
Afghan officials canceled a runoff presidential vote set for Saturday and declared President Hamid Karzai the winner on Monday, a day after his remaining challenger, , Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew.
The announcement capped a fraught election widely depicted as deeply flawed [...]
Big news for Honduras:
A lingering political crisis in Honduras seemed to be nearing an end on Friday after the de facto government agreed to a deal that would allow Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, to return to office.
The government of Roberto Micheletti, which had refused to let Mr. Zelaya [...]
Spencer Ackerman, responding to this NY Times article about the military’s frustration with the slow pace of escalation in Afghanistan:
Protracted wars fought by democracies ultimately last only until publics decide they ought to. I doubt that any military officer would disagree with that proposition, no matter his or [...]
Or more precisely, what is it good for? That is the question that is apparently being faced by political scientists, according to this NY Times article:
Mr. Isaac is the editor of Perspectives on Politics, a journal that was created by the field’s professional organization to bridge the divide after [...]
The NY Times has a couple of interesting reads about Afghanistan. First is this very long piece in the NY Times Sunday Magazine about Gen. Stanley McChrystal and the new effort in Afghanistan. It’s a good read, but I have a problem with how much emphasis the writer Dexter [...]
The Texas Progressive Alliance celebrates the start of early voting for the 2009 elections with its always on time weekly blog roundup.
Human tragedies are mounting in the Barnett Shale as study after study shows high levels of toxins in the air. The only ones who can’t seem to find anything [...]
The Senate Finance Committee approved its version of the health care bill (finally!). Despite all the concessions, Chairman Baucus only managed to get one Republican – Sen. Olympia Snowe – on board (reluctantly). You can read about this bill and the others passed by Senate and House committees here.
Congress [...]
Robert Kaplan, doing his best impression of a right-wing blogger (excerpted at length to make the parallels clear):
When it comes to foreign policy, Republicans and Democrats are each suspect in their own way. Republicans used to be the party of competence in world affairs. They lost that aura during [...]
Our idiot governor, doubling down on his claim that criticisms of the Willingham execution are politically motivated, put in his sights the arson expert whose report has touched off a storm of controversy:
“Perry said Thursday that Beyler had lost his credibility and exposed his political agenda by criticizing the [...]
Today is the final day of qualification for the 2010 World Cup (but for African qualification and a handful of playoffs that could take place next month), which makes today something like Christmas Eve to next summer’s World Cup Christmas. The United States already qualified by virtue of it’s [...]
I honestly don’t understand what Gov. Perry is up to. He couldn’t do more to bring attention to the Willingham controversy than with his own actions in the case. Here, the recently deposed chairman of the commission investigating Willingham’s conviction and execution reports that he was pressured by attorneys [...]
The Texas Progressive Alliance is enjoying the fall weather too much to think of a clever opening to this week’s blog roundup.
This week on Left of College Station, Teddy writes about what it is like to share a birthday with a war and how we have been unable to [...]
Glenn Greenwald highlights this episode of Bill Moyer’s Journal, where Rep. Marcy Kaptur and economist Simon Johnson tell us that the big banks on Wall Street “own” Congress. An excerpt:
BILL MOYERS: Let me show you an excerpt from the speech President Obama made on Wall Street last month, [...]
Even were the Honduran coup legal, this probably is not:
Rosamaria Valeriano Flores was returning home from a visit to a public health clinic and found herself in a crowd of people dispersing from a demonstration in support of the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya. As she crossed the central square [...]
I think it’s safe to say that nobody saw this coming:
President Obama on Friday won the Nobel Peace Prize, a stunning choice of an official who had been in office for less than two weeks before this year’s nomination deadline.
Obama won the prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen [...]
Grant Wahl has a great column about the upcoming World Cup qualifier between Honduras and the United States. The whole thing is worth reading (especially the part about the hostility American players face in Central America) but naturally this passage stuck out for me:
The U.S.-Honduras result could even have [...]
I’ll admit it. I was out on FC Dallas at about the mid-point this season when Kenny Coooper was traded. They were disorganized on the field, weak on the back line, and were now losing their most potent offensive threat.
Boy, was my timing ever off.
Thanks to the MLS playoff format [...]
Kevin Drum’s take on this is the best thing I’ve read today:
There are still plenty of battles to be fought, including those over subsidy levels and the public option, but we basically have on the table a plan that’s budget neutral (or better), covers most of the population, [...]
Eight years ago today, American forces began the bombardment of Afghanistan that signaled the beginning of the operation to topple the Taliban. The war in Iraq has largely fallen off the radar, to be replaced by a war in Afghanistan that is only become more difficult to prosecute. The [...]
You may recall the case of Cameron Willingham, whose was wrongfully executed for the murder of his own children in a fire in 1991. The fire scientist hired by the Texas Forensic Commission whose report has undermined Willingham’s conviction was scheduled to present his findings in a hearing last [...]
The Texas Political Alliance hopes that everyone reading this today has ensured they are registered to vote in the November election, as the deadline for doing so is Monday, October 5.
The Texas Cloverleaf reviews proposed changes to the city of Denton’s charter that will be on the November ballot.
CouldBeTrue [...]
Instead of passing health care, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to block money for the Obama administration to transfer Gitmo detainees to the U.S. The chamber also voted to spend more money on water-energy projects, sanction companies that sell gas to Iran, give more aid [...]
The circumstances change, but the advice remains the same from Robert Kagan. Whatever an American administration is doing about Iran, it’s not doing it forcefully enough:
The past two weeks have been a big success for the rulers in Tehran, despite what many in the United States and [...]
