Archives
I read Mark Segal’s column in PGN last week with dismay. He endorsed Obama with laudatory comments and added as his rationale that Gavin Newsom and Elizabeth Birch had also endorsed him. Early endorsements are always dicey, but early endorsements of incumbents who have done little for constituents are a mistake. I voted for Barack [...]
According to the near-daily emails i receive from the DNC, DSCC and Obama’s Organizing for America, the crowning achievement of the Obama Administration has been health care reform. According to the Republicans, their raison d’etre and the alleged mandate from the electorate after the November 2010 election is overturning health care reform. Only problem: There is no [...]
Rachel Maddow has a Ph.d. She’s smart. She’s politically motivated. She has reason to be left of center. But she has a fatal flaw: She’s an unrepentant Obama apologist. Tonight she proclaimed that President Obama had delivered a “smackdown” to GOP governors by moving up the date of the health care reform opt-out to 2014. [...]
Prom night at the Capitol with everyone wearing ribbons in support of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and Republicans and Democrats sitting side-by-side in a show of the most faux bipartisanship in recent memory was more enchanting for the punditry than it was for most Americans who actually listened to what President Obama said in his 61 [...]
I’ve written it often in this space: TV unites us at the darkest of times. The visceral nature of television and its immediacy makes us feel as if we are in whatever place tragedy has struck. Now that place is Tucson. The scenes on TV from the Arizona massacre on Jan. 8 and its aftermath [...]
It’s too soon to know all the details of what really happened in Tucson, Arizona this morning when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 other people were shot. Five were killed, the others left injured, including Giffords, who had sugery and is listed in critical but stable condition. The scene–a street corner meeting with constituents that Giffords holds regularly on Saturdays called “Congress [...]
Last week’s election unnerved Pennsylvania progressives like myself. The Democrats delivered lackluster candidates as well as a confusing and inadequate message to the state’s voters at a crucial time for the state and the nation. Nevertheless, many of us hoped that in a state with 1.2 million more registered Democrats than Republicans, voters would remember [...]
A few weeks ago my Democratic committeeman called and invited me to attend a meeting to help elect Joe Sestak and Dan Onorato. I declined, but wished him luck with the candidates he had to work with. “These are pretty awful choices,” I told him. “An anti-choice, anti-gay rights, anti-Philadelphia candidate for governor and a [...]
People can’t stop talking about Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party candidate who trounced 10-term veteran Republican congressman and two-term governor Mike Castle in Delaware last week. Democrats are crowing about O’Donnell’s win, seeing Delaware as a shoe-in for November because O’Donnell is “extreme.” Meanwhile, Castle insisted he would not endorse her for the November election. The [...]
The scenes from the Gulf are heart-breaking for anyone with a heart. Alas, that seems not to include anyone from British Petroleum, Transoean or even the Obama Administration. There are myriad questions to ask about who was and is to blame for the explosion that killed eleven and injured 17 and the subsequent oil spill that [...]
