National - Friday, October 30, 2009 10:30 - 1 Comment
World Series is a Dead Heat, but the Yankees Win at Congress
Game 2 of the World Series was last night, and it was a pretty solid night for the Yanks. Not only did they rebound from the near-blowout of Game 1, but Jay-Z and Alicia Keys performed “Empire State of Mind” in the stadium (see above). And on top of that, OpenSecrets is reporting that in the war of campaign contributions, they’re beating the Phillies handily.
Since its inception during the 2002 election cycle, the Major League Baseball Commissioner’s Office Political Action Committee has donated about two-and-a-half times as much money to federal candidates from New York ($51,136) than to those from Pennsylvania ($22,000), CRP has found.
In all, Major League Baseball has contributed money to 14 New York politicos versus six from Pennsylvania. Such donations are part of a broader political influence effort by the baseball commissioner’s office that this decade has featured hundreds of individual campaign contributions to federal candidates and committees. It’s also included more than $9 million in federal lobbying expenditures intended to affect issues ranging from copyright law to broadcast rights to immigration.
National - Thursday, October 29, 2009 8:00 - 8 Comments
Normally Upstanding Democrat Lieberman Shocks Caucus on Public Option
The above is Joe Lieberman using an argument he would later flatly contradict to explain why he is threatening not to vote for cloture of the public-option-including Senate health care bill.
Remember, 60 votes are needed for cloture in the Senate, and there are exactly 60 members of the Democratic caucus. With Olympia Snow now saying she won’t cross party lines, not a single Republican is expected to vote for the bill, meaning that it needs all the Democratic caucus members for passage. Lieberman is one of the key swing votes, and, as is his wont, he’s milking this for as much as he can.
Weigel, who’s usually right about these things, thinks this is an empty threat being made to garner some attention, albeit an empty threat that’s still damaging.
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National - Wednesday, October 28, 2009 8:00 - 0 Comments
NYT Editorial Board Runs Searing Indictment of Obama’s Poor Rule of Law Record
This may be a couple days old, but it isn’t getting anywhere near the attention it deserves–props to Glenn Greenwald for bringing it to my attention.
Here’s a flavor from the first couple paragraphs:
The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up.
We have had recent reminders of this dismaying retreat from Mr. Obama’s passionate campaign promises to make a break with Mr. Bush’s abuses of power, a shift that denies justice to the victims of wayward government policies and shields officials from accountability.
I’ve written about this a few times, but too much attention can’t possibly be drawn to it. So, as they say, read the whole thing.
Photo by Flickr user lewishamdreamer used under a Creative Commons license.
National - Tuesday, October 27, 2009 9:00 - 9 Comments
In Defense of “Fishy” Politics
I’ve got to hand it to Pratik Mehta: compared to some of the outright lunacy that often comes from the Washington Square News op-ed page, yesterday’s column was The Federalist Papers. It picked a single issue–a thought-provoking one at that–raised some real, legitimate concerns, and included this crazy innovation in column-writing technology in which you insert real, correct facts right into your argument.
But if the theme for his column was “the tyranny of the minority,” then he certainly picked a funny example to run with in the lede: the recently passed hate crimes amendment.
This measure was an amendment to a national defense authorization bill for the 2010 fiscal year. Republicans have rightly pointed out that hate crimes have little in common with military spending and that the Democrats have thus forced their hand.
While I support the broadened definition of hate crimes and the penalties that come with it, I find this tactic deplorable. Both Republicans and Democrats utilize this fishy tactic of adding off-topic, or non-germane, amendments in order to enact measures that otherwise may not be passed.
On Campus - Friday, October 23, 2009 15:00 - 0 Comments
NYU Students Protest Sean Bell Killing
Washington Square News reports that Nicole Bell, who was fiancée to Sean Bell at the time of his death, spoke to NYU students and led them in protest on Monday.
Yesterday, on the west side of Washington Square Park, dozens of people, ranging from NYU students to family members of police brutality victims, came together for the same cause. Members of the NYPD were present at the park as well.
The protesters wore black and held signs criticizing the police.
“The whole damn system is guilty as hell. Indict, convict. Send the killer cops to jail,” the protestors chanted.
Full article here.
On Campus - Friday, October 23, 2009 13:30 - 0 Comments
Video of “Fallin’” From Free Alicia Keys Concert
For those non-Tisch Alicia Keys fans who found that “Every Little Bit (of not getting into the free concert) Hurts,”* you’re in luck: NYU student Max Meyers grabbed a video of the singer/songwriter performing one of her signature hits.
And even better, the quality is strikingly good for one of those concert bootlegs, presumably because this isn’t anything like recording Fucked Up from stage left of the mosh pit. Anyway, enjoy.
*Special thanks to Wikipedia’s list of Alicia Keys singles for helping me formulate that awful, awful pun.
National - Friday, October 23, 2009 9:00 - 6 Comments
What We Can Learn From the White House/FOX News Slapfight
I’ve held off on commenting on this for a good long while, mostly because it seemed like a terrible waste of everyone’s time. The Obama administration keeps taking hits at FOX because it’s an easy target. And FOX pitches a fit over it because pretending to be brutalized by the White House makes for good ratings. But as far as I can tell, the center of this “controversy” isn’t really a serious debate.
I mean, if at this point, you’re still convinced that FOX values solid journalism over thinly-veiled xenophobia, conspiracy theories, rumor-mongering, ad hominem attacks and all sorts of other clownish antics, than either A) you have never watched a television or logged onto the Internet in your life, or B) you think Barack Obama is a Muslim, and there is absolutely no hope for you.
That being said, while the debate itself is painfully banal, how it’s being approached by the various interested parties, is kind of fascinating. In a depressing way, that is.
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National - Wednesday, October 21, 2009 12:00 - 3 Comments
Corzine May Be a Dick, But Christie is Corrupt
So granted, as Rob pointed out this morning, Corzine’s campaign tactics are pretty immature and underhanded (yet, frighteningly enough, effective all the same). But that shouldn’t obscure the growing body of evidence that Christie may have done some things that qualify him for the big house, not the state house. (That’s right; he’s been implicated in a corruption scandal so egregious that I am subjecting him to terrible puns.)
Yesterday, the New York Times reported there’s a good chance that Christie, an ex-US attorney, was getting some assistance from an ex-underling at the DoJ. What sort of assistance? The illegal kind. Such as:
In March, when Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s campaign requested public records about Mr. Christie’s tenure as prosecutor, Ms. [Michele] Brown interceded to oversee the responses to the inquiries, taking over for the staff member who normally oversaw Freedom of Information Act requests, according to federal law enforcement officials in Newark and Washington. The requested information included records about Mr. Christie’s travel and expenses, along with Ms. Brown’s travel records.
National - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 10:20 - 0 Comments
Obama Administration Rolls Out New Posture on Sudan
From the New York Times:
WASHINGTON — Laying out the basic outlines of his Sudan policy, President Obama said Monday that he would renew “tough sanctions” against the Khartoum government and increase pressure if it failed to improve the dire situation in Darfur — but he also held out the possibility of incentives if Sudan cooperated.
“As the United States and our international partners meet our responsibility to act, the government of Sudan must meet its responsibilities to take concrete steps in a new direction,” Mr. Obama said in a statement released by the White House.
The strategy, worked out after months of intensive debate, is meant to build pressure on Sudan to end the abuses that have left millions of people dead or displaced in its vast Darfur region. It places a greater emphasis on incentives than the Bush administration policy, but officials were quick to stress that there were also additional punishments on the table.
National - Monday, October 19, 2009 14:00 - 2 Comments
Two-State Solution Advocacy Group Under Fire
If you haven’t heard of J Street yet, you probably will soon; the left-wing lobbying organization and PAC is rapidly becoming one of the major domestic players in American-Israeli relations. Here’s some of the flavor of their mission from their about page:
J Street was founded to promote meaningful American leadership to end the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts peacefully and diplomatically. We support a new direction for American policy in the Middle East and a broad public and policy debate about the U.S. role in the region.
J Street represents Americans, primarily but not exclusively Jewish, who support Israel and its desire for security as the Jewish homeland, as well as the right of the Palestinians to a sovereign state of their own – two states living side-by-side in peace and security. We believe ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the best interests of Israel, the United States, the Palestinians, and the region as a whole.
