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Sunday, June 26, 2005
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Global Warming
Guardian Unlimited: "It was a strange winter in Ellsworth County, Kansas. Sitting bang in the middle of the American great plains, the usual weather pattern is straightforward: the summers are unbearably hot; the winters vicious and long. But not this year. Staring out over her rolling fields of corn, Anita Hoffhines was puzzled. There had been no real need this winter for her family's ample supply of snow shovels. The vast drifts of snow that bury the prairies for months on end had not come. 'The climate is getting warmer. You can just feel it,' she says. Even here, in America's small-town heartland, where the politics are red and the cars are huge, everyone is talking about global warming..."
"There are also high-profile deniers of climate change in popular culture. Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, attacked the environmental movement in his latest book, State of Fear. Crichton portrayed climate change as being vastly exaggerated by self-serving scientists. The real threat to the earth were environmentalists, not greenhouse gases, he said. The book was a bestseller."
Coyote Gulch maintains that Crichton's point was that we need to do the science. Write the scientific tests. Run 'em over and over. Thanks to Howling At A Waning Moon for the link.
Here's a link to a draft Brian Schweitzer for President website. Thanks to the Western Democrat for the link.
Category: 2008 Presidential Election
5:40:23 PM 
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Ritter for Governor?
Colorado Pols: "We are happy to bring you our third major Q&A of the week, this time with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter. Mr. Ritter has answered your questions over the last week, and the Q&A posted below features the complete, unedited answers to those questions."
Category: Denver November 2006 Election
8:51:42 AM
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MS RSS Extensions
 Dave Winer: "I just spoke with Amar Gandhi and Sean Lyndersay of Microsoft at Gnomedex. They'll revise their spec in response to concerns reported by Phil Ringnalda. This turns yesterday's home run into a grand slam."
Dan Gillmor: "The big news at the Gnomedex conference, as expected, is Microsoft's moves to support RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in Longhorn, the next version of the Windows operating system. On balance, it's good news. But if it's Microsoft's latest attempt to do its famous 'embrace and extend' -- take over the standard and kill the competition -- notion, then it's going to fail. Almost no one trusts Microsoft, given its long history of predatory behavior."
Lawrence Lessig: "Following Dave Winer's decision to release his spec for RSS 2.0 under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, Microsoft has now released its spec for 'Simple Feed Extensions' under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license."
8:46:53 AM
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Referendum C
The political fur is flying over Referendum C, according to the Denver Post [June 26, 2005, "Fall vote on TABOR already heating up"]. From the article, "It will be more than four months before Colorado voters decide whether to suspend the state tax refunds due them under the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights. But defenders of the crown jewel of small-government conservatism known as TABOR are rushing into the breach with an urgency that could foretell an intense autumn for an off-year election."
Category: Denver November 2005 Election
8:01:29 AM
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Immigration
Here's an opinion piece from the Denver Post arguing in favor of the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act of 2005 [June 26, 2005, "Immigration bill promising"]. According to the article, "The bill would: Create a national strategy for border security; Allow undocumented immigrants to stay in the country for up to six years; Reduce backlogs in family- based immigration; Establish a new visa program for essential workers; Protect against immigration fraud; and Provide incentives for workers to return home."
Styguis: "Taegan Goddard on why Republicans are better at getting away with dog whistle campaign tactics, points to a great CQ column."
Oval Office 2008: "You might think that fighting poverty is a pretty solid liberal cause, but it's a cause that may require some counter-intuitive solutions which may not go down well with the political left. And that's problem if you're going to campaign on poverty, but you need the political left to help get you nominated for president. This is all in the view of Des Moines Register columnist David Yepsen, who describes it as the dilemma facing John Edwards.
The Moderate Voice: "Quotes of the day on Karl Rove."
Stygius: "Polling of American disenchantment with Iraq evoke the myth that the American attention span won't permit a long project that involves American casualties. Thus, some -- like the Out of Iraq Caucus -- feel increasingly emboldened to argue for either a drawdown or withdrawal of American forces, often dressing it up in calls for a specific timetable. This is not only strategic lunacy, it is politically short-sighted. Others rail against media manipulation as the source of this perception, urging complicity with administration rhetoric and occasionally outright delusion. Both of these approaches misdiagnose America's public perception, their respective diagnoses based on this same, condescending myth. Ivo Daadler, on the other hand, gets it right while criticizing David Brooks' latest. It's not about defeatism. The anxiety is not about Iraq in and of itself, but rather the Bush Administration's eroding credibility and unwillingness to play it straight. In effect, it's about leadership."
Oliver Willis: "The Rove speech blaming everything on liberals is a classic 'look over here' ploy. I don't think progressives should allow such smears to go without response, but in our responses we must make clear that this is Bush and the Republicans dividing us in order to cover up their failures in the War in Iraq and the War on Terror."
Category: 2008 Presidential Election
7:48:48 AM
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McConnell for Justice?
Speculation over William Rehnquist's ill health and whether or not he will retire from the U.S. Supreme Court is also leading to speculation about who President Bush might nominate to replace him. According to the Denver Post Michael McConnell could be the President's choice [June 26, 2005, "Appeals judge has appeal - to some"]. From the article, "In reportedly placing Michael McConnell, a judge on the Denver-based 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, on its list of potential U.S. Supreme Court nominees, the White House has recognized a conservative legal scholar whose opposition to abortion and provocative ideas about church and state have prompted liberal groups to announce their opposition before he is even nominated."
Just last week the Washington Post profiled potential nominees.
Category: 2004 Presidential Transition
7:32:14 AM
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© Copyright 2009 John Orr.
Last update: 3/14/09; 7:36:39 PM.
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