News of the Week
Election 2012 *************** Sandra Fluke Turns Up at the RNC Well, look who’s here, not answering questions from the conservative media: Sandra Fluke, lifelong college student and charter member of the Give Me Free Stuff and Pay For My Lifestyle Choices Party. *************** Republican Platform Calls for Free Speech on Campus Exciting news this week from the Republican National Convention. No, I'm not talking about any of the speeches, nor anything having to do with the Presidential race. I'm not even talking about the guy who proposed to his girlfriend on the convention stage. This week, the Republican Party adopted the following plank in its national platform (see page 12): [W]e oppose governmental censorship of speech through the so-called Fairness Doctrine or by government enforcement of speech codes, free speech zones, or other forms of "political correctness" on campus. *************** Reagan and Ryan The resurgence of small-government conservatism. *************** MSNBC abandons GOP convention during every speech by a minority One of the left’s favorite attacks on the Republican Party is that it is the party of old white people, devoid of diversity and probably racist. *************** Obama Team Readjusts On ‘Are You Better Off?’ After either saying “no” or refusing to give a straight yes or no answer to Sunday show anchors when asked if Americans are better off today than they were four years ago, officials from Team Obama this morning changed their answers and enthusiastically offered a capital-Y “Yes.” *************** Big California Dem. Compares Paul Ryan to Nazi Joseph Goebbels California Democratic party chair John Burton compared Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan to Nazi Joseph Goebbels this morning in Charlotte, North Carolina. *************** Group says it found 30,000 dead North Carolinians registered to vote A Raleigh-based group devoted to reducing the potential for voter fraud presented the N.C. Board of Elections on Friday with a list of nearly 30,000 names of dead people statewide who are still registered to vote. *************** Campaign for Obama, get college credit A public university in Colorado may have violated state law by offering students course credit if they volunteered with President Obama’s re-election campaign. A blog post on the Adams State University website billed the opportunity as a “12 week long organizing internship for the Obama Campaign.” *************** Clinton staying as far away from Charlotte as physically possible Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as a sitting administration official, does not have any role at the Democratic National Convention next week in Charlotte. But she seems to gone out of her way to avoid the festivities, as she is traveling this week and next to the Cook Islands, Indonesia, China, Timor-Leste, Brunei, and Russia. *************** RNC protester Jason Wilson arrested carrying a machete Deputies arrested a 31-year-old man on Sunday who they say brought a machete to protest at the Republican National Convention. *************** Can we do to Dems in Maine what they did to us in Missouri? Obamacare *************** Health Care Expert: ObamaCare Will Kill Estimated 40,000 Seniors Every Year ***************Betsy McCaughey is the former lieutenant governor of New York. She has a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her Web site is DefendYourHealthCare.com and she is the author of The Obama Health Law: What It Says and How to Overturn It. *************** Universal Mediocrity Why do Britons like their sub-par health-care system so much? War & Terror *************** Afghanistan: Karzai dismisses intelligence chief Afghan President Hamid Karzai's office says he has dismissed the country's top intelligence official, a move that comes just as he prepares to name new defense and interior ministers. National *************** Obama Proposes Amendment to Restrict Political Speech in Reddit Appearance *************** California Multiple-Parent Bill Advances The California General Assembly approved a bill Monday that would authorize the courts to decide whether it’s in a child’s best interest to have more than two legal parents. *************** Kulaks raising their banners high It’s not just Ray Gaster who is raising the “I built this” banner. Readers have forwarded photos they just took of other businesses with similar signage. *************** Gov. Jindal slams FEMA and Obama administration over slow response to Hurricane Isaac requests *************** California Higher Education's Hollow Core "I look to the diffusion of light and education," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1822, "as the resource to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man." *************** The Evolution of the Republican Party Voter To see how the base of the Republican Party has changed over the years, compare two presidential elections, 1944 and 1988. In both, the winning candidate was the nominee of the party that had long held the White House—for three terms by 1944 and for two terms by 1988. The winning candidate in both cases found his strongest regional support in the South; his second-strongest region was the West. Both times, the winning candidate narrowly carried all but one of the large Eastern and Midwestern states—New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois. *************** Ex-South Carolina governor to marry former mistress Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford said on Sunday he is engaged to marry his Argentine girlfriend, Maria Belen Chapur. **************** Perry picks ex-railroad commissioner Williams to be Texas education chief Michael Williams, a former chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission who lost a bid for Congress in May, was named to the state's top education post Monday by Gov. Economy
& Taxes *************** First Audit Results In The Federal Reserve’s Nearly 100 Year History *************** US Consumer Confidence Tumbles to 9-Month Low U.S. consumer confidence unexpectedly weakened in August to its lowest in nine months as Americans turned more pessimistic about the short-term outlook, according to a private sector report released on Tuesday. *************** EU's Poorest Member Country Smacks Down Euro As Bulgaria Refuses To Join Eurozone If one needs a shining example of why the days of Europe's artificial currency are numbered, look no further than the EU's poorest country which moments ago said "Ne Mersi" to the Eurozone and the European currency. *************** With landmark lawsuit, Barack Obama pushed banks to give subprime loans to Chicago’s African-Americans President Barack Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices. *************** Spain: For Whom The Bell Now Tolls *************** Chinese Manufacturing Is Crashing The HSBC Flash Purchasing Managers’ Index for August crashed, falling to 47.8, well under the final July reading of 49.3. The dismal result, the first indication of China’s economy for this month, was far below 50, which divides expansion from contraction. The final PMI will be released September 3, but it is now clear that August will be the 10th-straight month of decline for the vitally important manufacturing sector in China. **************** Feds: Too few Americans ‘turn to government for assistance’ More Americans rely on their families for assistance than the government, so federal officials have undertaken an effort to help people to apply for federal assistance. *************** International *************** Christians in Pakistan Hiding in Forest Hundreds of Pakistani Christians have fled Islamabad following blasphemy accusations against a young Christian girl (who may have Downs Syndrome). While some have returned home, CBS reports, many Pakistani Christians are still living in a state of fear and uncertainty *************** Socialism Kills, Venezuela Edition 39 were killed and more were injured in an explosion at Venezuela’s Paraguaná Refinery, one of the largest in the world. This is only the latest in a string of accidents that the state owned oil company, Pétroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), has racked up in past years. The New York Times reports that—once again—faulty state supervision of the facilities is to blame **************** First Civil Union Between Three Partners in Brazil Sparks Outrage Gay activists say it is absurd to argue that redefining marriage to be genderless opens the door to legal polygamous unions. Now it has happened. So what do they say? *************** Opinion *************** Why Societies Develop Like Embryos An exclusive excerpt from Howard Bloom's new book The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates. *************** How Will You Answer? *************** American Character Is at Stake The American republic has endured for well over two centuries, but over the past 50 years, the apparatus of American governance has undergone a radical transformation. In some basic respects—its scale, its preoccupations, even many of its purposes—the U.S. government today would be scarcely recognizable to Franklin D. Roosevelt, much less to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson. *************** The Old, Enduring Leninist Religion Ho-hum, another engrossing, anthologizable, perfectly true article by Theodore Dalrymple, a.k.a. Anthony Daniels. How many of them does he write, two a week? This article is about Britain’s National Health Service and public attitudes toward it. A paragraph reminded me strongly of “the income gap.” You remember our old friend the income gap. I grew up in its religion. *************** Toons ***************  *************** |
News of the Week Mainpage
Follow me on Twitter: @ThePoliticalHat
My Homepage
E-Mail Me
Contact the Web-Minion if there are any problems