The great conservative bugaboo, Obamacare, is also far more moderate than its critics have claimed…Yes, it crosses the Rubicon of universal access to private health care. But since federal law mandates that hospitals accept all emergency-room cases requiring treatment anyway, we already obey that socialist principle—but in the most inefficient way possible. Making 44 million current free-riders pay into the system is not fiscally reckless; it is fiscally prudent. It is, dare I say it, conservative…What liberals have never understood about Obama is that he practices a show-don’t-tell, long-game form of domestic politics. What matters to him is what he can get done, not what he can immediately take credit for. And so I railed against him for the better part of two years for dragging his feet on gay issues. But what he was doing was getting his Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to move before he did. The man who made the case for repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was, in the end, Adm. Mike Mullen.
Andrew Sullivan absolutely kills this. He defends Obama’s first term as remarkably prolific, moderate and true to principle. Hear, hear. (via thecallup)
Tebow is respectful, wholesome and a man of God. He has no obvious failings besides an inaccurate throwing arm.
Well that is unfortunate, as THAT IS HIS JOB. Not to teach us all about Jesus. His job is to THROW THE BALL TO SOMEONE ELSE, and if he wasn’t talking about God all the fucking…
If you’d told me in January 2009 that the banks would pay us back the entire bailout and then some, that the auto companies would actually turn around with government help and be a major engine of recovery, that there would be continuous job growth since 2009, however insufficient, after the worst demand collapse since the 1930s, that bin Laden would be dead, Egypt transitioning to democracy, al Qaeda all but decimated as a global threat, and civil rights for gays expanding more rapidly than at any time in history … well I would be expecting a triumphant re-election campaign.
Steve was among the greatest of American innovators - brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it
This might be the last simple place left in the NFL. A place where fans navigate tiny roads and pass signs for $10 parking on people’s front lawns, and they can walk to a stadium that doesn’t look like the Emirates Palace. And when they do visit they can find an RV in the middle of the parking lot where a Hall of Fame quarterback tailgates just like them – every game-day morning.
I must disagree with this author’s take. I don’t think Green Bay has gone “corporate” - just because we have remodeled our stadium does not mean that we have lost that tradition and nostalgia. Green Bay is, and always will be, a football town. That city lives and breathes the Green Bay Packers. This is a place where after every practice, players (from the scout team all the way up to Aaron Rodgers) ride local kids’ bikes from the practice field to the locker room. Where people will go up to Clay Matthews in the grocery store to give him pointers for next week’s game. Practically the entire state of Wisconsin becomes a ghost town when the Packers are on TV.
True, they do receive more recognition and attention then the Bills. But they are one of the smallest market team in professional sports, the only community-owned team and yet they still have more league championships than any other NFL team.
In a perfect world, the execution of Troy Davis Wednesday night in Georgia would herald a new era in America’s grim history with the death penalty. It would shake the criminal justice system out of its self-satisfied torpor and force government and the governed both to face the ugly truth about capital punishment in the United States in the twenty-first century. It would propel this question to the forefront both of the nation’s political debate and the Supreme Court’s docket: How many exceptions to the rule must we allow or tolerate, how many legitimate questions must linger beyond the death chamber, before we either fix the system or end the experiment?
When the state kills those whose guilt is in serious doubt, or when the state kills those to whom it has not given fair justice, it doesn’t just perform an injustice upon the individual, the rule of law, and the Constitution. It also undermines the very legitimacy of the death penalty itself, for its continuing use as a sentencing option derives its civic and moral strength mostly from the fiction that it can be, and is, credibly and reliably imposed. Once our confidence in that credibility is shattered, as it should be now that Davis is gone, all that’s left of the death penalty is state-sponsored retribution and the hangman’s noose.
Andrew Cohen parses the significance of the Georgia execution in the history of American capital punishment. Read more at The Atlantic
The dog of slain Petty Officer Jon Tumilson refused to leave his side during the Navy SEAL’s funeral earlier this week in Rockford, Iowa. The heartbreaking photo taken by his cousin, Lisa Pembleton, shows Tumilson’s dog Hawkeye lying by the casket. (via The Daily Treat: Animal Planet)
