Opinion Forum

Sticks Hicks Nix . . . ?

October 18th, 2011

By Dan Miller One of the country’s greatest headlines ever appeared in Variety back in 1935, when the good folks of New Rochelle (then out in the boonies but only forty-five minutes from Broadway) did not much care for a new motion picture. The headline was, “Sticks Nix Hick Pix.” On October 14th, “Massachusetts Senate [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: campaign, Elizabeth Warren, headline, hicks, satire, Senate, Variety
Categories: Humor, News, Politics | Comments (5) | Home

Not Enough Yet, but House Bound to Cut More Spending

August 4th, 2011

By Dan Miller If the House behaves in the best interests of its majority, Uncle Sugar will have to diet lest they precipitate a new credit limit “crisis”. Both houses of the Congress have now approved the new debt limit bill, the text of which is available here. President Obama has signed it. It is [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: Constitution, credit downgrade, debt limit, House, legislation, Senate
Categories: Law, News, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

How the New Congress Can Roll Back Obama’s Agenda

November 6th, 2010

By Dan Miller Soon to be former Speaker Baghdad Bob’s Pelosi’s assessment on November 2 that the Democrats would hold the House of Representatives to the contrary notwithstanding, it will no longer be under “liberal” Democratic Party control come January. Perhaps she will not like the results when she sees them. The conservatives seem to [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: appropriations, Congress, election, House, revenue, Senate, spending, veto
Categories: Law, Politics | Comments (19) | Home

Winning Is the Only Thing

November 3rd, 2010

By Tom Carter “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” That famous quotation from American football legend has been attributed to Vince Lombardi, but it probably came first from UCLA coach Red Sanders. Whoever said it first, it applies to politics even more precisely than to football or other sports. Why is winning the only [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Angle, conservatives, election, O'Donnell, Reid, Senate, Tea Party, winning
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (29) | Home

Incompetent 111th Congress

October 8th, 2010

By Tom Carter The 111th Congress will, thankfully, pass into history on January 3, 2011. It’s been one of the most partisan, rancorous, and generally incompetent in our recent history. What it supposedly accomplished is highly unpopular with many people, and it failed to do some of the most important tasks of any Congress. Aside [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: budget, Congress, failure, House, incompetent, Senate, spending, taxes
Categories: Economics, News, Politics | Comments (3) | Home

When Did the Senate Turn into Pre-school?

September 7th, 2010

By Dr. Jim Taylor I’ve become quite an authority on pre-schoolers these days. My eldest daughter just finished pre-school and my youngest daughter is in her second year. Plus, I’m writing my third parenting book tentatively titled, Parenting on Message: The 9 Essential Messages to Give Your Child a Great Start to Life (The Experiment [...]

Articles written by Dr. Jim Taylor
Tags: dysfunctional, ideology, partisanship, pre-school, Senate, toddlers
Categories: Politics | Comments (2) | Home

What If the Republicans Win Control of Congress?

September 2nd, 2010

By Tom Carter As we approach the elections on November 2, more and more serious experts are predicting that the Republicans will win a majority in the House and possibly even in the Senate. One prediction published today comes from Larry Sabato, who is a professor at the University of Virginia and director of the [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Democrat, election, House, prediction, Republican, Sabato, Senate
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (4) | Home

Know What Obama Could Use? A Snake Oil Czar

July 4th, 2010

By Dan Miller President Obama is just one man. He clearly can’t sell all this snake oil himself. * * * We have a disastrously inadequate petroleum reserve; there is a crisis. “We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves,” or so [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: czars, drilling, leadership, oil, President, reserves, satire, Senate, snake oil
Categories: Humor, Politics | Comments (2) | Home

Kagan Can Be a Justice, Though Never a Judge?

May 10th, 2010

By Dan Miller President Obama has selected Elena Kagan, the solicitor general of the United States, as his nominee to replace the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. From her official bio: Kagan came to Harvard Law School as a visiting professor in 1999 and became Professor of Law in 2001. While on the faculty, Kagan [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: confirmation, Elena Kagan, experience, nomination, Senate, Supreme Court
Categories: Law, News, Politics | Comments (9) | Home

Kagan for the Supreme Court

May 10th, 2010

By Tom Carter It’s reported that the President will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, replacing the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. While Kagan, 50, has no experience as a judge, she’s a well-educated lawyer and a former law professor, law school dean, clerk to a U.S. [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: confirmation, Elena Kagan, nomination, Senate, Stevens, Supreme Court
Categories: Life, News, Politics | Comments (2) | Home

A More Conservative Court?

April 10th, 2010

By Tom Carter Now that Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens has officially resigned, effective at the end of this term, speculation is ramping up as to whom President Obama will nominate to replace him. As I noted in an earlier article, the question isn’t whether the President will nominate a liberal, but how [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: conservative, liberal, nomination, Obama, Senate, Stevens, Supreme Court
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

Health Care Fatigue

March 21st, 2010

By Tom Carter I’m tired of the health care debate. It’s been going on for a year, and it’s become so complex and so partisan that even many of the politicians who will vote for health care reform today don’t understand it well. We’ll know in a few hours whether we have a new law [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Congress, constitutional, health care, House, legislation, Senate
Categories: Politics | Comments (5) | Home

What’s in the Bill

March 19th, 2010

By Tom Carter The Washington Post today published a handy guide to what’s in the Senate health care bill and changes that are in the House reconciliation bill. It’s highly summarized and covers only eight major topics. It’s useful, however, given that the bill posted on the internet is unintelligible. On abortion, the Senate language [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: abortion, health care, House, Obama, reconciliation, Senate
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (4) | Home

Health Care and Abortion

March 7th, 2010

By Tom Carter Taxpayer funding for abortions is a touchy issue in the House in regard to health care legislation. The only way the House barely managed to pass their version of the legislation in the first place was by the Democrats permitting Representative Bart Stupak (D-MI) to add an amendment that strictly prohibits direct or [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: abortion, health care reform, House, Pelosi, Senate, Stupak
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (2) | Home

Words of Wisdom

March 6th, 2010

by Jane Thomas I’ve been reading Zell Miller’s book, A National Party No More, and, although I think he is a conflicted man in his approach to politics, he makes some very interesting comments on the process in the Senate. This book was published in 2003, but his comments resonate even more today. He tells [...]

Articles written by Guest Author
Tags: Biden, democracy, filibuster, government, process, Senate, Zell Miller
Categories: Politics | Comments (6) | Home

Brown Wins in Massachusetts

January 19th, 2010

By Tom Carter About eight minutes ago (about 10:05 pm EST), CNN called the Massachusetts Senate race for Scott Brown, the Republican, with a margin of 52% to 47%. Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, has conceded. All things considered, this is the equivalent of a political nuclear explosion. It’s going to be fun watching the [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Brown, Coakley, election, Massachusetts, Senate
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (2) | Home

Health Care Reform Details

November 22nd, 2009

By Tom Carter The Washington Post has published a good interactive graph that compares the costs and features of the House and Senate health care reform bills (click the image). You’ll find a lot of things that bring up questions. At the most comprehensive level, reconciling the differences between these bills in a House-Senate conference [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: health care reform, House, reconciliation, Senate
Categories: Economics, News, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

Good Old Harry

November 21st, 2009

By Larry Ennis As the time to vote for health care reform in the Senate speedily comes this way, we start to see and hear of different little sweetheart deals being cut by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and others to insure the passage of one of Obama’s favorites. One of the principle holdouts in [...]

Articles written by Larry Ennis
Tags: health care reform, Landrieu, Louisiana, Reid, Senate
Categories: Economics, News, Politics | Comments (11) | Home

The Great Compromise

August 7th, 2009

Joel Achenbach in Senators From Nowhere in The Washington Post: The six senators pushing for a compromise deal on health care — and meeting [on August 6] with President Obama — apparently aren’t going to be spending a lot of time meeting constituents in “town hall” gatherings back home. This is because they come from states without [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Great Compromise, representation, Senate
Categories: History, Politics | Comments (7) | Home

Al Franken, Filibuster Buster

July 5th, 2009

Now that the Minnesota Supreme Court has resolved the Franken-Coleman election dispute, Al Franken will take his seat as the junior Senator from Minnesota, presumably during the coming week. There’s a lot of talk about the Democrats having a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority with Franken in the Senate. The fact is, it’s a pretty shaky supermajority. Of the [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Franken, Obama, Senate
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

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