Read Ron Paul’s statement that he won’t compete in upcoming primaries and, vague though it may be, there can be little doubt he isn’t expecting to win in 2012. That is news to many die-hard supporters who blame any bad news on the mainstream, corporate media getting it wrong.
That has always been a strange argument, especially to anyone who understands the media. I’ve been involved with media nationally since my early days as a reporter at UPI in New York City. I’ve never known a political reporter or editor who didn’t want a great story, and a convention floor fight for the GOP nomination would be high drama, great for ratings and readership.
But it isn’t going to happen, regardless of how people may be counting delegates.
Ron Paul speaks at a campaign stop earlier this year in Maine. (AP photo)
The question on a lot of lips is whether Richard Lugar’s primary loss signals anything about Orrin Hatch, who now is the undisputed longest-serving Republican in the Senate.
Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., left, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., right.
According to an account in the Atlantic, at FreedomWorks headquarters Tuesday night people were chanting “Hatch is next!” Continue reading
Are they prisoners of war or enemy combatants? More than a decade after the United States launched its attack on Afghanistan, we still haven’t really confronted that question.
Oh sure, President Barack Obama officially renounced the term in 2009. But he hasn’t come up with any better term. He certainly isn’t calling them prisoners of war. He’s acting as if they’re, well, enemy combatants.
Americans can go on debating this. The cows will come home long before terrorists stop posing a threat. However, they should be fairly certain about one thing. Hardened fighters with ideological hatred toward the United States are not honest.
Military personnel inspect cells containing enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay.
The interesting thing isn’t that a Secret Service sex scandal is dominating the news. It’s that we suddenly care.
Richard Nixon’s apologists used to say that he did the same things previous presidents had done, but he was the only one castigated for doing them. The suddenly fired, resigned or retired Secret Service agents could say the same thing.
That doesn’t excuse what they did. It does, however, make you wonder why the government has tolerated such behavior for so long.
The hotel in Colombia where Secret Service agents reportedly brought prostitutes. (MANUEL PEDRAZA/AFP/Getty Images)
While a new group called the Utah Lift Coalition was holding a press conference Tuesday in support of a proposed mountain gondola that would link the Canyons Resort in Summit County to Solitude Mountain Resort in Salt Lake County, Salt Lake Mayor Ralph Becker was meeting with the Deseret News editorial board to explain his opposition.
The controversy boils down to a question of whether the lift would endanger the watershed that supplies the Salt Lake area or harm other parts of the fragile mountain environment. Developers say no. The city and county say yes.
The words of a 19-year-old man who would identify himself only as Dylan summed up the argument as he saw it. “We’re not hurting anybody,” he said.
Dylan was referring to the annual march in favor of marijuana legalization that takes place at the University of Colorado each April 20. Similar demonstrations took place elsewhere around the nation.
What counts as “hurting people”? Apparently not disrupting an institution of higher learning and keeping its faculty and students from the business of learning during the 4 o’clock hour on that day. Apparently also not the cost to the University of Colorado to clean up the mess the annual “protesters” leave. The school estimated this at $50,000.
Protesters at the University of Colorado. Photo from http://news.yahoo.com/photos/marijuana-rally-in-trouble-at-colo-university-1334963912-slideshow/
While Republicans and Democrats are using Tax Day to buffet (or is that Buffett?) each other over whether to sock it to the rich, the Alliance for Excellent Education has a slightly different take on the only thing in life, other than death, that is certain.
Get more people to graduate from high school and you’ll put more money into state and federal coffers.
To use a Titanic reference (that’s trendy right now), Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul seem to be fighting over control of the rudder, making sure they steer the thing into an iceberg no matter what Captain Mitt Romney may want.
Or perhaps they are more like the JetBlue captain who goes berserk and seems determined to bring the party’s plane down.
Ironically, the Mitt Romney campaign once tried to get Utah to move its presidential primary up so that, according to a Salt Lake Tribune story from last year, it “might play a bigger role in the nomination process.”
That’s ironic because now some observers say Utah’s latest-in-the-nation primary on June 26 may be the one that truly helps Romney the most, pushing him over the top in terms of delegates needed to secure the nomination.
(Deseret News archive photo)
The George W. Bush administration took a lot of heat for condoning various forms of torture against suspected terrorists, and rightfully so, in my opinion. So where is the general outrage against the Obama administration now that Attorney General Eric Holder has laid out his legal case for killing America citizens suspected of terrorism?
U.S. born Anway al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida leader, was killed by a drone attack in September. (File photo by Muhammad ud-Deen .)
The basic idea is this: If the executive branch determines that a U.S. citizen poses an imminent threat to the nation, that there is little chance the citizen could be captured and that killing this person would not violate the basic rules of war, the president can order the hit. Continue reading