Category: US Politics

Yahoo has this story about an Australian hack getting into an awful lot of trouble for not getting the right Visa. This is pretty bad behavious by the officials, I wonder how it will be investigated. The CBP agent who read Smethursts travelers questionnaire took her to a secondary inspection area 30 feet away and…

Eric Heginbotham, a senior fellow of Asian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations writes a thoughtful piece in todays Tribune. The Tribune is full of good stuff these days. He expresses satisfaction with Japanese military affairs but points out: Japan’s civil-military relations problem has more to do with the strength of the political system…

So the truth is out, Strom fathered a black daughter. The point was underscored dramatically last week when the family of Strom Thurmond, the former United States senator who died last June at the age of 100, dropped decades of denials and acknowledged that Thurmond had fathered a daughter with a black maid in the…

Naomi Klein has quite an interesting account of protests in Miami recently. Some shocking stuff, they are embedding reporters with cops just to cover protests? What is the world coming to? Meanwhile, independent journalists who dared to do their jobs and film the police violence up close were actively targeted. “She’s not with us,” one…

Gregg Easterbrook has a post about the Atlantic’s cover story this month. He seems to make it sound all unreleased and exclusive – but it’s not. I got the Atlantic last week, as did every other subscriber, and perhaps wasn’t aware of the full implications of the Kerry piece. I preferred O’Rourke’s piece on Iraq.…

Why does the White House robots.txt file look like this? It appears to mean that searches related to Iraq are being disallowed. Hmm. This is oh so strange. Perhaps someone with a better idea of search technology can explain it to me? Quite a debate going on over on Dan’s blog. The Democrats have something…

Interesting debate on last night’s Newsnight on BBC2. You can watch it here, until the link changes at 23.30pm today Here Kirsty Wark presents a discussion between New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Rupert Murdochs associate, and member of the Hudson Institute, Dr. Irwin Stelzer. I typed out a transcript it was that interesting……

This is curious stuff, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States might have to supoena the White House in order to gain access to documents that it believes are being withheld. According to the cover story on today’s New York Times, Thomas Kean, the head of the Commission is not satisfied with…

Paul Mason from AK13 dropped me a mail about his latest post – interesting reading. Political power is usually defined as the ability to make someone do something they would not otherwise do. It is a very general definition, saying nothing about how you make someone do something – you could, for example, pay them…

Andrew Sullivan: For Wesley Clark to become Howard Dean’s running-mate. It would be a great, centrist Democrat-Republican ticket I had this discussion a few weeks back after the seminar in the US Embassy. Jim Ledbetter and Ben made the very same point – it would be a great combination.