I was over at the Obama campaign site last night checking of the new Women for Obama initative launched earlier this month with a series of kickoff speeches from Michelle Obama. The first thing you notice about Michelle is that she’s a terrific speaker. Very witty, very engaging, very concise. The second thing [...]
I know that I’ve already posted tonight but I fear that this story has been swallowed up by the news cycle and that’s a shame. For anyone out there who missed Kevin Tillman’s absolutely inspiring testimony about the government’s treatment of his brother Pat’s death, here it is again.
That the Tillman family had [...]
Milestones in your child’s life, like most of the parenting experience, often come with a mixed bag of emotions. The one our daughter reached this week is no exception.
One one hand, Alex turned five, certainly a milestone birthday in her mind and ours. We celebrated by taking her to Hershey, PA, [...]
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blog has YouTube footage of two speeches in favor of a resolution that would give the District of Columbia a voting representative in the House. (A 417th representative would also be added in Utah to keep an odd number and, incidentally, partisan balance.) They’re mostly on the dry side, but watch Delegate [...]
We’re back home after a weekend trip that involved a lot of time on the Pennsylvania Turnpike - some of it driving. And it occurred to me that Pennsylvania, like several other states, is considering leasing its toll roads to for-profit companies, and then using the proceeds to pay for major initiatives (in Pennsylvania’s case, [...]
OK, this is ridiculous. Arlen Specter, ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, apparently decided to abstain from a voice vote on whether or not to authorize the Senate to issue subpoenas to Karl Rove and others in the US Attorney fiasco.
Cameras picked up his lips moving when the “ayes” were called for. Reporters [...]
In addition to the mayoral primary, it looks like Philadelphia voters will have a chance to vote on an amendment to the city’s home Rule Charter that would make it illegal to put casinos near schools, churches and residential neighborhoods. Various authorities have said that, given other existing restrictions, that would make it pretty much [...]
Got an e-mail from MoveOn.org today. (I signed up around the time of the Vote for Change tour, and haven’t really participated in a lot of the organization’s activities since then, even though the possibilities for Internet-harnessed democratic decision-making intrigue me.) They’re trying to figure out whether or not to support the House leadership’s version [...]
A bunch of threads are colliding against each other in my head right now. Reuters is reporting on a new poll that shows a majority of Americans want a timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq. In the meantime, there have been numerous reports about the Congressional Democrats’ problems coalescing behind any particular proposal to try [...]
Not News launched right before the 2000 election, and so it should not be too much of a surprise that we spent a lot of time in our forums in November and December talking about what do about the voting system. And at the time, I was a proponent of using electronic voting machines, ideally [...]