Early this morning, after a couple cups of coffee and a belt of Old Crow, I pulled on my leather riding gear and — armed with nothing more than a saddle bag full of dried feed and some labor pamphlets I borrowed from the PLP — pushed north along a series of dusty county roads that lead to a cluster of farms in rural Colorado where free range chickens are

From RWS: Obama’s hope and change website never addressed gay rights. In fact it never mentioned the words ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’. Until after the election that is. I admit to not spending much time over there, so I can’t independently corroborate this claim. But given that the staff from the Office of the President-Elect has shown no previous wariness about simply airbrushing away bits and pieces of Obama’s policy pronouncements

From Top of the Ticket: It may come as a huge surprise for everyone that ex-President Bill Clinton thinks that ex-First Lady Hillary Clinton would be a “really great” secretary of state in the new administration. His reaction comes amid unsourced reports that President-elect Barack Obama is considering his former Democratic primary rival for the post of chief U.S. diplomat. She’s said she just wants to be the best possible

How Obama got elected: I’d add my piece about voters being conditioned by many of our institutions to respond to certain ideological cues and easy political bromides — and for good measure, throw in a bit about how so-called conservatives who went for Obama were gulled by a boogey man created for their benefit, namely, this idea that improperly educated religious conservatives are hoping to burn books and build a

The cankles that roared. Not really sure how this will work, policy-wise: will Clinton provide a muscular foreign policy cover for Obama? Or will she now be free to adopt a more “progressive” foreign policy, and please the base that largely abandoned her in favor of Barack? One of the reasons I would have been less concerned with a Clinton presidency than I am with a Barack Obama stewardship is

That is, if you’re interested in returning to the economic paradigm of the Carter years. Foreign-owned manufacturers who build cars with American workers pay wages similar to GM’s. But their expenses for benefits are a fraction of GM’s. GM is contractually required to support thousands of workers in the UAW’s “Jobs Bank” program, which guarantees nearly full wages and benefits for workers who lose their jobs due to automation or

NYT, “Post-Guantánamo: A New Detention Law?”: As a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama sketched the broad outlines of a plan to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: try detainees in American courts and reject the Bush administration’s military commission system. Now, as Mr. Obama moves closer to assuming responsibility for Guantánamo, his pledge to close the detention center is bringing to the fore thorny questions under consideration by

On FoxNews Sunday with Chris Wallace: “I think the other thing that I’ve found that’s been lacking over the last four years, especially the last two cycles–’06 and ’08—we don’t know how to talk to people. We’ve absolutely forgotten how to communicate a message … to espouse those principles in the context of people’s everyday lives. … Our party needs to have a voice, it needs to have a relevant

A dubious and self-serving equation long espoused by those scholars reared on identity politics, postcolonialist theory, and the Balkanizing structural imperatives of multiculturalism — given perhaps its most popular airing by Spike Lee, who, rumor has it, once got into a fight with a swirly cone, accusing the vanilla of suffering from jungle fever while berating the chocolate for it’s desire to “assimilate.” David Thompson explores the trajectory of such