Republican politicians are afraid of their base. Very afraid. Press folks have categorized the April 15 TEA parties -- TEA for "Taxed Enough Already" -- as anti-President Barack Obama, anti-government and even "anti-CNN." But it is GOP leaders who are scared senseless (for want of a better word) by the protests.
Last Wednesday, conservatives held coast-to-coast "TEA parties" designed to send the message to Washington and state governments that the partiers feel "taxed enough already." The exercise struck me as more than a little out of touch with the political realities of President Barack Obama's
On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security distributed a counterterrorism assessment to local law-enforcement types entitled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." The nine-page paper has many on the right questioning what is going on in Washington.
In December 1773, Bostonians held a Tea Party in Boston Harbor to protest excessive British taxes. "No taxation without representation" was their message.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal seeking a new trial for death-row inmate and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted in the 1981 shooting of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner.
In the 1990s, the Math Wars pitted two philosophies against each other. One side argued for content-based standards -- that elementary school students must memorize multiplication tables by third grade. The other side argued for students to discover math, unfettered by "drill and kill" exercises.
Two very rich Republicans -- former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner -- are lining up to run for governor in 2010. The most money that a third Republican gubernatorial candidate, Tom Campbell, ever earned was as the dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley -- about $300,000 per year. That would make him the pauper in the primary.
When Barack Obama first met his Auntie Zeituni at an airport in Kenya in 1988, his late father's sister told him, "Welcome home," and kissed him on both cheeks. Obama was on a pilgrimage to the land where his African father lived apart from Obama's American mother.
American voters want -- and President Obama campaigned on a platform of -- European-style government at American tax rates.
It seems pretty obvious that the last three presidents -- Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- once smoked marijuana. OK, Clinton claimed he didn't inhale. Bush refused to say whether he ever used drugs; instead, he coyly alluded to mistakes in his youth. Obama didn't play games in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father" -- he wrote about using marijuana and cocaine as a kid.
There is no group more dangerous than one with some power, no scruples and leaders who think that they are really smart and that everyone else is really, really stupid.
When Tristan Anderson, now 38, was living illegally in the trees at the University of California, Berkeley, to protest the administration's ultimately successful bid to cut them down to build a sports training center, life was good.
How the tables have turned. In September 2008, when GOP presidential nominee John McCain said "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," unemployment was 6.1 percent, the credit crunch had yet to reach the point that prompted President George W. Bush to propose a bailout, and Team Obama proclaimed that an out-of-touch McCain "just doesn't get it" on the economy.
"The war on drugs is a failure," Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Cesar Gaviria and Ernesto Zedillo -- the former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico -- wrote in the Wall Street Journal last month. "Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalization … simply haven't worked," they wrote.
When a jury found Richard Allen Davis guilty of the murder of Petaluma's 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1996, Davis puckered his lips and extended a middle finger to TV cameras.
I have known Rush Limbaugh since his old radio days in Sacramento, before he became a GOP god. I've disagreed with him over the years. Last year I took on his bashing of Republican moderates and criticized Limbaugh and other talk-radio hosts when they were too harsh on not-yet GOP nominee John McCain. I've never apologized and we're still friends.
California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ron George looked none too comfortable Thursday morning as he heard oral arguments for and against California's ban on same-sex marriage.
Twenty-five years after 1984, Doublespeak lives. Last week, President Obama released "A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise" -- a 10-year, $3.55 trillion spending plan that represented anything but fiscal maturity.
A Sunday New York Times story described an expected sea change in international global warming policy. The story noted that President George W. Bush, "pressed by the Senate, rejected" the Kyoto global warming protocol in 2001, but now President Obama is eager to negotiate a robust international global warming treaty to be signed in Copenhagen in December.
When he worked as a legislative liaison in 1982 for Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, B.T. Collins -- an unlikely Brown hire, as Collins was a Republican and double-amputee Vietnam War veteran who joked that he threw grenades "like a girl" -- had choice words for the California Legislature. He used to call the Assembly "an adult day care center."
