Australia's Liberal Party, which is actually its biggest conservative party because the world outside of America is a land of many contrasts (I kid!), changed leaders today, which also means that Australia changed prime ministers. Tony Abbott, who had led the party since 2009 and the country since 2013, was replaced by the guy he … Continue reading Tony Abbott’s loss may be the environment’s gain

I agree with Kevin Drum; there's little to be gained from liberal/center-left groups like CAP arguing that today's Republican Party has moved far to Ronald Reagan's right. Yes, it feeds an argument that the current Republican Party is tiptoeing out on the radical right-wing fringe, but it's a hollow way to make that point. Here's … Continue reading A losing argument

Via io9, it appears that archaeologists in the Irish town of Collooney have a bit of a mystery on their hands, as they examine a human skeleton that was unearthed when a 200 year old birch tree blew over in a storm. To add injury to insult, the skeleton, which appears to have been buried … Continue reading So much for resting in peace…

It's no "it’s been pretty well confirmed that [Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 19 9/11 hijackers] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack," which was really a masterful display of lying in the service of … Continue reading Republicans rebooting an old classic

Remember how a few weeks ago, the AP's George Jahn reported that he'd seen a draft of the agreement between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency governing site inspections at Iran's Parchin military base? And how Jahn explained that the draft said Iran would be allowed to do its own site inspections without the … Continue reading When is the AP going to explain its bogus Parchin story?

Benjamin Netanyahu's consolation prize for losing his fight against the Iran deal is likely to be a major new outlay of military aid from the US to Israel. But the first bill out of the gate to propose new aid is Ben Cardin's "Plan B" attempt to scuttle the Iran deal via the back door, … Continue reading Congress considers giving the Israelis weapons that they probably don’t even want

At least 87 people (a number that's likely to rise) are dead and another 180+ injured after a construction crane collapsed and and fell onto Mecca's Grand Mosque, the holiest site in Islam. The Saudi government is planning to investigate the cause, but it's very likely that it was weather-related, as Saudi Arabia has been … Continue reading Disaster at the Grand Mosque

When I was in high school and college, I used to wonder about people of my parents' generation and earlier who could tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Surely they don't completely remember something that happened 30+ years ago, … Continue reading 9/11 + 14 years

As Democrats have accumulated enough votes to defeat, one way or another, a Congressional vote to reject the Iran deal, it's started to look like the deal might become the foreign policy version of Obamacare, with deal opponents repeatedly trying to pick the deal apart piece by piece in an infinite number of future votes. … Continue reading Like Obamacare on steroids

Suddenly campaign finance reform is all the rage in the Democratic primary. Hillary Clinton is the latest to make the issue a key part of her pitch to voters, and I suppose that's a good thing, inasmuch as we know that the heavy influx of private money into our political system is a very bad … Continue reading “How” matters more than “what”