John McCain: "I think the great danger now is a half-measure, sort of a - you know, try to please all ends of the political spectrum," McCain told CNN chief national correspondent John King. "And, again, I have great sympathy for the president, making the toughest decisions that presidents have to make, ...

President Obama is now a Laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize. There's enough in that statement alone to drive rightwing conservatives insane. And insane they certainly are, as others are ably and gleefully documenting. The general gist of the response by the Right is twofold, and predictably schizophrenic: ...

This is the second part of my series in anticipation of the upcoming Copenhagen conference. The previous post in this series was a defense of the scientific method. So, what do I think about global warming? The consensus is a powerful one, and it's not built upon one tree ring or one temperature reconstruction, ...

As the Copenhagen conference on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol draws near, I want to lay some meta-thoughts out about the scientific method which I think are important, as a context for my general support of the theory of global warrming and the need for decisive action by our own nation to reduce ...

This is the text and word cloud of the speech by Sarah Palin while in Hong Kong on September 23rd, for the CLSA Pacific Markets Conference. Note the dominant topic (in the cloud) in her speech is obvious, and hardly a surprise given the context and locale of the speech. palin_speech_hongkong You can ...

I admit to not having ever seen a Michael Moore movie, though from what I understand his film Roger and Me was probably his defining film, one that predated the Bush era and thus was more balanced in its critiques. Of course his latest effort, a rant against the horrors of unrestrained capitalism, is ...

There's an alarmist poll out from Investors Business Daily that makes the shocking claim that almost half (46%) of America's doctors will quit under Obama's proposed health care reform plan. The implications of such a finding - which runs counter to the American Medical Association's own support of ...

There's a new foreign policy group in town called the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, and they have written a letter to President Obama urging him to "focus US strategy more clearly on Al Qaeda" instead of explicit nation-building. The text of the letter follows: Dear Mr. President: During ...

I've been reading Tyler Cowen, Ezra Klein, and the League on the matter of the Baucus bill and am frankly bothered by the way in which progressives seem to be losing sight of the main goal of health care: to bring affordable coverage to 100% of all Americans. This is a goal that the vaunted public options ...

Earlier, I posted my thoughts about whether terrorism was still a threat, noting that in one sense the answer was obviously yes, but asking whether 9-11 was the outlier it seemed to be. My post was intended to provoke a discussion, and the best response was by Dave Schuler, reproduced here in full: ...