Juxtaposition of the day. First, the dawn of a new season in China:
BEIJING (AP) -- Beijing's skyscrapers receded into a dense gray smog Thursday as the capital saw the season's first wave of extremely dangerous pollution, with the concentration of toxic small particles registering more than two dozen times the level considered safe.
While we've been duking it out in Indiana over whether to move our gay marriage ban from the law to the state constitution, judges in Utah and Oklahoma have ruled those states' limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples violates the U.S. Constitution on equal protection grounds. The language and the reasoning used have become pretty standard in eliminating "moral disapproval" as a rationale for laws:
I am 66 percent conservative, 34 percent liberal. So says Time magazine's political calculator:
We just got thrown under the omnibus:
Congressional negotiators unveiled a $1.1 trillion funding bill late Monday that would ease sharp spending cuts known as the sequester while providing fresh cash for new priorities, including President Obama’s push to expand early-childhood education.
It's hard to know how seriously to take Robert Gates' book about his time as secretary of defense. People who write tell-all books have their axes to grind, and we have to consider their observations in the context of the times and our own sense of the way things were. What we tend to do is read our own predispositions into such memoirs. Critics of President Obama will like the book, Obama acolytes not so much.
Alaska State Rep. and Vietnam veteran Bob Lynn wants to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18 for active-duty service members, using the rationale that "if you can get shot at, you can have a shot." Should Republicans get on that particualr bandwagon?
Yeah, yeah, I know, some people find it tiresome the way those of us on the right prattle on about the liberal bias of the press. But, come on, seriously?
Geez. The number of Americans self-identifying as conservative (38 percent) is much greater than the number self-identifying as liberal (23 percent), according to a recent Gallup poll. But this is the headline Gallup put on the announcement of the results:
Liberal self-identification edges up to new high in 2913.
Yeah, it shot all the way up from 22 percent last year. Boy, that's some surge.
At first glance, this doesn't seem right, and yet . . .
You'd have to be living under a rock to not know about what's happening in Colorado - it's marijuana mayhem! Weed has finally become legal for retail sale in that state, and more might follow. And yet, there are still hundreds of marijuana convicts sitting in jail.
And apparently, not granting "retroactive ameliorative relief" is official policy.
