Author: briggs

  • Yellowcake!: a journey back from ignorance

    Hey, the Democrats are finally getting mad about something! (Harry Reid shut down Senate business today saying, “… this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared to challenge its actions…”) I feel for them. I’m just working up a head of steam…

  • Weighing Justices

    Justice may be blind and that’s for the good but what about those scales? When it comes to weighing one side against another I’m worried about size and heft overpowering brevity and thrift. Another way of imagining this concern is to place a bible on one side of the scale and the U.S. Constitution on…

  • Harriet Miers, fashion froward?

    My first glimpse of the latest nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court on the afternoon news revealed not just your usual power-suited Washington insider. First, the suit was a serene royal blue, not screaming patriotic red. Beneath the suit jacket, nominee Miers sported a demure “high-collared” silk blouse, also in royal blue. Could this be…

  • David Brooks can go to Hell or New Orleans

    His choice–for saying “We have to think about whether we want to rebuild New Orleans” on the (Lehrer) News Hour this afternoon. Whaddya mean “we” Mr. Smarty Pundit?! Like, if a hurricane had destroyed Washington D.C. there would be a vote to decide whether or not it was wise to rebuild the nation’s capitol in…

  • Got (moooo) Smog?

    A curious editorial in the Sunday New York Times points out that California’s agricultural heartland may be at the heart of an air pollution crisis that could require regulation of cow emissions as well as car emissions. It seems that the mammoth dairy farms of the San Joaquin Valley–where about twenty percent of the nation’s…

  • Public Television vs The Klan

    Full disclosure: I have a liberal viewpoint. That means primarily that I believe in taxes, free speech, and that Abraham Lincoln was right. And sometimes I wish The North had let The South secede. Then we wouldn’t have today a national leadership lording their prejudices over us from the legacy of a constitutional compromise. That’s…