Bear Left!
Where else would you get your leftist bearings every week?
Volume II, Number 4917 December 2002
This Week's Article:
The Democrats Earned a D for Effort
Taken out of context, the 2002 election results were not so bad for the Democratic party. It lost a net total of two seats in the Senate and seven seats in the House of Representatives, and won more gubernatorial races than it lost. In context, the election was much worse, because the Democrats lost their narrow majority in the Senate.
More importantly, the Democrats blew a golden opportunity to solidify their hold on the Senate and even to take control of the House. They failed to exploit Republican weaknesses on a host of policies. They failed to make the elections into a referendum on either President Bush or his allies in Congress. And they failed to present any sort of systematic alternative to the Republican status quo. Democrats have suffered too long from a misbegotten notion that they needed to be more like the Republicans in order to win.
[Click on the link to read the whole article.]
Older Articles:
Articles from previous weeks are in our archives. If you're not careful, you might learn something.
Fact of the Week
If you were filling a senior director's job on the National Security Council for Near East and North African affairs, you would scertainly want someone with experience, someone trustworthy. The Bush administration certainly appointed someone with experience, Elliott Abrams, but his trustworthiness is notable by its absence.
During the Reagan administration, Abrams helped funnel arms to the Nicaraguan contras despite a Congressional ban on such aid. As a result of some 1986 testimony that was far from the whole truth, he pled guilty in 1991 to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress. Abrams received a lame-duck pardon from President Bush the Elder on 24 December 1992.
Source:
San Francisco Chronicle,
2 December 2002.
Fact of the Week Flashback
Bear Left certainly gets you ahead of the curve. Here is our Fact of the Week from 21 October 2001. If only that liberal media we keep hearing about had noticed this item...
In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that the IRS properly stripped the tax-exempt status from Bob Jones University, which then, as now, had racially discriminatory policies. The only dissenter was Justice Rehnquist, now the Chief Justice. One of the very few amicus curiae briefs supporting the University was that of Trent Lott, now the Senate Minority Leader.
Source: FindLaw, 461 U.S. 574
Our favorite links regarding Afghanistan
- The Guardian (London)
- The Independent (London)
- Federation of American Scientists (Washington)
- National Security Archive (Washington)
Our favorite links on the impending war with Iraq
- Red Pepper news on Iraq.
- No Rush to War: a collection of articles from The Nation.
- Target: Iraq from Global Security.org.
- Iraq's Nuclear Weapon Programme from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
- Iraq dossier presented to Parliament by Tony Blair.
- New York Times op-ed ad signed by 33 international relations scholars (HTML version of the ad).
- Stand Down cross-ideological, anti-war weblog.
- Alternative Resources on the US-Iraq Conflict: like it says, from the American Library Association.
- Iraq War Debate: a huge collection of links from the University of Michigan.
- Project on Defense Alternatives: analyses of Iraq and Afghanistan.
- United for Peace: Broad-based anti-war coalition.
- More, alas, likely to come.
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"Bear left! Bear left!" / "Right, Frog!" (Kermit and Fozzie, The Muppet Movie)
© 2002, Paul Corrigan and Tim Francis-Wright.
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