The death today of Tim Russert, 58, was a shock and a big loss. Russert, moderator of “Meet the Press” and NBC’s Washington bureau chief, was known for his unrelenting questioning. “There wasn’t a better interviewer in television,” Barack Obama said. John McCain called Russert the “pre-eminent journalist of his generation.” But I liked best NBC anchor Brian Williams’ description of Russert as a person: “aggressively unfancy.”
“It shouldn’t be necessary for the Supreme Court to tell the president that he can’t have people taken into custody, spirited to a remote prison camp and held indefinitely, with no legal right to argue that they’ve been unjustly imprisoned – not even on grounds of mistaken identity,” columnist Eugene Robinson wrote about the court’s Guantanamo Bay detainee decision. “But the president in question is, sigh, George W. Bush, who has taken a chainsaw to the rule of law with the same manic gusto he displays while clearing brush at his Texas ranch.”
But a Wall Street Journal editorial complained that the court had declared judicial supremacy over Congress and the White House. “Justice (Anthony) Kennedy’s opinion is remarkable in its sweeping disregard for the decisions of both political branches,” the editorial said. “In a pair of 2006 laws – the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act – Congress and the president had worked out painstaking and good-faith rules for handling enemy combatants during wartime.”
The fight over a western Kansas coal-plant expansion is more than legal and regulatory. It’s also political. The Kansas Chamber of Commerce is using the issue to raise money for its political action committee, with chamber president and CEO Amy Blankenbiller claiming in a letter that the air-permit denial of the plants “will have a chilling effect on Kansas’ entire business and manufacturing community.â€
But that “effect†is speculative at best. Obviously, the chamber is going to support candidates who support business, but shouldn’t that support be based in fact rather than fearmongering?
Remember the misery index? Well, the Gallup polling organization is now teaming up with health researchers to try to provide a “happiness index†that measures Americans’ feelings of well-being, based on such factors as job satisfaction, stress levels and optimism.
Gallup thinks politicians should be evaluated in part on how happy their constituents are — the research data can show happiness-stress levels in the population broken down by state and congressional district.
Will politicians in the future be held accountable for making us happier?
Social critic and “post-feminist feminist†Camille Paglia has decided Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is Barack “Obama’s best bet†as a running mate. Here’s why: “She is a polished public presence who epitomizes that cordial, smoothly reassuring, and blandly generic WASPiness that has persistently defined the American power structure in business and government and that has weirdly resisted wave after wave of immigration since the mid-19th century. An Obama-Sebelius pairing would be visually vibrant and radiant, like a new day dawning.â€
The death today of Tim Russert, 58, was a shock and a big loss. Russert, moderator of “Meet the Press” and NBC’s Washington bureau chief, was known for his unrelenting questioning. “There wasn’t a better interviewer in television,” Barack Obama said. John McCain called Russert the “pre-eminent journalist of his generation.” But I liked best NBC anchor Brian Williams’ description of Russert as a person: “aggressively unfancy.”
