One Utah

Former National Security Council chief counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke discusses the fact that al-Qaeda may try to influence the U.S. presidential election again, saying that “at the very least” we should “expect another Halloween video from the scary man in the cave.”

Remember that an Osama bin Laden video hit U.S. TV screens just three days [...]

Did the late Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen ever say, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money”? (or anything very close to that?) Perhaps not. According to one account, Dirksen said, “A newspaper fella misquoted me once, and I thought it sounded so good that I never bothered [...]

What the Democrats should have done: Told President Bush to wait until after Election Day, and then taken the time to write progressive legislation aimed not at bailing out Wall Street billionaires, but at restoring the financial regulatory system that the Republicans wrecked, and helping out their victims.
What the Democrats did: Went along with demands [...]

Originally published on OneUtah June 2007.
Morris Berman, a distinguished professor and writer is known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. His most recent book, Dark Ages America, is not pretty. I first saw him on C-Span book TV. It was interesting because even among the predictably liberal sympathetic crowd in attendance, some got [...]

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, May 16, 2002
I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile. [...]

In the real world, every government policy is an experiment. We look to history to guide us but also ground ourselves in basic values.
Public education, supported by property taxes, open to everyone, is an experiment. Creating a progressive tax code is an experiment. Cutting taxes on the rich in hopes they will [...]

Here are the Republican talking points on what to do about an economic crisis:

Tell everyone that the fundamentals of the economy are sound
Blame the downturn on pessimists and whiners
Refuse to acknowledge bad economic statistics
Advocate more restrictions on immigration
Demand additional cuts in the capital gains tax

Does this speech sound familiar? “The fundamental business of the [...]

As I continue my desultory series on the four freedoms, I find myself, in the face of the seemingly endless sludge of bad economic news pondering the idea of freedom from want.
FDR’s original line was:
The third is freedom from want–which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy [...]

If you missed “60 Minutes,” then you ought to watch this now. Scott Pelley interviewed Bob Woodward about his new book on the so-called “surge” in Iraq.
Now, normally I wouldn’t hit the keyboard to run the risk of helping Woodward– he’s a smug s.o.b. who wrote adulatory books about President Bush until [...]

Consistency. If there’s one thing Republicans have going for them, it’s consistency. In fact, no other organization that I’m aware of, whether it be a sports team, a university, a government bureau or a business can point to a track record of such astonishing consistency. For a hundred years now, the Republicans have unfailingly been [...]

Is that he might actually tell us the truth.
Read it all, but here’s the money quote:
But what the foreign visitor finds the most frightening, the most dangerous, is the voter who, after eight years of abject catastrophe, continues to pray “Please, please, give me a reason to vote for the person who says that things [...]

Hurricane Gustav is barreling toward the Gulf Coast. Today it was forecasted to hit New Orleans on Monday, the first day of the Republican National Convention. By then it could be a Category 3 storm, which triggers mandatory evacuations. President George W. Bush will be the featured speaker at the convention in [...]