Iraq's indigenous sources of uranium ore
The continued attention to Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame and Iraq's alleged interest in Niger's yellowcake uranium ore led me to look for a source that would have something useful to say about the...
View ArticleMore disquieting revelations about contractors in Iraq
Security contractors supporting the U.S. effort in Iraq regularly shoot into civilian cars with little accountability, according to a Raleigh News & Observer analysis of more than 400 reports...
View Article"They said it was democracy and freedom, but in reality, it was...
Dr. Rashad Zidan, Iraqi humanitarian activist and pharmacist, spoke Wednesday night in Raleigh about her experience in Iraq under the U.S. occupation. Zidan stressed the importance of relaying the...
View Article"We're CNN with secrets"
Just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an extremely high level U.S. officer spoke off the record to a Triangle audience about U.S. invasion planning. While much of his talk now seems quite dated...
View ArticleDemocrats in Action
The discussions of local organizing on DKos suggest that maybe folks would be interested in some of our ideas in NC on building a strong and effective political organization. Democrats in Action is...
View ArticleMore on Democrats in Action
I'm sympathetic to those who see efforts like ours as a distraction from party building. If your numbers are low, and you don't have enough functioning people to staff basic party positions, then you...
View ArticleWhat are you doing on Tax Day? Something one person can do
Here in Durham, we're planning to take advantage of the usual last-minute filing of tax returns at the Post Office on the night of April 17 -- and the usual local news coverage of this event -- to meet...
View ArticleWhat a "bunker busting" nuclear attack would do
The Union of Concerned Scientists has a highly informative animated briefing on these weapons at their site. Go tohttp://www.ucsusa.org/... Two points addressed by this presentation: 1. Possibility...
View ArticleWSJ attack puppy nips at Juan Cole's ankles
I'm a bit surprised that nobody has diaried on Monday's Wall Street Journal column by John Fund. In a two-part assault on Yale, Mr. Fund first continued his campaign to have ex-Taliban diplomat Sayed...
View ArticleGlobal warming and earthquakes: The other shoe drops
Hound Dog's recent diary on the Wall Street Journal story detailing the link between global warming and earthquakes highlights another way in which the changes wrought by global warming might be...
View ArticleWhy not privatize marriage?
Debates about gay marriage take for granted that it is the state that is a proper institution for marrying people. But why should the state marry anyone? The state is a secular institution. It seems...
View ArticleUS policy towards the latest Arab-Israeli war: Is Djerejian right?
I suppose it's inevitable that whenever a discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict takes place that a large part of it is devoted to arguments about who did what to whom over the last 2000 years. I...
View ArticleUnderstanding voter turnout: the basics (pt. 1)
One common thread that runs through many posts on elections (particularly when they are close) is that victory is heavily dependent on who turns out to vote. This often includes inconclusive...
View ArticleUnderstanding voter turnout: Key insights
Yesterday's diary listed half a dozen well known regularities in voter turnout. They can all be derived from a relatively simple general theory about turnout that is based on three key insights about...
View ArticleUnderstanding Voter Turnout, pt. 3: Less obvious patterns
In the two previous diaries I presented some durable patterns in voter turnout, then presented the outlines of a simple theory that accounts for them. Today I turn to some less obvious patterns that...
View ArticleMeasuring "bias" in presidential approval polls
How large is opinion poll "bias" in presidential approval surveys? It's not necessary to spend a lot of time studying surveys to notice that often polls on presidential approval taken at roughly at the...
View ArticleEvidence that Dems overspend in safe seats
A number of diaries here recently have pointed out that several Democratic incumbents are sitting on very large piles of cash that could be better used in close races. Recently released research by...
View ArticleThe economic consequences of reducing trade barriers, lesson one
Does free trade benefit everyone?This claim is advanced so often, and so casually, that one might suppose that it is a basic result in economic theory, a sort of Newton's Law for the international...
View ArticleWolfowitz and the "3 camps" theory of the WH
I was hoping that the comments on Jerome's diary would have more to say about the original Financial Times story on the three camps supposedly inhabiting the White House. Since the string of comments...
View ArticleTNR: "Fred Thompson Channels L. Ron Hubbard"
It might seem odd to link Fred Thompson to L. Ron Hubbard. But, as former Bush (Sr.) administration Treasury official Bruce Bartlett recounts in the current edition of The New Republic on-line,...
View ArticleI.T. and politics -- new research
The first issue of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics is now available free online at: http://www.jitp.net/The Table of Contents is below. (Perhaps of special note: "WEB...
View ArticleUS now officially acknowledges Israeli nukes
In a story headlined "CIA: We said back in 1974 that Israel had nuclear weapons," the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on a 1974 Special National Intelligence Assesment, "Prospects for further...
View ArticleIraq: Decoding US and insurgent "surges"
One weakness of news coverage of the Iraq war has been the lack of convincing "big picture" stories. Even when reporters try to do this, they invariably give snapshot views of events in a few...
View ArticleCourt Orders Bush to Show Cause Why Emails Can't Be Produced
In an order issued today, the U. S. District Court for the District of Columbia directed the Executive Office of the President (EOP) to show cause why it should not be ordered to create and preserve a...
View ArticleBritain: Conservative MPs cash in on their seats
"We are not supposed to be an assembly of gentlemen who have no interests of any kind and no association of any kind. That is ridiculous. That may apply in Heaven, but not, happily, here."...
View ArticleNC voter registration and opinion poll results
Most voter registration in North Carolina ended last Friday (the exception is people who vote early beginning April 17, and who register at the polling place.) This morning the Raleigh News &...
View ArticleWithout fanfare Bush alters deterrence policy
The shadings and subtle nuances that distinguish the Clinton and Obama words on deterrence have been given a lot of attention lately, but actual Bush administration policy has escaped serious scrutiny....
View ArticleCourt Sets Deadline on Missing White House E-mail
Today, responding to the National Security Archive's motion in the pending White House e-mail lawsuit, Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola of the U.S. District Court ordered the White House to provide...
View ArticleNC Republicans give McCain 74% of vote
From the NC Board of Elections website:Mike Huckabee 12.17% 63,061 Alan Keyes 2.63% 13,631 John McCain 73.99% 383,401 Ron Paul 7.22% 37,392 No Preference 3.99% 20,667 TOTAL VOTES 518,152The...
View ArticleHelp free professor "disappeared" by Saudis
I'm normally skeptical about email chains, but this checks out. See, for example, http://www.cnn.com/... . I've edited the email (below) for readability and brevity, but not for content. The "Arab...
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How Republicans Use Hurricanes in Florida
This story has been covered already by a few blogs, but not here, and none seems to have presented the graphic shown below.Jowie Chen, a doctoral student in political science at Stanford, obtained the...
View ArticleNC: "This is history - I don't have time to be embarrassed"
I got this story from Kevin Farmer, the Chair of the Durham County Democratic Party:"There's this fantastic voter registration dynamo in Durham named Louise. I gave her 500 forms a while ago, and they...
View ArticleLisa Jackson @ EPA: A warning light is blinking
After the last eight years of the Bush administration's environmental policies, it is difficult not to feel a sense of relief over their imminent departure. But I would be a lot more optimistic if I...
View ArticleMissing emails: White House stalls to the bitter end
For years Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive have been waging a legal battle to secure the recovery, proper storage and archiving of several million...
View ArticleNuremberg war crimes prosecutor Henry King (1919-2009)
Henry King was the youngest American prosecutor at Nuremberg and a pioneer in international human rights law."Henry King is the George Washington of modern international law," said David M. Crane, a...
View ArticleMeasured: How moving polling places depresses turnout
Anecdotes and educated guesses about why election officials make an unusual number of changes in polling places before an election are widespread. What's been lacking has been a procedure for...
View ArticleMay 4, 1970: Nixon & Kissinger's Kent State phone call
Many of us at the time of Kent State wondered just how the White House saw the shootings. Given the Nixon/Agnew position that anti-war protesters were "bums," the common supposition then was that they...
View ArticleNon-citizens could vote in 13 states
American history is full of little surprises like this. Looking for information on an unrelated topic, I stumbled across this little nugget:"The period from about 1840 through about 1910 was оnе in...
View ArticleBill Koch wins Nobel Prize for Irony
“It’s sacrilegious,” Koch says. “Here is something beautiful and wonderful they are destroying for base reasons. How would you feel if some guy burnt the Mona Lisa? I feel my love has been...
View ArticleMarkets' stinging rebuke of GOP healthcare claims
We've heard a lot from Republicans about how the Affordable Care Act would be a disaster for the healthcare industry, how the medical device tax would drive companies out of the business, how the...
View ArticleTrump's immigrant talk in NC even more vitriolic
Although Donald Trump has taken a lot of heat for his June 16th comments about immigrants, only the Raleigh News & Observer noticed that his earlier remarks on this topic were even more...
View ArticleNC early voting surpasses 2012 -- for Dems more than GOP
The Raleigh News & Observer this morning reports statistics from the State Board of Elections showing that the number of early voters this year surpassed 2012’s total by 8%, rising from about...
View ArticleNC-9: NC Board of Elections refuses to certify result
In a surprising development, a closed meeting of the North Carolina Board of Elections today ended with the Board refusing to certify the election results in the 9th congressional district. In that...
View ArticleIs the SEC about to gut whistleblower protections?
The Security and Exchange Commission’s whistleblower program has recovered over $1.7 billion in sanctions from wrongdoers over the past decade, including $900 million in disgorgement of ill-gotten...
View ArticleSee voters awaken in real time
Think that people are too preoccupied with the terrible labor market to give any thought to the November election? I wondered about that, until I looked at Google Trends this afternoon. I checked...
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