A conversation between East Portland Blog and Lawrence Spaulding: EPB: Are you still running? LS: Yeah, I have a hamstring strain and I am not training for anything, but I still run ten miles or less. EPB: But you did run marathons at some point? LS: Yeah, but like I said I am not training …
Ok, first thing, I am not too embarrassed to admit I really did not think Mitt would choose Paul. Everything thing about Romney’s style and campaign has led me to view him as a cautious, careful politician. One who tries little new, but wants to perfect the doing of what has been done before. Thus …
Did you ever have a friend who gave up some habit that had gone bad, and then began preaching to everyone else they should do the same? Maybe she gave up eating meat or drinking coffee, or maybe he stopped going to church—or started. Now that they have changed their practice they have become evangelical: …
I was recently asked, “Did the Iraq War foment the Arab spring? Is this even a legitimate question?” To which I responded: Yes, absolutely a legitimate question. Although I would do the professory thing and say, well, do you mean it was the sole and exclusive catalyst/cause? or it was a factor? Maybe because my …
…even if he wins the Iowa caucuses or comes in second, or third. And Ron Paul won’t be the next president if he wins either. Really. The importance of Iowa is not that it picks the winner, just ask President Pat Robertson or President Mike Huckabee, instead it helps identify the losers (or more gently …
http://youtu.be/qAkubiZhly4 “To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest …
Here we go again. Cue: The left commentariet decrying the sell-out Democratic President and Congress for negotiating and supporting legislation that no good progressive would get near. Cue: The right commentariet bewails the Republican Congressional leadership for giving in to Pres Obama, the Keyser Soze of American politics. It is probably of little value to …
First off, I think this issue of the debt ceiling has revealed again and maybe more starkly than others a severely bad habit of the press to need to understand their role as non-partisan as always necessitating their taking the view that both sides of the debate are equally valid or equally a cause of …
I feel like I am in a time warp. Back in the tail end of 2010, President Obama and the Republicans negotiated a deal that preserved some tax cuts and some social programs, and the progressives and the left couldn’t stop crying. Months later the sky as not fallen, but a new deal has been …
The waiting and uncertainty are over. I know you were concerned. Would he or wouldn’t he? Would he make the easy choice “to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: ‘Sit down and shut up,’ but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out”… and thus choose to …
We Are Wisconsin from Finn Ryan on Vimeo. . An idealistic new executive gets elected along with majorities in both legislative houses. He sets about pursuing a pungently ideological agenda that he says the voters sent him to do. The minority party says, “Whoa, don’t over read a rejection of the status quo with a …
I continue to choose not to speculate about the motives (or lack thereof ) or sanity (or lack thereof) of Jared Loughner. And I sadly wish I had been wrong in my speculation about the reactions of right and left to the cruel violence inflicted by Loughner and its sad aftermath. That there are those …
Clearly Nebulous avers “They keep talking about “all the rhetoric” — but they never cite a single specific example.” I appreciate the anxiety and in my original post I had hoped to avoid exactly the tit-for-tat left right citations and actually suggest that it is much more complicated. But since CN seems honestly unsure here, …
On Saturday January a gunman in Tucson Arizona shot and critically wounded US Representative Gabrielle Gifford and killed US Federal District Court Judge John M. Roll, and he also killed five others and wounded another 15. This news interrupted my Saturday afternoon, otherwise filled with the improbable Seahawk’s victory over the Saints, in the way …
Oh, what a little fantasy it is to imagine that all one’s thoughts were or even could be one’s own. Credit (and blame) would be uniquely ours, whether the witty bon mot or the crude faux pas. But what we add to most conversations is almost never a wholly new product, rather some collection of …
The politics of that last few years have had their particular rancor and tone not because of Pres Obama or Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid, but because of a political party gone off the rails, leaving the Democratic party to be its own loyal opposition since the Republicans have ceded the field. Leaving me with …
So much gets presented as a challenge to President Obama, but his leadership style really asks more of his base and the American people: patience, a sense of history, an understanding of the modest limits of politics and our governing institutions. Obama seems to have these—do we? – Lawrence Spaulding Now, doesn’t that feel better? …
. Please, please, please tell me that you are not ready to be co-opted by the naive and even dangerous view that is being adopted by too many already that the tax cuts/unemployment benefits deal that Pres. Obama just worked out with Republican leaders is somehow a bad deal, that he got rolled, or that …