Author Archive | Jim Lindgren

Last night the Philadelphia Flyers finished off the top-seeded Montreal Canadiens. I’m still in shock they did it — let alone in five games. If the Pittsburgh Penguins can beat the New York Rangers today, we’ll have an all Pennsylvania playoff in the Eastern Conference finals.

The chorus of voices calling on Ohio AG Marc Dann to resign is getting louder. Today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer: By his own actions and by those of the people he trusted the most, Dann has turned the attorney general’s office into a laughingstock. He has embarrassed the good people who work there. He has embarrassed […]

Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann has only been in office 16 months, and he’s already engulfed in scandal. Some Republicans are even talking about impeachment. But his political opponents are not the only ones up in arms. Dann’s fellow Democrats (and Democratic-leaning bloggers) are also upset. On Friday, four staffers from Dann’s office quit or […]

Is California exercising energy policy leadership that other states (and nations) should follow? The Manhattan Institute’s Max Schulz doesn’t think so. the state’s energy leadership is a mirage. Decades of environmental policies have made it heavily dependent on other states for power; generated crippling costs; and left the state vulnerable to periodic electricity shortages. Its […]

With rising food prices and increased awareness of the environmental costs of corn-based ethanol, it should only be a matter of time before politicians reconsider their support for ethanol mandates, right? Perhaps this is starting to happen. The WSJ reports that two dozen Republican Senators, including John McCain, are asking the Environmental Protection Agency to […]

The LA Times has an interesting story on a Cal State Fullerton instructor, Wendy Gonaver, who was fired for refusing to sign the state’s loyalty oath. the day before class was scheduled to begin, her appointment as a lecturer abruptly ended over just the kind of issue that might have figured in her course. She […]

The WSJ reports that anti-evolution forces have adopted a new stealth strategy to undermine the teaching of evolution in public school science classes: “academic freedom.” The story reports on “academic freedom” legislation that would protect high school science teachers who challenge evolutionary theory in their classes. The academic-freedom bills now in circulation vary in detail. […]

Reuters reports that relatives of a former Guantanamo detainee claim he became a suicide bomber in Iraq. What does this prove? Nothing really, but I’m sure partisans in the debate over Guantanamo and the treatment and detention of alleged enemy combatants will see this as evidence that confirms their respective points of view. On the […]

The School Law Blog reports that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has granted rehearing en banc in Pontiac City School District v. Spellings. In January, a divided three-judge panel reversed a federal district court’s dismissal of a school district’s Spending Clause challnge to portions of the “No Child Left Behind” Act. […]

A Rasmussen tracking poll on Monday in North Carolina found Obama had a 14% lead over Clinton. A Tuesday NC poll by Insider Advantage found a 2% lead for Clinton. Despite all that has happened this week, I doubt that both of these polls are right. But things are probably quite fluid in NC. Given […]

Ann Althouse has an excellent post parsing what Barack Obama was — and was not — saying yesterday. As I indicated yesterday, Wright’s betrayal of Obama is a big part of it.

By one of the two main ways of determining a recession, we were NOT in a recession in the Jan-March quarter: The bruised economy limped through the first quarter, growing at just a 0.6 percent pace as housing and credit problems forced people and businesses alike to hunker down. The country’s economic growth during January […]

I was struck by Barack Obama’s blaming the press for identifying Reverend Wright as his spiritual mentor or spiritual adviser: OBAMA: I know that one thing that [Wright] said was true, was that he wasn’t — you know, he was never my, quote-unquote, “spiritual adviser.” He was never my “spiritual mentor.” He was — he […]

In a magazine called “The Progressive,” Ruth Conniff writes this anti-progressive article in defense of Rev. Wright: Watching Jeremiah Wright’s speech to the National Press Club Monday morning was both cathartic and alarming. Cathartic because, after weeks of the endlessly repeated soundbites from his controversial sermons, which have been used to tar his former parishioner […]

Today, Barack Obama vigorously denounced the words of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and said that his relationship with Wright had changed, but stopped short of explicitly disowning him. So how is this any different than the last time, his speech in Philadelphia? This time Obama seems actually to mean his denunciations: SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: . . […]