Home > Jay Bookman > Archives > 2008 > December > 30
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Blagojevich a one-man carnival
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, never a shy one, has gone ahead and appointed former state Attorney General Roland Burris to replace Barack Obama in the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had already promised to bar any Blagojevich appointee from taking a seat in the Senate, using the Senate’s rarely used power to control its own membership. But there are questions as to how and whether that power can be put into play.
“Don’t allow allegations against me to taint this good and honest man,” said Blagojevich, who’s not exactly a compelling character witness. (If you notice, he also sounds an awful lot like Regis Philbin, which is another strike against him.) And while Burris apparently does have a decent reputation in Illinois, his willingness to accept the appointment from Blagojevich calls his judgment and integrity into serious question.
Oh, and then there’s the race card thing. Burris is black, and supporters such as U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush are suggesting that barring Burris from joining the Senate as its only black member would be like lynching him.
Now THAT’S old school.
Permalink | Comments (78) | Post your comment |
Time for a Cuba Libre!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Berlin Wall came down almost 20 years ago. The Cold War is long over, and the Soviet Union sits on history’s ashpile. Yet U.S. policy toward Cuba has remained frozen in time, a fact that has made it easier for Fidel Castro and his followers to maintain their tight grip on the island and its people.
Can we finally change that policy? Why yes we can.
WASHINGTON - Five decades after Fidel Castro toppled a U.S.-backed dictator to take power in Cuba, the Cold War rivalry with Washington could be thawing as President-elect Barack Obama looks to ease sanctions against the communist-run island.
Obama has made clear he favors relaxing restrictions on family travel and cash remittances by Cuban Americans to Cuba, which this week marks the 50th anniversary of Castro’s revolution.
Obama could also reverse other steps taken by outgoing President George W. Bush to tighten sanctions on Cuba, such as the prepayment of food imports from the United States, and he is expected to restore migration talks broken off by Bush.
Experts on Cuba believe modest changes in policy will come quickly, but stop short of lifting the trade embargo first imposed in 1962 or allowing all Americans to travel to the island 90 miles off the coast of Florida…..
“The potential for change is more real than ever,” said Katrin Hansing, associate director at the Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute.
An FIU poll conducted in November showed that 55 percent of Cuban Americans in Miami, an anti-Castro bastion that has long backed a hard-line U.S. stance on Cuba, now favor lifting the 46-year-old trade embargo.
Cuba watchers agree the embargo has failed to bring about political change in Cuba, like earlier CIA efforts to assassinate or overthrow Fidel Castro, who retired in February due to illness but still wields power behind the scenes.
Permalink | Comments (111) | Post your comment |
‘Abstinence only’ is a total crock
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The right has long pushed abstinence-only programs as an alternative to sex education, and the Bush administration has funded those programs to the tune of roughly a billion dollars. Yet repeated studies have found the programs just don’t work.
How has the administration responded to that data? With one federally funded study, it simply refused to release the report.
They would rather push what ought to work rather than what does work. They would rather design a program that makes themselves feel better than a data-driven program that actually cuts down on teen pregnancy and teen abortion. There’s something amoral about preserving programs that you know don’t work just to satisfy a political constituency, especially when the failure is measured in damaged teenaged lives.
Here’s the latest study to confirm what previous studies found, reported in the Washington Post:
“Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.
The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a “virginity pledge,” but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.
“Taking a pledge doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior,” said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. “But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking.”
The study is the latest in a series that have raised questions about programs that focus on encouraging abstinence until marriage, including those that specifically ask students to publicly declare their intention to remain virgins. The new analysis, however, goes beyond earlier analyses by focusing on teens who had similar values about sex and other issues before they took a virginity pledge.”
.JPG)
-1.JPG)
Services »
