Harry's Place

The Hill reports:
Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is launching a foreign policy institute focused on undercutting U.S. interventionism.
“The neo-conservative era is dead,” proclaims the media advisory on his Facebook page announcing the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
“The ill-advised policies pushed by the neo-cons have everywhere led to chaos and destruction, and to a [...]

Steve Stockman is challenging Louie Gohmert for the title of Most Cringe-Inducing Republican Member of Congress from Texas (there’s quite a lot of competition).
Our campaign bumper sticker: If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted. stockman2014.com #gosnell #tcot twitter.com/ReElectStockma…
— Rep. Steve Stockman (@ReElectStockman) April 12, 2013

Now if only he had found a way to work [...]

After being repeatedly assured by Fox News that President Obama is a dedicated socialist, it came as a shock to me to read a report by the Knoxville, Tennessee, News-Sentinel:
In the 2014 budget submitted to Congress, the [Obama] administration says it “intends to undertake a strategic review of options for addressing [the Tennessee Valley Authority’s] [...]

After Latino voters overwhelmingly chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, Republicans have been trying really, really hard to find ways of convincing them that the GOP is their true home– thirty-three long years after Ronald Reagan famously said: “Latinos are Republican. They just don’t know it yet.”
This won’t help:
Rep. Don Young [...]

With the Supreme Court holding a second day of hearings on the question of same-sex marriage, it’s interesting to note the astonishingly fast change of public opinion in the US on the issue.
Even Fox News’s conservative curmudgeon Bill O’Reilly conceded: “The compelling argument is on the side of homosexuals.”
Ohio’s Republican Senator Rob Portman recently [...]

Sounding (and dressing) like a goddamn hippie, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky told this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington that the feds need to chill out.
“The GOP of old has grown stale and moss covered. I don’t think we need to name any names, do we?”
“The new GOP will need to embrace [...]

That this earnest, wonky, far-from-radical video on wealth and income inequality in the US has been viewed more than four million times perhaps tells us something about the current political zeitgeist.

It seems Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu had something to do with the video’s popularity. Krissy Clark of the public radio program Marketplace reports:
Someone by the [...]

Guest post by Andrew Murphy
Looks like the dreams of the anarcho-libertarians are coming true in New Jersey. Because of budget cuts in cash-strapped cities (the state has lost over 4,000 police officers since 2008), citizens are turning to private detectives to solve robberies, murders and rapes.
The privatization of the judicial system is now in [...]

Some statistics point to encouraging trends toward greater personal responsibility among American teenagers in recent years.
(Does anyone know if there are similar trends in the UK and other countries?)
So who gets the credit?

And speaking of farmers:
Remember Shirley Sherrod, the black former US Department of Agriculture employee who was defamed by the late Andrew Breitbart?
Sherrod was ousted from her job as a Georgia rural development official [in 2010] after Breitbart posted an edited video of her making supposedly making racist remarks…
The video on Andrew Breitbart’s website turned out [...]