Media outrage over abortion provider George Tiller’s murder in Wichita, Kansas has led to charges that the crime should be considered domestic terrorism, and that Scott Roeder should be punished accordingly. Arguments have ranged from Cenk Uygur’s sarcastic call in The Huffington Post for Roeder to be waterboarded to Joe Conason’s serious consideration for Truthdig of the government’s responsibility to guard us from extremists. Conason writes:

Although an overwhelming majority of abortion opponents bear no responsibility for the doctor’s murder and should feel free to exercise their constitutional freedoms to the fullest extent, there is a violent fringe on the far right that has earned the designation of terrorist. And the federal government is responsible for ensuring our safety from those menacing forces.

But, will the feds go so far as to call Tiller’s murder terrorism? Lindsay Beyerstein at Huff-Po thinks not. Beyerstein reports that although the Justice Department will investigate whether Roeder violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, to classify the crime as terrorism would exceed the feds’ capabilities.

“That designation would unleash vast federal powers to investigate large swathes of the radical anti-choice movement,” Beyerstein writes. “The feds are simply not prepared for the political fallout that would ensue if, say, Operation Rescue were officially designated as a terrorist organization.”

Regardless of the legal outcome, Tracy Clark-Flory over at Salon.com claims that the recent decision to close Tiller’s clinic proves that, in this country at least, terrorism works.

Sources: Washington Post, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, Truthdig

Image by pdeonarain, licensed under Creative Commons

Hypotheticals are flying about judge Sonya Sotomayor, Barack Obama’s recent nomination for Supreme Court Justice. Media Matters wonders, what if she were a man? Would newspapers still question her “temperament”? Eric Boehlert wonders, “Would the NYT ever dream of typing up a straight news article about whether the judge was too bossy on the bench?” He thinks not.

The American Spectator questions: “What if Sotomayor were white?” Writer Andrew Cline postulates that more than half of the praise for Sotomayor stems from her race, gender, and socioeconomic background. “Most of the praise of Sotomayor is being dished out by commentators who seem ignorant of her record,” Cline writes, “but acutely aware that she is a Hispanic woman who grew up in a housing project.”

In the same vein, conservative radio host Bill Bennett recently went beyond speculation and straight into unfounded rumors, according to a transcript provided by Think Progress. Speaking with Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, Bennett said:

BENNETT: Did [Sotomayor] get into Princeton on affirmative action, one wonders.

BARNES: One wonders.

BENNETT: Summa Cum Laude, I don’t think you get on affirmative action. I don’t know what her major was, but Summa Cum Laude’s a pretty big deal.

BARNES: I guess it is, but you know, there’s some schools and maybe Princeton’s not one of them, where if you don’t get Summa Cum Laude then or some kind of Cum Laude, you then, you’re a D+ student.

In response, Salon.com threw out a hypothetical of their own, saying “if Sotomayor were a white man nominated by a Republican, he and Bennett would never have had that conversation.”

Source:  Media Matters ,  American Spectator ,  Think Progress ,  Salon.com  

Before Barack Obama won the 2008 election, pundits and politicos were already planning his first 100 days in office. Since then, the situation in the United States has gotten worse and the urgent calls for reform have gotten louder. 

“No president in recent memory has come into office with so many and such varied crises to deal with,” John D. Donahue and Max Stier wrote for the Washington Monthly. Obama’s agenda includes, but is not limited to, averting a global recession, ending the war in Iraq, stabilizing Afghanistan, closing Guantanamo Bay, and “passing and (the hard part) implementing universal health care,” Donahue and Stier report. 

After a campaign based on such amorphous themes as “hope” and “change,” some expect the myriad problems to evaporate as soon as the new president takes office. “I think that we've replaced the housing bubble in the United States with an Obama bubble,” Steve Clemons, a senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation told Salon.com. Clemons and others are calling for quick, decisive action on foreign policy and other initiatives. According to Clemons, “He's got a very short window to make the Obama bubble mean something before it explodes.”

A huge challenge for the incoming administration is deciding which issues should be dealt with first. Shirley Ann Jackson, writing for the Scientific American, has joined a multitude of scientists and environmentalists calling energy security, “the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity of our time.” In his first 100 days in office, Jackson wants Obama to update the national power grid, create a $200-billion “clean energy” bank for investment in sustainable energies, and “triple the currently paltry federal investment in basic and applied energy research and development.”

Though energy reform and foreign policy may garner big headlines, the most important tasks of the new administration may be the most mundane. Donahue and Stier report for the Washington Monthly that Obama should focus on fixing the federal bureaucracy, before moving on to bigger ticket items. “To put it bluntly” Donahue and Stier write, “even with brilliant policy ideas and flawless political instincts, Barack Obama’s administration is likely to fail if it doesn’t reverse the erosion in federal capacity.”

The disastrous example of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) during Hurricane Katrina has shown what can go wrong when a federal agency is dysfunctional, and Donahue and Stier report that many important federal offices have fallen into disrepair. Donahue and Stier provide an urgent call to reform Medicare and Medicaid, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Defense Contract Management Agency, the Defense Nuclear Detection Office, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and especially FEMA, now under the Department of Homeland Security.

Most people realize that Obama’s promised “change” won’t come overnight, and that’s not a bad thing, according to Mark Schmitt writing for the American Prospect. Many politicos and pundits urged Obama to hit the panic button at various points throughout the 2008 election, but the candidate won with “a long, patient strategy of assembling a majority of delegates, one at a time, in friendly and unfriendly states alike.” Schmitt writes that the President-elect will need to use that same patient style to truly turn the country around in 2009.

 Image by  Ragesoss , licensed under Creative Commons.

Wedding cake, birthday cake, “let them eat cake.” Cake is classy, elegant, and above all, traditional. But what about its oft-ignored dessert cousin, the pie? Salon.com writer Vincent Rossmeier argues that pie is in fact superior to cake; it is “the perfect dessert.”

“Pie is moist where cake is too often arid; it’s complex where cake is too often banal,”  he writes.“Pie offers me lasting contentment, whereas all cake can tender is a cloying sugar rush. In a subtle, supple flake of pie crust there is more of heaven than in all the world’s slabs of cake combined.”

It’s a tough call to make. Who wouldn’t enjoy an airy slice of coconut cream cake? Who could say no to a perfectly spicy carrot cake with sweet cream-cheese frosting? Then again, Rossmeier has history on his side. Pie stretches back to medieval and even Egyptian times, when it was considered food as well as decoration (releasing live birds out of baked goods was popular, apparently). The English brought pie over to the colonies, where it became the go-to dessert, served with nearly every meal.

It’s no secret that dessert carries a hefty cultural caché—when’s the last time a parent sent their naughty child to bed without the salad course? In pie, Rossmeier sees the means to suffuse that most revered of courses with deep social identity. "In America, pie is as regionalized as dialects, serving as a landmark of place and history,” he writes.

(Rossmeier is preparing for his wedding, and reveals that instead of cake, he and his beloved will be serving wedding pie. His soon-to-be wife is totally fine with that.)

Image by thebittenword.com, licensed under Creative Commons.

During a speech in Pittsburgh last week, Salon.com reports that Sarah Palin took another swing at earmarked spending, giving a specific wink towards "fruit fly research in Paris, France!"

Palin was referring to money secured by California congressman Mike Thompson for the study of the olive fruit fly, according to Salon. The Alaska Governor opted not to tell the audience that the flies have been infesting olive groves for decades in Mediterranean climates (hence research in France) and more recently have started affecting crops in California. Thompson was adamant about his decision to fund studies of the pest, which he called "the single largest threat to the U.S. olive and olive oil industries.”

Palin may attack the program as frivolous, but fruit fly testing has proven indispensable in genetic research (it was through fruit flies that we discovered how chromosomes determine sex, for example), and it’s also helped scientists better understand autism, an issue in which Palin has repeatedly shown interest.

It's also worth noting that just a few months ago, Palin herself had pushed for earmarked money to study, among other things, the mating habits of crabs. That study seems less ridiculous when revealed that the money would be used to research "Bering Sea crab productivity and sustainability as necessary to restore crab stocks."

Attacking fruit fly and crab studies could make for a cheap political point in front of audiences, but a little more information shows that kind of research deserves respect.

Image courtesy of  shioshvili , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Serious cash is changing hands amid the pomp and pageantry of the party conventions. Convention halls and party space, balloons and fireworks, free food and gift bags all cost money and lots of it. Campaign finance laws have tried to close loopholes in the electoral system, but according to a report from the nonprofit group Public Citizen (pdf), “[c]orporations and their lobbyists see the national nominating conventions as ideal opportunities to buy access and influence with the presidential campaigns, lawmakers, and party leaders.”

Corporations contribute millions of dollars in “soft money” to both parties by donating to each convention’s host committees. In 2004, Public Citizen reports that private donors gave $57 million to the Democratic convention and $86 million to the Republican convention. “As of August 2008,” Public Citizen reports, “173 organizational donors to the host committees have been identified, and all but two are corporations.” This year, the International Herald Tribune estimates that private donors will give some $112 million to the conventions.

Each host committee offers donor circles for corporations to buy into, ranging from $50,000 to $5 million, with perks associated with each level. Donors who give $1 million to the 2008 RNC host committee—a group that includes US Bank, Xcel, and Medtronic—are promised a private reception with Minnesota politicians Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Sen. Norm Coleman, and the mayors of St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Bloomington.

Influence is also bought by hosting exclusive parties and receptions for politicians. One example is AT&T’s celebration for conservative “Blue Dog” democrats, which according to Public Citizen, “appears to violate the letter of the ethics rules.” Salon.com reporter Glenn Greenwald showed up outside the party and was quickly ushered away by the police. Greenwald writes: “Amazingly, not a single one of the 25-30 people we tried to interview would speak to us about who they were, how they got invited, what the party's purpose was, why they were attending, etc.” A video of Greenwald’s efforts is posted below.

Trying to curb the moneyed influence of the conventions, new laws have created confusing inconsistencies in 2008. At the highly publicized Kanye West show during the Democratic National Convention, the Sunlight Foundation’s Political Party Time Blog reports that House members were forced to pay a $90 entry fee. Senate members, who weren’t bound by the same ethics laws, got in for free. Reporters from Sunlight Foundation, predictably, were denied access all together.

Image by Steve Bott, licensed under Creative Commons.