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The Abomination of Gun Violence
View toward downtown San Bernardino, where Wednesday's mass shooting took place, from the hills on the north of town James FallowsThree years ago, after that week’s American gun massacre (the one at a...
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After the Massacre in San Bernardino
I have done a post, in our Politics channel rather than here in Notes, on today’s murders in San Bernardino, a place I know well. The post is here. I will be off line until sometime tomorrow but will...
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Obama the Analyst
Pool Photographer / ReutersSunday evening’s speech about terrorism distilled what people like, and don’t, about President Obama’s leadership style. I liked the logic he laid out and the realities he...
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Does a Chickenhawk Nation Invite Terrorism?
Predator drone, first line of defense (Wikipedia)After President Obama’s speech on ISIS last night, I argued that he was make the least-bad sane, shrewd case about a long-term U.S. strategy,...
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Obama ‘Needs to Stop Sounding Like Dad’
Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross in Family Ties (Wikipedia). Readers argue that a president cannot let himself sound like a sitcom dad.After President Obama’s anti-ISIS speech, I said that I agreed...
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Technology Can't Solve Every Problem, but It Sure Helps With This One...
The Stihl BGA 100 cordless blower quietly but effectively deployed in Washington yesterday (Deborah Fallows) In this space I’ve been reporting developments in local D.C. citizen-action efforts to phase...
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Articles on Fear, Concern, and our Current Predicament
I found these two articles worth reading, about the current political mood.1) “Inside the GOP: Report on focus groups with Evangelical, Tea Party, and moderate Republicans.” This report in PDF, from...
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Obama: Chessmaster, not Pawn
International figures including Christiana Figueres, Ban Ki-moon, and Francois Hollande celebrate after the deal was announced in Paris Stephane Mahe / ReutersFour years ago at this time, I was in the...
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Obama's Leadership Tone: Chessmaster, Pawn, or Something Else Altogether?
Our March, 2012 coverThrough the past ten days in this space, I’ve had several items on the style and logic of President Obama’s leadership style. First, one on the ISIS speech, which I found very...
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CNN Shares Responsibility for the Fear-Mania of the GOP Debate
Carson, Trump, and Cruz synchronize their watches before the Tuesday night debate. (Mike Blake / Reuters) Let’s start with the First Rule of Terrorism, which this era’s attackers either know...
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Obama ‘Needs to Stop Sounding Like Dad’
Meredith Baxter and Michael Gross in Family Ties (Wikipedia)After President Obama’s anti-ISIS speech, I said that I agreed with his strategy and its underlying logic, but could understand why it might...
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We Should Go Fight a War. And by ‘We’ I Mean ‘You.’
Harvard Institute of Politics GFK-Knowledge Panel survey, as reported on NPR. In case you missed it when it appeared last week, let me highlight this graph, created by Katie Park of NPR from data...
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The Future of Leafblowers: The Guardian Weighs In
Dr. Bertram Kandziora, executive board chairman of Stihl, unveiling the surprisingly quiet and gasoline-emission-free Stilh BGA 100 blower Stihl corporationThe surprisingly quiet and...
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Why Can't a Modern President Say, ‘The Only Thing We Have to Fear ... ’?
In 1933 the newly inaugurated FDR said, Fear is the enemy. Today’s politicians have a harder time getting that message across. (Wikipedia)A week ago at this time I was still typing up notes from a...
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Obama Doesn't Watch TV News. Good.
A shot of an apparently rare moment in the president’s day. (White House photo)In the previous note I mentioned a strange little controversy over President Obama's comment, in a supposedly...
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How Politicians Deal With TV News, from Obama to Cheney to LBJ
Memo from Vice President Cheney’s advance team, requiring that rooms where he stayed must have “All Televisions tuned to FOX News.” As reported in 2006 by The Smoking Gun, and to the best of my...
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America's Festival of Beer, North Texas Edition
A sampling of North Texas’s finest, shown on a doorstep in Dallas today.When my wife and I lived in Austin long ago, while she was a UT graduate student and I was working for the then-new Texas Monthly...
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If You Didn't See Obama’s Gun Violence Statement Live, You Should Watch It Here
Below you see the YouTube version of the official White House feed from earlier today. I’ve set it to begin around time 36:40, when relatives of gun victims come on stage. A father of one of the...
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MPR Interview on Chessmaster v. Pawn
Yesterday morning I had an interesting (from my POV) talk with Kerri Miller of Minnesota Public Radio, on the by-definition impossible task of assessing how the Obama administration’s record will be...
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Tech Tips for the New Year: CloudMagic, Workflowy, ‘Low Light’ Filter on iPad
Tips on three things I have found useful and wanted to pass along.1. Le roi est mort. Vive le roi. Mailbox gives way to Cloud Magic.Mailbox death notice, from its blog last monthThe moribund king in...
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