Opinion

As has been reported in numerous press publications, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin recently claimed on camera that the Vice President is "...in charge of the Senate" and at least implied that the position held power above and beyond any other member of the Senate. She was roundly criticized in the general news media on the grounds that Article I, Section III of the U.S. Constitution says nothing remotely like what she claimed. Many pundits have argued that her statement was just yet more ignorance on public display by Ms. Palin. But I don't think so, for while Gov. Palin may be ignorant of many things, she is not the only conservative making these arguments.

In the wake of Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Will The Next Election Be Hacked?, and this conservative leaning NewsMax article, concern for voter fraud is rampant among members of both political parties. In response to these longstanding concerns, in 2005 a bipartisan commission chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, recommended requiring that voters present a photoID to poll workers to prove citizenship prior to voting. In response to the commission's recommendation, this month the house passed a bill which would do just that. Yet the ACLU argues that photoID legislation would disenfranchise large numbers of infirm, elderly, and poor.

Questions remain: will photoID legislation actually solve the stated problem, is the social cost greater than the problem stated, and are there cheaper alternatives which could meet both goals of reduced voter fraud and increased citizen access to the polls?

Recently, United Press International, printed a New York Times story that the UN International Atomic Energy Agency had issued a report stating that inspectors had found "... highly enriched uranium ... at an Iranian facility," and that this uranium did "... not match that found on earlier samples," which they concluded had come from "...contaminated equipment from Pakistan." [UPI report used due to NY Times firewall] Due to this reporting, I argued in a DailyKos thread that the IAEA (and thus the administration) would appear to have a slam dunk case against Iran for nuclear weapons production, and not nuclear energy production as Iran claims. Yet the Washington Post reported today that IAEA inspectors disputed a recent House Committee report on Iranian nuclear capabilities, calling the committee's claim that Iran had created highly enriched uranium "outrageous and dishonest" and offering facts to dispute the House report.

So which is it: Are they or are they not enriching uranium to weapons grade?

Recently, The Guardian reported on the results of an Orange Prize for Fiction commissioned study by Professor Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins where, according to the article, they interviewed: '500 men, many of whom had some professional connection with literature, about the novels that had changed their lives.' According to Professor Jardine, who was quoted in the article: "We were completely taken aback by the results," and was paraphrased by the reporter as saying: 'that they revealed a pattern verging on a gender cliché, with women citing emotional, more domestic works, and men novels about social dislocation and solitary struggle.' An interesting result even if, in a minor discrepancy, the Orange Prize Press Release on the study states that the researchers had interviewed '... 400 men from the worlds of academia, arts, publishing and literary criticism ...' and not 500. But what do her reported results mean, if anything at all?

By now it has become common knowledge that Redstate site founder Ben Domenech, or Augustine under his pseudonym, is a plagiarist.

The son of Doug Domenech, White House liason to the Department of the Interior, he was hired in March by the Washington Post to run a new blog called Red America. He resigned in disgrace with only a few short posts published after only three days on the job. The discovery of numerous instances of plagiarism dating back from his student newspaper days at The Flat Hat, all the way through to the Post itself, included text from a P.J. O'Roark book and numerous movie and music reviews taken from sites such as Salon.com. According to editors at The Flat Hat, of 35 articles published 10 appear to contain "suspicious" similarities to other work. Further, work published in the the professoinal publication National Review shows signs of plagiarism. This behavior looks to have extended across his entire, if brief, career until his outing at the young age of 24.

Rapid international market liberalization is breaking down nationalist protectionism policies throughout the world. As a result, a divide between the higher wages and better living standards of the workforce in the industrial nations, against those in the cheaper developing third world, have given multinational business an incentive to move manufacturing offshore. Such a move requires significant shipping of raw materials to the manufacturing plants and finished goods to market. What happens if shipping costs exceed labor savings due to higher energy rates? Below the fold, this article explores that issue.