The Hollywood Liberal

Senator stockpiles seeds for doomsday
From the Department of Press Releases You Don’t Get Every Day comes this dispatch, courtesy of Sen. Benjamin Cardin’s (D-Md.) office: “Red Hot Chili Peppers Arrive in Sub-zero Arctic Seed Vault.”



Seed – Plants – Shopping – Home and Garden – Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Obama sticks with clean-energy goals
President Obama is looking again to convince voters that the billions of dollars he has pumped into embryonic clean-energy firms will build a better economy even if they generate only a modest number of jobs before the middle of the decade.


Barack Obama – United States – President – Energy – History

North Korean, U.N. officials to hold talks on sinking of South Korean warship
NORTH KOREA North Korea’s military abruptly canceled a rare meeting Tuesday with the U.S.-led United Nations Command that had been arranged to discuss the deadly sinking of a South Korean warship.


South Korea – Asia – Panmunjom – Korean War – United Nations Security Council

Kagan Hearings Were Pointless

Obama’s Phoenix Act
John Heilemann, New York Magazine
The White House and Eric Holder haven’t marched in lockstep on every controversial issue, but regarding the wisdom of razing Arizona—or, to be precise, the state’s Draconian new immigration law—there’s no daylight between them. This we learned after Holder announced the Department of Justice’s lawsuit to challenge the law, when Robert Gibbs affirmed at his daily briefing that his boss stood foursquare behind the suit. “The president believes that we filed a strong case based on the fact that you can’t have…

Big Oil’s Good Deal

Why Obama Disappoints the Left
Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast
“Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment,” writes Eric Alterman in a mammoth new essay about the constraints that supposedly make a progressive presidency impossible. Well, count me among the few. A law guaranteeing near-universal health coverage is more than merely “significant;” it’s the fulfillment of a century-long progressive dream. And the Obama stimulus bill lavishes more money on liberal priorities than anyone dreamed…

Giving Power Back to the People
David Cameron and Nick Clegg, Telegraph
When we formed our Coalition just nine weeks ago, we did so because we shared a view that our country needed strong and stable government to steer it through a time of enormous difficulty. With the largest peacetime deficit in our history, the inevitable short-termism of an unstable minority government wouldn't have been good enough. So we put aside our differences to work together in the national interest, and have set to work tackling Britain's debt.But, for both of us, sorting out the public finances is a responsibility, not a passion. We didn't come into politics just to…