For your Memorial Day weekend reading pleasure, enjoy these select stories on the religious right, marijuana, immigration and oil drilling from the previous week: Dobson: Pro-Abortion Rudy Has No Remorse
For those keeping track of the official James Dobson presidential tally, John – and now Rudy – are out, and likely so is Fred “Not Christian Enough” Thomspon.
That leaves only seven – or will Newt Gingrich make it eight? – left.
Giuliani is the latest presidential candidate to get thrown under the bus by James Dobson, the chairman of Focus on the Family. This week, in a column published online at World Net Daily, the influential don of GOP politics said he cannot and will not vote for Giuliani, whom Dobson termed “an unapologetic supporter of abortion on demand.”
“It is an irrevocable decision,” Dobson wrote.
Read more…
The Next Best Thing
When Denver voters abruptly passed an initiative to legalize marijuana in 2005, city officials were quick to assure residents and members of the media that the drug would not be sanctioned, and that state law would be summoned to convict any individual found in violation.
Fast forward two years. Amid a rise in marijuana arrests and a unsympathetic City Council, legalization proponents have decided to work for the next best thing: a ballot proposal to make possession the lowest enforcement priority.
This time backers are determined to bulk up their previous victory, despite changes in the way Denver approves ballot measures.
More after the jump…
When Does an Expat Become an Immigrant?
As Congress considers the comprehensive immigration reform plan introduced last week, it is helpful to remember that the United States is not the only country that is dealing with the related issues of an aging population with a declining birthrate on the one hand, and on the other a large number of foreign-born people who want to enter to the country to work, with varying degrees of commitment to staying. I’ve paid special attention to the way Japan has approached these issues, because a friend who went to high school with me in Littleton is now a permanent legal resident of that country. He is part of a trend, because Japan, which has traditionally been far more hostile to immigrants than has the United States, has found itself needing to become more open to allowing migrants to live in the country.
Continue reading…
BLM Mainlining Oil Shale Development
No oil company has yet invented a commercially viable way to extract oil from oil shale. Not ExxonMobil, not Shell Frontier, not Chevron USA.
Sure, there are several experiments that look promising, especially Shell’s in-situ process (simply, heating the shale rock underground so that the oil seeps up to the surface,) but it could still take decades to make oil shale a feasible enterprise and a temporary answer to our petroleum shortages. Yet, the Bureau of Land Management has given the governors of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado and affected city and county officials only a couple of weeks to digest and respond to the BLM’s seven-volume, 2,000 page draft environmental impact statement for oil shale development.
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