Posts by Blake de Pastino

The post-election panic on the right isn’t limited to the Republican Party’s identity crisis. As our sister site Colorado Independent has discovered, the right-wing advocacy group Focus on the Family laid off 20 percent of its staff yesterday, even after dumping more than a half-million dollars into passing California’s Proposition 8 gay-marriage ban.

When freak and unforeseen events occur, there’s always some pundit, wag, or crackpot who warned that it would happen. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, there was the issue of National Geographic magazine that warned New Orleans would be nearly wiped off the map by a tropical storm a year before the prophecy was fulfilled.

With the veepstakes heating up and Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.) still at the top of McCain’s list, our sister site Minnesota Independent takes a look at how Pawlenty stands on issues that will affect his–and McCain’s–appeal among social conservatives and evangelicals.
MNIndy

Our colleagues at Michigan Messenger have the latest update on the Center for Independent Media’s nationwide series on “fusion centers,” a little-scrutinized program to funnel info about “suspicious activity” from federal, state and local agencies into data centers around the country.
Messenger’s Alexa Stanard investigates Michigan’s two fusion centers and finds that their original purpose-counterterrorism-has become [...]

Our sister sites around the country today are continuing their collective investigation into one of the biggest secrets in American law enforcement, so-called “fusion centers,” where state, local and federal agencies collect and analyze information about potential security threats-from legitimate terror risks to activities merely deemed “suspicious.”
This morning at the Colorado Independent, Erin Rosa takes [...]

Good help may be hard to find, but when it comes to security staff for this summer’s national political conventions, it’s apparently just this side of invisible. Both host cities—Denver, the site of the Dems’ confab, and St. Paul, where the GOP will gather—are looking to neighboring communities to pony up some officers to help [...]

Critics and wags already take pleasure in scorning Sen. Barack Obama as a political rock star. Now all they need is an appropriate ’80s arena-band metaphor to make the analogy complete. As our sister site, Colorado Independent, notes, campaign officials have announced that Obama will formally accept the Democratic presidential nomination at Denver’s INVESCO Field, [...]

The two cities hosting this summer’s national party conventions — Denver and St. Paul — have surprisingly long-standing roles in the political histrionics that is the presidential nomination process, two of our sister sites note.

Today at Colorado Independent, Naomi Zeveloff observes that local historians are getting their spectacles all fogged up over the fact that [...]

All of that grunting and ligament-snapping you heard last week was the mainstream media straining to liken Iowa’s record-breaking floods to New Orleans’ devastation by Hurricane Katrina. As Iowa Independent writer Lynda Waddington points out in the Guardian this week, Iowa may seem too white and rural for the comparison to stick, but the connections [...]

Our sister site Minnesota Independent is picking up word that U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison reprimanded Sen. Barack Obama at a recent meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus, following reports that Obama volunteers removed two women in traditional Muslim headscarves from the stage at a campaign event in Michigan last week. Obama’s upbraiding by Ellison, the [...]