When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?

Put me in the latter category. I’ve had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ever since the final stages of the 2008campaign. I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 - an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.

Conservatives denounced that report. But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.

It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having […]

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We’ve Heard All This About American Decline Before.’

This time it’s different. It’s certainly true that America has been through cycles of declinism in the past. Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy complained, ‘American strength relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and communism has been advancing steadily in every area of the world.’ Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One was published in 1979, heralding a decade of steadily rising paranoia about Japanese manufacturing techniques and trade policies.

In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive — and China is the wolf.

The Chinese challenge to the United States is more serious for both economic and demographic reasons. The Soviet Union collapsed because its economic system was highly inefficient, a fatal flaw that was disguised for a long time because the USSR never attempted to compete on world markets. China, by contrast, has proved its […]

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The magnetic north pole is currently hovering over the North Sea and moving toward Siberia. This means two Florida airports are renumbering their runways.

Odd as this connection may appear on the surface, the adjustments under way at Tampa International Airport and beginning next week at Peter O’Knight Airport are the result of a natural, ongoing process.

Earth’s magnets

The Earth has an iron core, and movement within its outer part is likely responsible for sustaining a magnetic field, which constitutes much of what we measure at the Earth’s surface. As a result, the Earth resembles something of a giant magnet with two poles: magnetic north and magnetic south. However, its field is not perfectly symmetrical and has undulations that are always moving around, according to Jeffrey Love, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geomagnetism Program.

The magnetic poles don’t line up with the geographic ones, and the difference between them is an angle called declination. As if this wasn’t enough of a nuisance for navigators, the Earth’s magnetic field drifts, causing the angle of declination to change over time.

In fact, it drifts about one-fifth of a degree a year at lower latitudes, such as Florida. ‘So that means if you wait […]

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In a November ad for their special series ‘Fox News Reporting: The Challengers for 2012,’ Fox News promised ‘unrivaled access’ to ‘the GOP’s top White House contenders.’ Such access, however, isn’t hard when correspondents just have to walk down the hall.

That Fox News helps Republicans get their message across to their conservative base — long documented and publicly acknowledged by Republican officials — is nothing new. But what’s unprecedented is the level of influence one news organization can exert on a party’s presidential primary, and the rest of the media’s coverage of that primary, by simple fact of who is on its payroll.

Fox News employs five Republicans considering runs for the GOP nomination: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and John Bolton. All five regularly appear on the network through exclusive contracts and all five have used their employment to position themselves for their respective possible runs.

Take the cases of Rick Santorum and John Bolton — two potential candidates who have so little chance of winning the nomination that Fox didn’t even include them in their twelve challenger profiles.

Both would largely be out of the public spotlight if not for their Fox News contracts, yet Santorum — […]

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A few days, or at the very least, a few hours – in an earlier era, people would have taken a breath before plunging into a remorseless debate about the political implications of an obscene act of violence.

Within minutes after a gunman’s shots-bullets that killed a federal judge, a nine-year-old girl and four others, and left a congresswoman clinging to life-activists of all stripes were busy, first on Twitter and blogs, then on cable television, chewing on two questions that once would have been indelicate to raise before the blood was dry:

Who in American politics deserves a slice of blame for the Tucson murders? And what public officials find themselves with sudden opportunities for political gain from a tragedy?

By day’s end, the argument that the political right-fueled by anti-government, and anti-immigrant passions that run especially strong in Arizona-is culpable for the Tucson massacre, even if by indirect association, seemed to be validated by the top local law enforcement official investigating the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D).

‘When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government-the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country […]

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