World’s Biggest Polluter and Plagiarizer
An under-reported news story from Summer 2008 has just come to my attention. Bush makes a joke about the USA as a polluting country at the G8 Summit? Never heard about it. Bush press materials which were insulting to Italy are excused as accidental because — it is admitted — they are the result of [...]
The Visions of Tom Friedman
My Fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of ‘Dumb as we wanna be.’– Thomas L. Friedman I highly recommend Thomas Friedman’s latest editorial for the New York Times. Thanks go to my friend Kollin Min for pointing it out to me. In this piece, Friedman argues eloquently, citing America’s comparatively run-down airports and [...]
Good News about Google Books
In a recent NY Times Op-Ed, James Gleick reports some great news about Google Book Search. Great, that is, for scholars. If you are a scholar, you should already love Google Books for the huge number of public-domain books it has archived in full text. Printed texts were formerly resistant to the modern-world’s rapid research [...]
The Real Mavericks: McCain and Palin in Defeat
Palin Tells the Truth, for Once This comes from an AP article published Denver Post (thanks Eric Smith for the reference): In an interview with the Anchorage Daily News, Palin faulted the policies of the Bush administration for the defeat of the GOP ticket, and said, “it’s amazing that we did as well as we [...]
OBAMA
I predicted the Democrats would certainly win in 2008 back in early spring, and bet a number of people $10 (I did not keep a list) that he would win. A few weeks later, way back in April, I also blogged about my reasons for thinking so. To read the signs of the times is [...]
Are "Tax Brackets" Socialist?
The answer is: NO! Idiocy reigns in the latest political season, as McCain calls Obama a “socialist. If he is, then Kennedy was, and Clinton was, and even most republicans except for Steve Forbes are all socialists. The only argument the McCainists can offer for this hare-brained assertion is that Obama supports the traditional notion [...]
what they aren’t discussing in this campaign
Why we can’t have a balanced federal budget in America Why the worst legacy of the Bush administration is the so called “culture of security” that has replaced the American culture of freedom VIRAL VIDEO HERE: Naomi Wolf’s End of America
Update: Prurient Interest in Sarah Palin
A few weeks ago, I tried to explain here in eschata that the McCain camp had chosen Palin not to appeal to the supporters of Hillary Clinton (as many presumed) but because she had an enormous potential to appeal to younger white male voters (see Pit Bull in Lipstick). The column concluded that prurient interest [...]
The Federal Debt and the Federal Budget: Some Scary Truths
Truth: The Federal Government of America is nearly 11 Trillion Dollars in Debt. Truth: The 2008 Federal budget allowed for interest payments on our national debt amounting to 21% of total spending: nearly $610 Billion. One fifth of spending! Truth: The federal budget proposed by Bush for 2008, at $2.9 Trillion dollars, allowed for only [...]