I recently wrote my Senator, Harry Reid, a letter about a generic drug hijacking that has affected me personally, and has likely affected many of the over 5 million Americans who suffer from gout. The underlying issue is one that should concern everyone regardless of their current health status. Rather than write a separate blog entry [...]
I hate to agree with the Right Wing about anything, but I think they are right that it’s time to defund PBS and NPR.
I know. It’s heresy.
Back before the age of “reality” shows, Fox News and staged wrestling, television was a serious cultural medium with the courage to present real news and to reflect on our fears and anxieties through drama in an intelligent, non-vitriolic way. An especially memorable episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone from that era, imagined the [...]
Not 24 hours after Obama and Congressional leaders had their Kumbaya meeting at the White House, Senate Republicans released their letter to Harry Reid pledging scorched earth obstructionism unless and until the Bush Tax Cuts are extended. The Democrats seem poised to cave. I say, Let Them Eat Taxes. Need to “compromise” (the new-age word [...]
It is a tautology – in both the logical and rhetorical senses – that election results are a Rorschach Test. The blowback from this election has been no exception. The Rorschach Test, of course, is an infamous and somewhat debatable psychological test based on perceptions of standardized inkblots. It is useful, however, as a metaphor [...]
Dear Mr. President, I watched your speech Friday at the USC rally. [For excellent ground-level accounts of the rally, see R Paine's My Take and the Karoli's Blog.] My first thought: “Who are you and what have you done with our President?” Then I remembered — Oh yeah, that’s the guy I told my neighbors about. [...]
Name a President of the United States who, at the time of election Was unfamiliar with the constitutional duties of the Vice President; Did not know the name and function of Justice Department; and Whose only prior full term government experience was as a small town mayor? Hmmm. Let me think. Ulysses S. Grant? Nah [...]
Only in America would an annual occasion for family gathering and giving of thanks for our bounty – Thanksgiving Day – be followed by an annual rite of economic gluttony and lost values – Black Friday. You would think a day of reflection deserves a bit more of a breather before people descend on stores [...]
The Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University’s Medill School is small scale compared to the efforts of the ACLU and some of the other state innocence projects that struggle to identify and free wrongly convicted inmates. But Professor David Protess’s undergraduate project has been successful, securing the release of 11 inmates since 1999, 5 of them on [...]
This is the second of a two part post. Part I can be read here. Out of the post-Vietnam ashes of liberal idealism born in the Great Depression came the conservative revolution that has held sway for the last 30 years or so. With it has come the worship of individual wealth and freedom from [...]
