Whenever the culture warriors give it a rest they toss a few scraps in the direction of fiscal restraint, not that they practice any. But now we’ll see just how connected they are to their words.
Town after town in many states is raising its tax rate to foot its budget instead of making the sacrifices [...]
Do you have that queasy feeling that when we’re showered with blather about something like bailing out Detroit the real story is running beneath our feet like a vast underground river?
The Democrats say that with 240,000 jobs jobs at stake and God knows how many ancillary jobs we can’t afford not to bail out Dopey, [...]
They’re not like us. So, who’s us?
They‘re not like us, they don’t look like us.
Those are the operative political and cultural code words in America. Why else would the government look as if it had been exported from Northern Europe while the rest of us look like our army? Why else would a nation that [...]
Albert Einstein (inset) offered an intriguing definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
If that definition is credible, we need more shrinks in Washington and way fewer lobbyists and politicians. For example, once Gen. William C. Westmoreland decided against counterinsurgency in favor of all-out war in Vietnam Einstein’s [...]
Is the nature of airwave journalism contributing to the polarization of American culture? I think so.
Many Americans, young and old, are abandoning television and radio journalism to turn to the Internet for information, rendering airwave journalism a dinosaur.
I look at this situation as a poet and journalist. What I see are formats in which people [...]
Neither as a journalist or plain citizen did I think I would live to see the day when a television news anchor and a correspondent suggested that Americans suck up to their bosses to keep their jobs. But that’s exactly what anchor Betty Nguyen and personal finance editor Gerri Willis were talking about this morning [...]
Read More...Some people are holding parties. Some are learning what it’s like to walk on air. Some are gagging on their anger. But whether jubilation or fulmination is your dish of tea, I have something in mind that perhaps we might all celebrate: The New York Times on its op-ed page the day after our momentous [...]
Read More...The world is a different place this morning. The world’s most durable democracy has elected an African-American as its president. Let those European nations so quick to disparage America ask themselves if they’re ready to match this act of political maturity. Is France, for example, ready to make a Franco-Algerian its head of state?
But the [...]
While we play factual ping pong with the debate about Internet publishing its most profound issue, cultural gatekeeping, keeps getting lost.
There is a story about Kindle, the Amazon hand-held reading device. Ping. Then there is a story about copyright. Pong. There is a story about the Big Six book publishers worrying about market share. Ping. [...]
What if Wall Street dirt bags had not concocted credit default swaps? What if banks had acted as if we could bank on their prudence? What if Washington had not drunk too deeply of Ayn Rand’s toxic fountainhead?
What kind of economy might we have had had we not the flim-flam economy that has now collapsed? [...]