Guest Post by Michael J.W. Stickings Alright, my first two posts here were way too serious, especially the last one, so let’s lighten it up a few notches and delve into the ever-so-humorous world of cable-TV news: It’s fair to say, I think, that integrity is in short supply in the TV-news business, and especially […]
Guest post by Ed Stephan Most of post-WWII politics in this country has operated on the assumption that the United States is committed to the well-being of its solid middle-class with its not-too-surprisingly middle-of-the-road politics. Americans don’t like to talk in the class-structural terms familiar to most Europeans and much of the rest of the […]
Guest post by Ed Stephan Bush’s approval ratings have been dropping fairly steadily ever since 9/11. They were in the mid-50s during his first half year in office, then shot up to the high 80s with 9/11 (in spite of his “My Pet Goat” performance). They returned to the 50s by March 2003, then spiked […]
Guest post by Ed Stephan Many of us here have said that the “uniter not a divider” split our families into hostile, hardly-speak-to-each-other pro-Bush and anti-Bush factions. I grew up in a New Deal household; my twin sister and I are still there in spirit, but my younger brother and sister are as rabid a […]
Guest post by Ed Stephan Last Thursday we here at TCR began some discussion of possible (probable?) future pandemics. In one comment I mentioned that the U.S. long-term mortality rates are represented by a gradually declining straight line, reflecting slight improvements in mortality throughout the 20th century. I couldn’t add the graph to that comment, […]
Guest post by Ed Stephan When 3,030 of our people were killed in attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, we retaliated with war against Afghanistan and a peculiar “War on Terror” which, somehow, morphed into an invasion and attempted conquest of Iraq (planned back in 1997 by Cheney and his neo-cons), at a […]
Guest Post by Michael J.W. Stickings We’ll get to that, but let’s begin with John McCain: This isn’t much of a surprise, but it looks like the maverick senator from Arizona is already on the pre-campaign trail in preparation for a run at the White House in 2008. Now, don’t hate me because I’ve always […]
Guest Post by Zoe Kentucky Great. I am so screwed. Scientists have scanned the brains of young people when they are doing, well, nothing, and they found that a region active during this daydreaming state is the one hard-hit by the scourge of old age: Alzheimer’s. “We never expected to see this,” said Randy L. […]
Guest Post by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver Here’s another dark cloud that’s no longer out on the horizon, but just a few miles away, close enough to smell the rain and both hear and see the lightning simultaneously, as the first stinging droplets hit your face in the rising wind. I’ll start by admitting that, when […]
Guest Post by Zoe Kentucky The LA Times has a nice play-by-play of the evolving Wilson/Plame/Libby/Rove scandal. Yeah, it’s very nice of them to remind us all why this scandal still matters, but frankly I’m getting a little tired of waiting. When is Fitzgerald going to make his move? When are we going to know […]