Guest Post by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver Yesterday, one of those intelligent souls who commented on my post about “dark clouds” said that the darkest cloud was that created by fundamentalism. I have to say I could not agree more. As a friend of mine once pointed out, the words Christian, Jew, Moslem and Hindu are […]
Guest Post by Michael J.W. Stickings Nothing seems to be going right in Iraq, militarily or politically, and yesterday there was yet another setback: Talks over the Iraqi constitution reached a breaking point on Thursday, with a parliamentary session to present the document being canceled and President Bush personally calling one of the country’s most […]
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. […]