Independence Day 2008

Flags wave, fireworks fly, and magnetic stickers abound.  But what does it mean to be patriotic?  On the 232nd anniversary of the declaration creating the United States of America, it’s worth a few minutes to consider.  An essay from the Makinac Center for Public Policy captures much of how I feel.
It isn’t that flags, fireworks, or [...]

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Still a Bad Idea

Two weeks ago I was critical of Senator John McCain’s proposal for a national “gas tax holiday.”
Now Senator Hillary Clinton is backing a similar idea.  Though she has added a twist to the proposal with a windfall-profits tax on oil companies, the idea of a gas tax holiday is still a bad one, regardless of [...]

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4,000

4,000 U.S deaths in Iraq since the war began five years ago. The Associated Press has one way of calculating the death toll, The New York Times and Department of Defense another. Regardless of the exact number, it is exactly that number too many.  Of course, this is just the number of U.S. dead in [...]

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Err…Whoops!

So, it’s been a week.  Let’s take stock (no pun in ten did).  Or better yet, let’s not.
Earlier this week, economist and New York Times op-ed contributor Paul Krugman said, “In a worst-case scenario, the Federal Reserve would find itself owning around $200 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities.”
Then, what happens?  You guessed it - the [...]

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GEICO Caveman Defeats Giuliani

Since posting about the possibility that cavemen had and used language, my prehistoric friend has come to account for nearly 20% of all the traffic to this blog.  With numbers like that the GEICO caveman would have beat Rudy Giuliani in the Florida primary.  Not enough to be a serious candidate this time, but I [...]

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Cover-Up

Benazir Bhutto, 1953-2007 
As was observed over at BrianKaneOnline on the day of her assassination, the blame for Benazir Bhutto’s death appears more and more likely (though it seems there was little reason ever to doubt) to rest at the feet of Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf and his government.  Early conflicting reports as to the cause of death (”She [...]

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SUV Owners Are Hypocrites. Or Not.

In a recent editorial, the editor of our local weekly (weakly?) paper said that people who drive SUVs and then complain about gas prices are hypocrites.  Aside from trying to trying to provoke a reaction - which he has obviously accomplished - he is just plain wrong.
Let’s start with what a hypocrite is:

a person who [...]

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Where to Start

In my mail at work the other day I received a copy of “For I Was Hungry,” an editorial series run this summer by the central Maine newspapers the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel.  The series is about hunger in Maine, manifested in what has come to be called “food insecurity.”  Food insecurity is, depending [...]

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