Category: Thursday

In an item I ran on Sunday I said social conservatives (the majority of the Republican Party by far) need to wake up to being used by fiscal conservatives (the small minority of the party that actually runs it). And I’d like to continue on that thread now. After all, when social conservatives have been…

“Republicans have a great gambit. They run on the promise that government is ineffective and then they get in there and prove it”–Bill Maher Republicans hate government. They hate the regulations it imposes. They hate the taxes it draws to keep the country running. If you’re Ron Paul, you even hate that government forces you…

Blaming teacher unions for what’s wrong with public education is like blaming the coal miner’s union for the pollution a coal company causes. But yet, in everything from the worthless documentary Waiting for Superman—which faked an interest in probing what’s wrong with public education before taking the easy way out in blaming education unions—to the…

“Government can do nothing right.” Republicans have said this for so long, we hardly blame them for getting elected into office and proving it. They run on the promise that government is ineffective, sluggish to respond, and unholy expensive, and then don’t even attempt to govern once they get elected. Instead, trying as hard as…

Last week I spent most items defending President Obama, but now it’s time to ask the flip side of that question: Is he worth it? By worth it, I mean is the entire Democrat Party worth compromising for this one man? Far right wing conservatives (i.e. racists) hate him with every fiber in their body….

If anyone has ever read a book or seen a TV show based on life in the “contemporary” Southeast, sooner or later The Civil War comes up. It’s as if the writer—who probably “isn’t from around here”—is itching for the moment to work this into the narrative. Even otherwise great books and television series go…

Let me start off by acknowledging that I don’t mean that title literally. I don’t mean to suggest that the creators of the Real Housewives of [Some City You Don’t Live In] were sitting around thinking of faster ways to ruin civilization and decided to create a quasi-racist, definitely ignorant, oxymoronic (they want to lower…

By now articles about the legendary inaccuracies to stories Faux News reports are almost old hat. Nearly every week, people accuse them of making something up. If it can be proven they did, they ignore it long enough to hope it goes away. If it cannot be proven to a certainty what they reported is…

It is the best of times to be a democracy. It is the worst of times to be a democracy. All over the world, fledgling democracies are springing up in the place of decades old dictatorships. Tunisia, Egypt, and (any day now) Libya will all be in that exciting new phase of a country where…