Two governorships have fallen to Republicans, if the headlines have it right.
Yet most of the pundits are saying this is not a sign of disenchantment with the Congress and the President, but only local politics.
I’m not sure I agree. I think it is a sign that the “ordinary” folks are worried, and that they trust […]

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“The culture in this country has become so overwhelmingly conformist that any alternative to capitalism is considered outlandish.”
Tariq Ali October 2009
 
Winston Churchill once famously said that “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” He might have said the same about the primacy […]

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By Jefferson Flanders
A tip of a Yankees cap to the late, great New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Cannon for borrowing his signature phrase: nobody asked me, but…
THE WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCED THAT FEDERAL STIMULUS SPENDING HAS “SAVED OR CREATED” 640,329 JOBS SO FAR. Not 640,328 or 640,330, but 640,329. Of course this is nonsense—there’s no precise […]

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The recession has ended.  Or so the administration would have us believe with the announcement that gross domestic product rose 3.5% in the third quarter.  GDP is defined as the sum of consumption, investment, government spending and net exports (exports less imports).  The figures released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the Department […]

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Would Jesus pack heat?
An easy question you say, since Jesus told his followers to “turn the other cheek”, and this quote is often quoted by those opposing all war or violence of any sort…mainly by those living in safe suburbs and working in tenured academic jobs.
Yet this article states that some pastors in the Detroit […]

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I was startled to find this important editorial in the NYTimes:

A Final Verdict on the Presidential Salute

After a couple of paragraphs explaining the writer’s expertise in saluting, and another couple of paragraphs on the history of presidential salutes, we come to the conclusion:
(President Obama’s) salute, it struck me, was impeccable in every way.
Huh?
It’s true that […]

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Arianna Huffington, the Ann Coulter of the far-Left, expresses an enormous amount of dissatisfaction with the way her far-Left wing president does his job in her article this week on her website: “The Huffington Post”.
Huffington’s article, titled: “Barack Obama Is Doing My Job; Why America Needs Him to Do His,” openly wonders why […]

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You may or may not know that the largest film industry in the world is not Hollywood, but Bollywood: the film industry of India. But do you know which country has the second largest film industry in the world?
Nollywood.
The Nigerian film industry.
According to Wikipedia the industry is a $250 million dollar industry which produces […]

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October 14th. The big chill was early, even for Albany. A press conference was being held in the park across from the New York Court of Appeals. The highest court in the state was set to hear Goldstein et al v. New York State Urban Development Corporation. The press conference speakers and their supporters were […]

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Ah, how quickly the grandchildren grow up. The grandsons have changed from computer game freaks to college geeks, and the granddaughters are now budding teenagers, on the threshold of being a woman.
In the past, the “Themes” for birthday parties were various Disney princesses; now little girls are starting to grow up, so the Theme of […]

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When last Zimbabwe was in the news, people were dying of cholera, there was a huge inflation rate that made the local dollar worthless, and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party, along with an MDC offshoot, had agreed to make a unity government with the President Mugabe.
But although the verbal agreement was that Tsvangirai’s […]

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It happened so quickly, few people noticed.  The chief architect of the President’s stimulus plan, Christina Romer, who now heads the Council of Economic Advisors, testified before the Congressional Joint Economic Committee on 22 October.  While such an event would be otherwise unremarkable, what is striking in this instance is Dr. Romer’s sudden reversal in […]

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Ah, a British paper just pooh poohed the British victory at the Battle of Agincourt, saying that Prince Hal was not outnumbered 4 to 1, merely outnumbered 2 to 1.
Actually, the author misses the point, which is that the elite knights of France got slowed down by the mud and were massacred by ordinary British […]

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The serious concerns of the UK Autism Foundation were highlighted in the Autism Debate in the House of Lords. Peers backed the call of the UK Autism Foundation for Her Majesty’s Government to reach out to poor families with autism who are struggling during the recession.
Baroness Uddin speaking in the debate supported the UK Autism […]

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The latest kerfuffle on the Health Care bill is that the Obama church has leashed the Am Cath types against the Catholic bishops.
For those of you who are not Catholic, much of the church bureaucracy is full of those who claim Vatican II to justify changing the Catholic church into a Episcopalian wanna be church.
Luckily, […]

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President Obama was brought up in Asia, yet he seems clueless about Afghanistan, and of the geopolitical problems in this area.
The press is even worse, preferring the simplistic out of date explanations of the “Afghanistan is Viet Nam” meme, or the “Stop the war” meme, or stressing civilian casualties “reported” by Taliban linked sources without […]

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The title is a line from an article by Steve Huntley in his article in the Oct. 20th Chicago Sun Times titled: “Excuses wearing thin for Obama, media pals”. Here’s the full quote:
“You’d think it’s October 2008, the final month in the Obama presidential candidacy, rather than October 2009, nine months into the […]

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Move over, tea-baggers. The rest of us want to know where the trillions in taxpayer dollars and guarantees to Wall Street actually went.
The government won’t tell us. 
We also want to know if the administration of Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress will reinstate and invigorate laws and regulations on the financial sector to prevent another […]

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The financial press and economists are starting to raise their voices about the deficit and the debt that is burdening our country and threatening our future.  Amid the news that the dollar hit a 14 month low last week, concerns abound about how government is spending our money; money earned in the form of taxes, […]

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We’ve had a few sunny days here in the Philippines to finish harvesting the rice. Our fields are on high ground, so the main problems we face are finding a dry day to cut and thresh the rice, and a rice mill to dry it.
Usually in our area, rice is dried in the hot sun. […]

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As the US government takes steps like government controls of major industries and attempting to hijack 1/5th of the economy via health care reform, another country is moving in quite the opposite direction during this global recession.
Cuba’s workplace cafeterias are closing, President Raúl Castro keeps saying the well-off shouldn’t get the same subsidies as the […]

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Juxtaposed on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on Saturday were two stories that tell opposite sides of the lingering economic crises.  One article discussed the slight uptick in global trade as an indicator of the economic recovery to come.  The total interchange of good and services between countries fell more sharply in […]

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First came Typhoon Ondoy, which flooded Manila and the Laguna area.
Manila had at least one million people displaced from their homes due to flooding, and many whose houses were built in low lying areas were drowned from flash flooding that they did not expect. When even movie stars have to flee to the rooftops of […]

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Vancouver Police have decided not to fund raise for United Way this year.
Canadians Opposing Political Psychiatry learned of this decision after writing to the Vancouver Police Board on Sept. 22/09 requesting that they put an end to Vancouver Police fundraising for United Way.  Initially, COPP received an email from Rachelle Radiuk, Executive Director of the […]

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Hippocrates (or the Pythagoran writer of the oath) was well aware that patients or their caretakers frequently “fall in love” with their physicians  and openly express the desire for an affair. But experience shows that often patients/caretakers are psychologically vulnerable, and later regret their actions. That is why the Hippocratic oath expressly forbids physicians from […]

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Vancouver Police Board members Gregor Robertson, Vancouver’s mayor, and Terry La Liberte, a criminal lawyer, have been asked to put a stop to the Vancouver Police Department’s in-house fundraising for United Way.  
Canadians Opposing Political Psychiatry made the request in writing on Sept. 22, based on documented evidence supporting allegations that United Way benefited from […]

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Using a slight of hand and having his propaganda mill obscure what has been done, the Democrats and the Obama administration are planning to fund abortion in their health care bill.
The original “compromise” on abortion was a slight of hand that would force people to pay for abortion coverage themselves, similar to the way you […]

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The flood waters in Manila are slowly subsiding. Family members who traveled to Manila yesterday for business reported that most of the roads were clear, but that the garbage and mud from the floods were all over the place. Some of the roads remained blocked, including major highway “underpasses” that were now lakes of water.
Several […]

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On my family blog, I often write the headline: Another Day, Another Typhoon.
The Philippines gets hit by about ten typhoons a year, but we live inland so are usually safe.
On Saturday, however, the winds were brisk and the rains very very heavy. Our house has good drainage, but the main street where the vendors have […]

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Rep. Dexter, I had a high school math teacher who would occasionally tell a student he was being “stupid”, but he was always quick to remind us that the word actually means ‘intellectually lazy” and merely represented a temporary state of being.
I really hope your position on payday loans is just because you are stupid, […]

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