I was in my cubicle, in the Fairfax County Government Center, 30 miles from the Pentagon. I was hard at work on the FY 2003 budget for my agency, the Division of Solid Waste, Collection and Recycling. Then came news of the first attack. Only nobody knew it was an attack when the first plane [...]
Did TSA really ask a 95-year old wheelchair-bound female leukemia patient to remove her (wet) depends undergarment to make sure she wasn’t carrying a bomb? Do they really pat down small children/toddlers? If so, does that make you feel safer flying? Here’s the deal, Osama Bin Laden, apparently was fixated on airplane terrorism. Two reasons why [...]
OBE, for short–that’s a much used phrase from a once upon a time former supervisor. Applied to projects, assignments, etc., it meant the task at hand no longer needed doing. Some might suppose that recent election results might make that an epithet applicable to health care reform. But as President Obama said in his state of [...]
The Vermont House joined the state’s senate in overriding the governor’s bill making gay marriage legal in Vermont. The Iowa supreme court recently made gay marriage legal there. Numerous states allow the use of medical marijuana and some have decriminalized the possession or use of small quantities of the recreational drug. An African-American man now [...]
What a hoot! Leave it to the American Enterprise Institute to declare as a scholar someone who can set up and knockdown liberal strawmen in such a hilarious fashion. It’s difficult to know where to begin in critically examining his opinion piece from Sunday, March 22, so let me quickly summarize his thesis and then get [...]
I am getting impatient. I want the election to be over so I can stop watching Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Larry King, Nightline and local news. What else is there to blog about right now but the election? Plenty of stuff; the same stuff that I used to blog about. But I am consumed [...]
Once upon a time, John McCain was a Maverick. At least as late as 2000, he still behaved like one. Unfortunately for him, that helped seal his doom in the contest for the Republican nomination for President. The sad truth he took from defeat is that in order to fulfill his Vietnam POW-era dream of the [...]
What news will come from the MastersButtheads of the Universe today, a continuing fall in the global economy perhaps? Maybe the MBAs should have “learned to play the guitar,” as Mark Knopfler suggests, instead of learning to play the market. At least then the suffering we are enduring would have been limited to our ears [...]
Obama will tell you it’s Bush and his buddy McCain that helped make the current money morass happen. He is not entirely wrong but he is not entirely right either. Congress facilitated the mess by repealing the Glass-Steagal Act that kept the insurance, investment and banking businesses firewalled from one another. Institutional investors, including the [...]
Treasury Secretary Paulson and Republicans in Congress object to tying limits on executive compensation (especially “golden parachutes”) to bailouts in the legislation now pending. Even with such limits, a taxpayer revolt may be in the offing. Freemarket conservatives jump up and down, stamp their feet and scream “class warfare!” whenever anyone talks of raising taxes [...]