Archive for July, 2010
Wanted: Your Golden Retriever Stories
Shaun Mullen over at Kiko’s House — a certified Friend-of-1115 — is soliciting help with a story he’s researching about golden retrievers: But as I have written here, many American golden retrievers are also ticking time bombs because an extraordinarily large number of them — perhaps one in four — succumb to cancer well before [...]
Good Deficit, Bad Deficit
Republicans in Congress have been repeatedly ridiculed over the last several months for their new-found outrage over our truly humongous budget deficit. Ridiculed mostly for what can be delicately described as the time-inconsistency of their beliefs. When Republicans were last in power, they cheerfully operated under the what-me-worry philosophy that nothing had to be paid [...]
No Sir, Not The Party of No
The Republican Party must be quite tired of being ridiculed as The Party of No. Especially when that isn’t even true at all, since they have always been The Party of “Yes, boss!” All through the time of Bush, and now in the time of whoever-the-heck-it-is-who-should-be-regarded-as-the-leader-of-the-Republican-Party, the one thing they have never wavered on is [...]
Presidential Voodoo Spells?
The prevailing wisdom used to be: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But Rand Paul believes that words can indeed hurt the corporate citizens of the world. That the rhetoric of politicians and bureaucrats can drive large, profitable companies into bankruptcy: Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul said Thursday [...]
The Corporate Mind Of Employee Benefits Administrators
Companies in the employee benefits administration business must have a monthly contest to see who can get caught trying to pull the meanest-and-dumbest denial of coverage stunt. It’s early days still, but this month all the smart money is likely to be on North-Dakota-based Discovery Benefits. According to them, Discovery Benefits is not only “a [...]
The Wall Street Reform Bill’s Prospects
It looks like the recently-watered-down version of the Wall Street reform bill now stands a good chance of passing in the Senate, when it reconvenes next week after the July 4th recess. The bill was watered down last week at the behest of Republicans Scott Brown, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, who simply couldn’t abide [...]
We-a Culpa! We-a Minima Culpa!
Back in May, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government published an interesting little study of media dishonesty. It examined how four major newspapers — the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today — have covered the topic of waterboarding [...]
George Bush Wins The Votes He Richly Deserves
President former president George W. Bush may not be running in elections any more, but he’s still winning votes. At least as the worst President of the modern era: Since 1982, the Siena Research Institute has polled presidential scholars on whom they view to be best and worst presidents in American history, based on a [...]
Literally Unprecedented Obstructionism
The Huffington Post headline reads: “Unemployment: Congress Has Never Before Dropped Extended Benefits With Jobless Rate So High“. Though the jobs crisis shows few signs of abating and the unemployment rate continues to hover near 10 percent, Congress allowed extended unemployment benefits to expire at the beginning of June, causing so far more than 1.2 [...]
Michele Bachmann Rides Again
Last April, Michele Bachmann caused herself a huge amount of totally unnecessary embarrassment through her complete ignorance of matters relating to the world economy, and her dogged determination to make incendiary pronouncements on the subject anyway, despite her complete ignorance. She must have come to miss that experience over the last fifteen months, because she [...]