Category: politics

I find these days to have little energy for hot takes, blaming or recriminations. Instead I will offer this list of some of the books I read or listened to over the last year that helped me understand where we are now and how we got here. YMMV. The Rise and Fall of the Third…

In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.  – Tony Montana I don’t think Al Pacino’s character from Scarface is a good person to emulate but he does capture something about how we…

I’ve never been completely satisfied with terms like wealthy, rich, middle class, poor or working class. They seem to be amorphous and ill defined to me, and mostly just get politicized for various purposes. It is hard to define groups based on income numbers because of variations in cost of living or other factors such…

Conventional wisdom says that the free market compensates people based on how hard they work, their ability,  or the importance of their job. People with rare or high levels of talent and strong work ethic rise to the top and make the most money.  It is certainly true that most of the people at the…

Its not clear anymore how we should define victory in our wars.  I think that one prerequisite might be that you need to be able to visit the country without it being unannounced. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/28/AR2010032800828.html

… a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart – not out of charity, but because it…

Truth be told, I’m basically a sucker alot of the time. I mean I’m often easily swayed by a small piece of evidence that has nothing much at all to do with the big picture. This comes up all the time during the Iraq Conflict. I hear a story that makes it sound like things…

While in most cases you have to be super rich or a terrorist to benefit from Bush’s policies, there has been one new law that went into effect which in my opinion is good for people in neither of these special groups. Hurray Bush for moving up Day light savings time. While its not really…

I got something in the mail the other day about a speech by Newt Gingrinch about how serious the threat of terrorism is. The sender figured that since I don’t support the war I would react negatively to what Newt was saying. But I didn’t really. Newt was mostly right. Its a serious problem and…