When traveling in foreign lands I always tune into the local TV for a few hours each day. I’m currently in the middle of a two-week trip to France (which explains why the OpEdge blogs have not been as topical as usual), and so have been watching some French TV. For the most part, I […]
Around my house, when one wants to give an example of sappy and saccharine light classical music, one usually invokes Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances.” And when we want to disparage the kind of corny white-bread show-tune music of our parents’ generation, the go-to song is “Take my hand, I’m a stranger of paradise,” a hit from […]
America buys oil from Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. We buy cars from Japan, South Korea and Europe. And from China, we buy clothes, appliances, plastic goods, toys, shoes and medical equipment. But for what goods and services are we the dominant world seller (that is, besides Spiderman movies and Lady Gaga)? The answer […]
The latest mass media survey of the best cities in which to live again fixes the results by putting bias into the criteria by which it measures things. The fix is always in favor of an automobile, mall and chain store-based existence, even when considering city life. This time, it’s a Bloomberg Business Week study […]
In baseball parlance, the anti-death penalty movement has batted 500 over the past 24 hours. The Supreme Court of the United States stopped the execution of white man Cleve Foster, but the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency to back man Troy Davis. The racial contrast speaks for itself. Much has been written […]
Bravo to President Obama for remembering his progressive roots and the location of his spine and proposing the Buffett tax, named after billionaire financier Warren Buffett who says he and his fellow ultra-wealthy should be paying more in taxes. The Buffett tax would raise the minimum federal income tax that people with more than $1 […]
Reading the lead story on the front page of today’s New York Times certainly sent a shiver up and down my spine, as I’m sure it did for many people. The Times story discusses a debate in administration circles on “whether the United States may take aim at only a handful of high-level leaders of […]
Read More… from Is the Obama Administration planning to go to war in Somalia and Yemen?
Thanks to an article published today by the Associated Press (AP), the American public now knows more than we need to know about a brand new category of products and services: cosmetics for a woman’s most private part. Here are examples of ways to decorate the vagina that the article mentions: “Vajazzling” — gluing on […]
The tax cut part of the Obama plan is a big mistake because it gives more money to people who already have money, instead of directly creating jobs for people who don’t have jobs. The centerpiece of the Obama plan, what he’s selling on his current road show, is that the temporary cut in the […]
USA Today today gave Texas Governor Rick Perry about 350 words to explain his position on Social Security, which he called a “Ponzi scheme” last week in the debate between Republican presidential candidates. The headline, “Rick Perry: I am going to be honest with the American people,” said it all, but in the negative. Mr. […]