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Monthly Archives: November 2012

Friday Night Music

Romney’s lament. Okay, I know only the refrain really works, but it’s always good to hear the Beatles. And I think, despite the fact that this clip is from Shindig, that it’s a true live performance, and not lip synced, and according to the person who posted the video on youtube, it is in fact […]

All Hail the Job Creators

A bankruptcy judge has approved bonuses for the job creators who successfully steered Hostess into bankruptcy. The update on the sale of the company’s brands comes as Hostess seeks approval in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York in White Plains, N.Y. to give its top executives bonuses totaling up to $1.8 […]

A storm is threatening

It’s just a shot away: A Hungarian far-right politician urged the government to draw up lists of Jews who pose a “national security risk”, stirring outrage among Jewish leaders who saw echoes of fascist policies that led to the Holocaust. Marton Gyongyosi, a leader of Hungary’s third-strongest political party Jobbik, said the list was necessary […]

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

The Republicans are single minded in the pursuit of power and the pursuit of policies favorable to the rich. To these objectives one can add the goal of impoverishing the rest of us, though why they feel that need is unclear. Democrats, on the other hand, are single minded in their insistence that they must […]

Shaping Reality

It has been endlessly noted that the Republican party appears to have lost touch with reality. It denies science and shouts down, rather than engages with, those who question its articles of faith. Witness, for example, its recent suppression of a Congressional Research Office report, which reached the unsurprising conclusion that low tax rates on […]

History Repeats Itself

Sad but not surprising news out of Bangladesh: MUMBAI — More than 100 people died Saturday and Sunday in a fire at a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, in one of the worst industrial tragedies in that country. It took firefighters all night to put out the blaze at the factory, Tazreen Fashions, after it […]

Friday Night Music

The gloating continues. While helping to prepare our Thanksgiving Dinner I chose to play the American Songbook album of songs by lyricists Yip Harburg. Actually, I didn’t know all the songs were by Harburg, only that the cover art said “American Songbook”. It was a fairly random pick, except I was looking for something “American”, […]

A mystery solved

Four years ago Al Franken won a Senate seat after a six month court battle. One of the more bizarre sidelights to the battle was the revelation that someone had voted for the “lizard people”. Here’s the ballot: At the time I had no idea what the motivation for this was, and I don’t believe […]

The Nation Mourns

Today, we mourn collectively, North and South, rich and poor, black and white, Democrat and Republican, religionists and atheists. Is there a person living who can recall an event since the Kennedy assassination that has brought the nation so together? Hostess, the maker of the iconic Twinkie, has been Romneyed, plundered by takeover artists and […]

Christian love in action

Only religion can make people this cruel: An Irish woman has died after she was denied an abortion, even though she was having a miscarriage, because the medical staff found a fetal heartbeat and so would not intervene. 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar was 17 weeks pregnant when she was admitted to University Hospital Galway on October […]