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Persistent Paranoia

Our daughter called me the other day, horrified. She’d somehow gotten on the mailing list of one of the crazy organizations that seem to thrive in our country–a group called “Freedom Watch,” headed by one “Larry Klayman, Attorney.” The letter was, as she said, vile; among other things in its overheated diatribe, it accused President [...]

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The Older I Get, the Less I Understand….

Final week is over, grades are in, and I’ve had more time to read the news. That’s obviously a mixed blessing. There are so many things I just don’t understand. There’s a toaster that embosses the face of Jesus on each piece of bread as it toasts. It is evidently selling briskly. There’s Newt Gingrich. [...]

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Luck of the Draw

A friend of mine used to have a saying to the effect that he’d rather be lucky than smart. While I think President Obama is pretty darn smart, if current trends continue, he may also prove to be very, very lucky. Conventional wisdom–which is conventional because it tends to be right fairly often–is that Presidents [...]

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Reich Hits the Nail on the Head

I don’t always agree with Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, but in this post, he hits the proverbial nail squarely on the head. What contemporary Republicans are selling is reheated and reconstituted Social Darwinism. (And just for the record, Darwin never used the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Herbert [...]

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It’s All About the Framing

A recent report in Salon quotes Frank Luntz as being “very scared” of Occupy Wall Street. Luntz, for those who don’t know, is the GOP “messaging” genius who came up with terms like “death tax” to rebrand the estate tax, and who urges Republicans to abandon use of the word capitalism in favor of terms [...]

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