In 2008 I left the Commonwealth of Virginia (my ancestral home, where I had lived and worked for most of my adult life) to move to Connecticut. News from the Old Dominion (reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education) confirms my decision to leave:
Virginia’s attorney general says public colleges and universities in the state with [...]
I am the product of 20 years of Catholic education (grade school, prep school, college, seminary), of which I am proud and for which I am grateful. During the 1980s I was a Roman Catholic priest. Over 20 years ago, I left the priesthood and the Church. In the words of the Jewish Passover Seder [...]
Telehypocrite Pat Robertson has announced today that the Haitian earthquake was God’s punishment for Haitians’ making a pact with Satan 200 years ago when they struggled for liberation from the French. (I’m not making this up.) The following prayer is offered for the relief of Haitians and all humanity from this pestilent beast.
(To be prayed [...]
Google, the online data monopoly that drew ire of human rights activists when it decided several years ago to agree to filter Chinese searches in order to strike a deal with the government of the Republic of China (a totalitarian political system), has now threatened to withdraw from China after Google’s email systems were hacked [...]
Since the Christmas Day airline terrorist attempt, much has been made about the failure of government authorities to “connect the dots”; all the data were known (the dots) but not all parties knew or interepreted the data (connecting).
In an attempt to encourage our guardians, I offer the following policy guidance videos.
Connecting the dots: It’s not just for [...]
David Brooks invites us to turn off the TV (or turn off the iPhone, the Wii, the iPod, YouTube, &c.) in order to read a long-form published essay, in his annual Sidney Awards.
Among the topics healthcare leads the list, but also American (in)justice, local DC politics (in the person of Marion Barry) and Afghanistan.
Sphere: Related [...]
One of the early signs of dementia is the loss of short-term memory, forgetting what you recentlydid or said.
So it is with great concern that I note the Republican leadership’s recent criticism of the Democratic majority in the Senate. Republican minority leadership has condemned Democrats’ procedural management of the Senate healthcare reform bill, including strict roll [...]
In an NY Times op-ed jeremiad about East Coast ignorance of the West Coast, Timothy Egan’s “Clueless in Costco” observes:
These are all minor annoyances, mind you, in a world with daily reminders that an embittered, small-hearted senator from Connecticut can hold up health care for millions, or some people would rather read a “book” by Hulk Hogan [...]
The Times announces that Comcast has purchased NBC Universal from General Electronic (”We Bring Good Things to Life” . . . including parts for nuclear bombs), thus “Reshaping the TV Industry.” Whatever that means.
Before G.E. could sell its controlling stake in the media company, it had to buy out the stake of Vivendi, the French media [...]
As any social scientist knows, the responses you receive from survey participants depend in part on how you phrase the question.
The New York Times now reports (“Does the Public Care About the Public Option?” by Katharine Q. Seelye) on several surveys indicating that a majority of Americans favor the provision of government supported health insurance [...]
Two front-page articles in a recent edition of the Sunday New York Times (15 November 2009) caught my eye.
Robert Pear’s ”In House Record, Many Spoke With One Voice: The Lobbyists” observes that, “In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that [...]
The Obama Administration has announced the end of another W. Bush-era boondoggle: A missile system that didn’t work, for a military threat that did not exist.
The anti-missile-missile system to be deployed in Poland the Czech Republic didn’t work. (Think we could move the savings into healthcare?) The alleged threat was Iranian ICBMs . . . [...]
“Who is the liar . . .?” queries the First Epistle of John, which came to mind last night during President Obama’s speech to both houses of Congress and to the nation, when it was interrupted by at one point by House Republican from South Carolina, Joe Wilson, who shouted quite audibly, “You lie!”
Ah, South [...]
In this video, Canadian physicians and nurses describe the real Canadian healthcare system to Americans (not the cartoon Canadian health care portrayed some American media and public discourse).
American viewers, accustomed to American bombast, hyperbolic rhetoric, rants, and apocalyptic jeremiads will have to adjust their TV sets accordingly in order to view the modest understatements of [...]
He’s big. He’s obnoxious. He’s Barney.
No, I’m not talking about the PBS children’s TV icon who sings, “I love you, you love me, we’re just one big family.”
I’m talking about the congressman from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, who, when confronted by a anti-healthcare-reform right-wingnut at a Dartmouth town hall meeting, gave better than he got.
The healthcare [...]
So much for Sarah Palin’s fictive “death panels” (though I would like to convene one in order to put her out of our misery).
As reported by the Associated Press, a study funded by the National Cancer Institute and published in the respected Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), in which 322 terminally ill patients [...]
Thank God the US Conference of Catholic Bishops are on watch looking out for your physical and spiritual health. Its Committee on Doctrine, chaired by William Lori, bishop of Bridgeport, CT, has published “Guidelines for Evaluating for Evaluating Reiki as an Alternative Therapy.”
Reiki (an alternative touch therapy used in many hospitals as a complement to [...]
According to press reports in the Hartford (CT) Courant , The Stamford Advocate, and on line in the Huffington Post, the Stamford (CT) Marriott Hotel and Spa is defending itself from a negligence suit (brought by a woman who was raped in the hotel garage while the rapist pointed a gun at her two children) by [...]
Two quotes included in a recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker (“Cocksure: Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence”) disclose the cluttered psychosexual landscape of Jimmy Cayne, former CEO of Bear Stearns, a firm that was sued (unsuccessfully) by an investor for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty.
According to the cocksure Cayne:
Their lead [...]
Here is the health-care reform agenda of Republican politicians and the right-wingnuts (pundits and conspiracy theorist deadenders) who constitute the aptly-named Republican “base”:
Defeat Obama.
That’s it. It’s just that simple.
No innovative health policy. No creative health proposal. Just a political calculation: Defeat Obama on this big one, and he becomes a lame duck. Then try to make [...]
As widely reported in the news media, the preeminent scholar of African-American studies, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a public intellectual known to a large American audience for his PBS programs on Africa and on African-American genealogy, was arrested at his home in Cambridge, MA, after he allegedly yelled at police who had come [...]
For two decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been warning the Pentagon about the presence of military personnal associated with organized hate groups enlisted in the services. Apparently the Pentagon is more concerned about presence of gay and lesbian people in the service, however, since the FBI reports that the neo-Nazi presence has grown.
As [...]
The summer solstice has come and gone here in Connecticut, with no observable change in the weather–the same chill and damp as all spring.
The same cannot be said elsewhere in the US, where the solstice seems to have marked the beginning of the Republican adultery season.
First, Senator John Ensign, Republican from Nevada, disclosed his marital [...]
Douglas J. Amy, professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College had a problem: An established scholar with three scholarly books on his curriculum vitae, Amy decided that he had another book to write but one that would reach a wide general audience. However, when he wrote the book, he found no trade press (which would [...]
Like most boys, my second objects of infatuation and attachment (after my parents) were cars.
Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, my friends and I could tell the nuances of styling changes from one year to the next (which baffled my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Keefe), and could even recognize the make of an auto by [...]
