“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”
—attributed to Josef Stalin in Boris Bazhanov’s
Memoirs of Stalin’s Former Secretary, publ. 1992
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Bev Harris is one of democracy’s watchdogs. She leads Black Box Voting, [...]
It’s ironic, maybe even macabre, that while Sarah Palin and some other Republicans raised the spectre of Health Plan Death Panels (even though they did not exist…see my previous post), actual Death Panels have lurked in the catacombs of the Texas Health and Safety Code (Section 166.046) for a decade.
A 1999 bill signed by then-governor [...]
Most Americans do not create opinions by reading or consulting primary sources. Their information comes from commentaries and summaries provided by politicians, pundits, newscasters, talk show hosts, and these days, bloggers. Since this information is pre-digested, one of the most successful techniques for tilting sentiment is to frame the topic with biased language. In that [...]
In a recent post, I exposed a quote attributed to John Maynard Keynes as a fraud. Such villainy, which is an unfortunate artifact of a free society and a free internet, demands a squinty eye and a Missourian’s “show me” attitude.
Today, an email that has been circulating for several months came to me. It included [...]
During the research for my previous post, I came across a bumper sticker that attributed the quotation in question to John Maynard Keynes. When I informed the purveyor that the quotation was not from Keynes’s oeuvre, they replied:
Well, that is sad. It seems that making things up has been a major accomplishment of the electronic [...]
Of course you know that not everything on the web is accurate, but what if you find thousands of hits for a quotation, including citations in Webster’s Online Dictionary, the Washington Post, and the Howard Law Journal?
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work [...]
What do you get from this excerpt from the Saturday, June 6, 2009, article entitled “Clinton Rejects Israeli Claims of Accord on Settlements” by Washington Post Staff Writer Glenn Kessler?
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton forcefully rejected yesterday Israeli claims that the Bush administration had secretly agreed to expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank, [...]
Can your personal political morality stand the fairness test?
Compare Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter. Each abandoned his party in order to assure or improve his chance of winning re-election. Pragmatic? Egomaniacal? Fighting the neverending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way?
Whom do you love?
Lieberman, 67, lifted high by the Democratic party (vice presidential candidate [...]
AIG is saved once, and then resuscitated again, because it is judged “too big to fail.” Billions are pumped into General Motors because it also is “too big to fail.”
I say step back and look at what “too big to fail” should have suggested long before the current financial cliff edge was reached: If it [...]
Born 200 years ago, February 12, 1809: Charles Darwin, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in the bios, and Abraham Lincoln, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in society.
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But perhaps these two Great Men were not born on the same day. Darwin’s birth was [...]
