How Bush Lost Georgia

The Russian bear comes roaring back, 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with an unprovoked attack on the Republic of Georgia to ostensibly look after the interests of the ethnic Russian population of the province of South Ossetia.  This is a conflict that has been brewing since the demise of the USSR, [...]

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Dick Cheney, America’s Putin

As the Fourth of July looms on the horizon, with all it’s hyperbolic foaming and blowing about our heritage and our great country, I’m forced to write a slightly different post. I regret that I have come to the conclusion that Vice President Cheney is the antithesis of America and everything America stands for. [...]

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Cronyism, Penny-Pinching, and the Shafting of our Soldiers

The current and pending scandals on the healthcare of our wounded soldiers and veterans wouldn’t be half so outrageous if they didn’t happen on the watch of an administration that has constantly engaged in public breast-beating about “supporting our soldiers” and suggested that any questioning of the administration’s conduct or policies in any regard is [...]

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Education, and the Beginning of Our End

So you think we have enemies abroad trying to do us in? It would be hard for them to do the damage that we’re doing to ourselves, if we don’t get a handle on the education of our children — and obviously also remedial education of our adults. The 2005 data from the [...]

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Botnets, Spam, and the Average User

Here’s a little amplification on the issue of the overwhelming deluge of spam that I posted on earlier. If you have any doubt at all about the dimension of the problem, read on.
The problem is not that somebody’s generating spam, but that they’ve installed an intrusive little program on a few thousand personal computers [...]

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What Did We Learn from the Pilgrims?

As I’m proudly descended from three of the signers of the Mayflower Compact (Isaac Allerton, Francis Cooke, and Degory Priest), I feel obligated to bring out a post on Thanksgiving that meditates on what we may have learned from the Pilgrims, and this post is it.
Now before you accuse me of spouting some kind of [...]

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Watching the Republicans Self-Destruct

Well, the President may have SAID that his party “got whupped” in the election, but if that statement contained any meaning to him, he and the party have not as we would say, “fully internalized it.” With the electorate up in arms over gross corporate tax breaks and corruption, with their syncophant lobbysts going [...]

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A Word in Defense of CEOs

CEO-bashing is in favor these days, especially against the greedy ones that feel that no salary and benefit package is too rich for them regardless of their company’s performance. I willingly join that bashing, don’t mistake me. But there are CEOs who are worth their pay, and you only have to look at [...]

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Repeating Viet Nam

I recommend an excellent article published in the journal Foreign Relations, which analyzes the inevitable comparison of the Iraq war with Viet Nam:
Most discussions of U.S. policy in Iraq assume that it should be informed by the lessons of Vietnam. But the conflict in Iraq today is a communal civil war, not a Maoist “people’s [...]

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Progress Stomps On

The once-dominant telegram, has, after 150 years, fallen to the onslaught of e-mail, instant messaging, and cellular text messaging. Western Union has announced as of January 27th 2006, that it will no longer accept telegraphic messages.
In my grandfather’s day, and he was once a telegraph boy on the railroad, you went into a telegraph [...]

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