Follow this link to a column on the Boston Globe web site by Garry Emmons.
This is the first that I heard of the antidote to Ayn Rand.
RichardH brought this article to my attention. Perhaps he was too bashful to post this here because Garry is a friend of his.
Follow this link to the request for support from MoveOn.org.
Joe Lieberman is single-handedly gutting health care reform. And it’s time someone held him accountable. So we’re going to make sure every voter in Connecticut knows what he’s doing. And then, when he comes up for re-election, we’ll make sure we send him home for good. Can you chip in to make Joe pay?
I am so frustrated with Joe Lieberman. This is the only thing I can think of doing. I have already signed the petition to strip him of his committee chairmanship.
Little did the Democrats realize the monster they were creating when they failed to support Ned Lamont. Nothing we can do about that now. We need to come up with a plan going forward.
Follow this link to the commentary published on the McClatchy News web site.
This one is for those who naively believe that an entity called the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice should be in the business of enforcing the nation’s civil rights laws. Under the late Bush administration, one had reason to doubt.
The case is laid out in a report prepared by the Government Accountability Office.
Follow this link to the column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.
Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown.
An excellent obituary of Paul Samuelson in the New York Times (14 December 2009).
The 1970 Economic Sciences Nobel webpage with links to Samuelson’s Nobel addresses and selected other articles.
Follow this link to the story on McClatchy news.
Promoting birth control in Africa faces a host of obstacles – patriarchal customs, religious taboos, ill-equipped public health systems – but experts also blame a powerful, more distant force: the U.S. government.
Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.
Bush’s mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.
This is not news for me. I have already read about this issue. I think it was in the book Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Follow this link to the AP story that analyzes the leaked emails about climate research.
I find it interesting that the AP story admits way at the bottom that one of the authors of the news analysis has been involved in controversy with the scientists being covered in the story. That’s just being honest, but it does show the near impossibility of writing story on a controversial topic in a way that cannot be subject to charges of bias. After all, humans are not robots.
Having been the subject of a story in the semi-technical press, I know how poorly a story can be reported even when the reporter allegedly has some technical expertise. You can imagine what happens in the non-technical press concerning reports on scientific matters.
I don’t really find any specific fault in this story. The headline is editorializing, but in a news analysis story, I guess that is permissible.
David Runciman, in the 17 December 2009 issue of the London Review of Books, reviews Taylor Branch’s book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History in the White House. Branch, a long-time friend of Bill Clinton, recounts his conversations with Clinton over the course of his presidency.
In response to my earlier post, reader LeonidG sent me email.
I have heard of Hazars, a long defunct tribes which used to fight with Slavic tribes 1000 years ago. There were also arguments regarding whether they were practicing Judaism and whether they have just accepted the religion or were descendants of one of the Israelite tribes.
He further suggested the following links for research:
Later on December 10, I followed some of the above links.
One on the http://www.khazaria.com/ web site in particular shows the depth of the controversy. Are Russian Jews Descended from the Khazars?, A Reassessment Based upon the Latest Historical, Archaeological, Linguistic, and Genetic Evidence by Kevin Alan Brook
Follow this link to the article by The Rev. Howard Bess.
As long as I am getting into subjects that touch on religion as well as politics, I thought I would post a link to this one.
I don’t claim to be any expert who is able to judge the merit of the arguments in this article. I find it plausible. I always keep in mind that I know there are a lot of things that are plausible but not true.
I am tempted to ask my sister, the self proclaimed expert on these matters, but I really don’t want to introduce any controversy between us.