In Praise of Folly

This article provides interesting background on Ryan: http://www.thenation.com/blog/158010/paul-ryan-republicans-thinker?rel=emailNation . A...

Yesterday, I happened to catch most of the Republican response to the SOTU speech. One thing I found fascinating was the series of myths tha...

In preparation for the State of the Union address, Republicans showed up on the Sunday talk shows to warn that they seek cuts in all areas o...

News that astronomer signs are misaligned by as much as a month (due to "wobble" in the earth) has sent people into identity crise...

It is still unclear whether the shooting of Arizona Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was politically motivated, but it is clear t...

Obama announced yesterday that he is naming William Daley as his new Chief of Staff and will announce today that Gene Sperling will become t...

ESP has generally sat alongside UFO sightings, flouridation, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, life on Mars and the like, as the ra...

The House of Representatives will change hands today and already Republicans are getting ready to pay back their corporate sponsors ( http:/...

I often write in this blog about the social justice and empirical arguments against the "small government" discourse. I thought I ...

Some of us remember the age when kids should be seen but not heard, or maybe even not seen that much. Youth was to be lived freely, spending...

Michael Bloomberg has just announced that he is adding an opinion section to his financial news organization: http://www.salon.com/news/m...

The U.S. Census Bureau released findings today that show an expected shift away from Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and Midwest to ...

In the classic Stanley Kubrick spoof Dr. Stranglove , a mad general believes the Russians are contaminating our water to take over America. ...

A piece of good news emerged today as Obama finally came through -- ending Don't Ask Don't Tell and hopefully putting a first nail i...

As I contemplate the Republican victory in the election last month, it occurred to me what is at stake in a broader sense. I have often spok...

A Bloomberg poll on the eve of the election found that two-thirds of likely voters believed that, under Obama and the Democrats, middle-clas...

A new poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal shows that Obama holds an early lead over all Republican contenders in his presumed bid for re...

Reagan once offered this line and beyond absurd adherence to Reaganomics and trickle down economics, this appears to be another legacy he ha...

In an interesting article in the November 25, 2010 New York Review of Books "The Way Out of the Slump," Paul Krugman and Robin Wel...

So Republicans will soon take over the house and use that position to enact their policy agenda. After the tax cut deal with Obama, two trou...

One of the signature elements of Obama's campaign for change was to repeal the Bush tax cuts, which exacerbated a 30-year trend toward i...

Missouri state treasurer Sarah Steelman, announcing her intentions to run for the Senate in 2012, made the following comment, ""...

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) met with President Obama a few weeks ago and according to a report on ABC News reports that he is willing to ...

This is what passes for media coverage today: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/04/AR2010090402579_pf.html . App...

This is what passes for media coverage today: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/04/AR2010090402579_pf.html . Appa...

Republicans are at it again, rewriting inconvenient truths to serve their larger national ambitions. This time it is Mississippi's GOP g...

I wrote my dissertation on cynicism and democracy and have often wrote here about the topic as well. When Obama won the election in 2008 I h...

Last week we heard that Fox was giving $1,000,000 to Republicans to help win the midterm elections. Now the magnanimous folks at the Chamber...

Republican logic generally has little to do with fact or rationality. In the latest example, they are now arguing Saudi Arabia would never a...

Facebook has just launched Places a new application that allows you to check in at various places across the city: http://www.slate.com/tool...

The ongoing controversy of a Mosque being built by the site of the World Trade Center seems to highlight a fundamental disconnect between co...

You may have seen the 2010 Diesel advertising campaign somewhere around town, on a billboard, in a store and or in some other instantiation....