Forty-two Bush Administration appointees resigned under a cloud of controversy over the past eight years. Only now could a final tally be calculated. So many had resigned that it actually has become difficult to remember every one of them. Some were well illuminated by the mainstream media while others were just a passing blip on [...]

[Read more →]

I used to admire John McCain. I am grateful for his military and civil service and for taking on his own Republican party when they were just plain wrong. But the John McCain I see in this campaign is a shell of the man I once looked up to.
His general election campaign is being run [...]

[Read more →]

The advent of the 24/7 news media and the blogosphere had led to critical attention being focused on the most inconsequential and irrelevant issues I have ever had the misfortune to listen to. This is an open letter to the electorate of all the things I don’t care about but for some ridiculous reason, many [...]

[Read more →]

John McCain recently seems to have little problem uttering such blatantly false and idiotic statements that it  makes President Bush look like a statesman.
Today, Sen McCain said that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong, but these are very, very difficult times.”
He said this the same day that investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy [...]

[Read more →]

I was duped. Even though I take a critical eye to political language in this blog, I failed to take that same critical eye to the use of political imagery in my previous post. That got me thinking about how much political imagery gets faked and more importantly, how much of it is the general [...]

[Read more →]

Author’s Note: Originally I had a picture in this post of what appeared to be Governor Palin in a star-spangled bikini holding a scoped rifle. I have since learned it was a photo-shopped picture of another woman with Governor Palin’s face superimposed. Since the photo was a fake, I have removed it. The post that [...]

[Read more →]

Patriotism isn’t about colored ribbons or bumper stickers on your car. It isn’t about waving a flag or chanting “U-S-A” at a sporting event. It certainly is not about wearing an American flag pin on your lapel. These are all pleasing symbolic displays of patriotism, but they are not patriotism in and of itself.
Feeling [...]

[Read more →]

The New York Times has begun producing a useful debate transcript analyzer. The analyzer allows you to not only view the video and transcript of a debate, but also view how much time the candidates had to speak, how many words they said, and the order in which they spoke. This tool can be [...]

[Read more →]

The Reagan Library Republican Debate finished just a couple hours ago and even though there were four candidates on stage, CNN’s Anderson Cooper was primarily focused on John McCain and Mitt Romney. Mike Huckabee twice made the point that he was not getting nearly as many questions asked of him as of the titular front [...]

[Read more →]

Anderson Cooper, the moderator of the CNN/YouTube Republican debate, made a point of telling the candidates at the start that they were expected to address the questions asked and not drift off onto other subjects. “Americans put a lot of time into submitting these questions. We think they deserve direct answers. ” In that [...]

[Read more →]