Remember when it was actually being said that the maverick John McCain and the post-everything Barack Obama might wage a new kind of campaign free of so much of the venom and bile of modern American politics?
Remember when it was actually being said that the maverick John McCain and the post-everything Barack Obama might wage a new kind of campaign free of so much of the venom and bile of modern American politics?
What do you think of this for a meal? T-bone steak with A-1 sauce, onion rings, french fries, four eggs over easy, toast with butter, hash browns, a pint of rocky road ice cream, a Mountain Dew soft drink and bear claw pastries.
Whew. That's the last meal of Richard Cooey, the Ohio death row inmate who argued that he is too obese to be executed "humanely" by lethal injection. The bad news for him:
David Brooks, who is what passes for a conservative at The New York Times, peers into the future and sees -- Gasp! -- Big Government as Democratic liberals and moderates duke it out:
Here's one I agree with Obama on rather than McCain:
Even as the U.S. confronts two long wars, neither Sen. John McCain nor Sen. Barack Obama believes the country should take the politically perilous step of reviving the military draft.
You know the old "give 'em inch and they'll take a mile" warning. University officials in Indianapolis have discovered the "give 'em the sidewalk and they'll take the buildings" corollary:
Students at a downtown Indianapolis university are encouraged to use chalk to express their political views, but when those messages move from the sidewalks to the sides of buildings, that constitutes vandalism, school officials said.
The General Assembly passed a measure session before last that allows almost any unit of local government to "reorganize" with almost any other unit. Mostly, it's been ignored by officials who like things fine just the way they are. But in West Lafayette, Mayor John Dennis and West Side Schools Superintendent Rocky Killion are enthusiastically embracing change:
This is one of those stories that I can't consider the larger implications of until I learn how it affects my selfish interests:
Taylor University officials announced Monday that the Fort Wayne campus will stop offering its traditional undergraduate program effective this spring.
[. . .]
Issues such as gay marriage should be decided by legislatures, but it's obvious that we're not headed that way. Connecticut has become the third state to say that same-sex partners are entitled to all the benefits of traditional marriage, including the title, and all three were court decrees. Furthermore:
When discussing difficult public issues, we sometimes overlook the most obvious answers. Scott Newman, Indianapolis' public safety director, notes that more than 6 percent of that city's 14,163 felony arrests last year were of people who already had an unresolved misdemeanor or felony case:
Yeah, just keep spending that money you don't have. What's a lousy $150 billion when you've already done over a trillion?
The United States needs a new economic stimulus plan that pumps billions of dollars into infrastructure projects and budget relief for cash-strapped state and local governments, Democratic lawmakers said on Sunday.
Memo to the Indianapolis Colts:
See, isn't it a lot more fun to play a whole game the way you played in the last quarter of the Houson game? Try to remember that if you make it to the playoffs.
This Editor & Publisher article makes it sound like The Associated Press is going through a small rough patch. I think it's bigger than that -- technology is passing by the whole model AP uses:
This is a day to mark on the calendar of despair:
A watched clock never moves — unless it's the National Debt Clock.
In fact, the digital counter has been moving so much that it recently ran out of digits to display the ballooning figure: $10,150,603,734,720, or roughly $10.2 trillion, as of Saturday afternoon.
If you didn't think Hugo Chavez was a menace to the world before, this will surely change your mind:
The Venezuelan government has ordered all McDonald's restaurants in the country closed for 48 hours for what it calls irregularities in the fast-food chain's financial books.
The order stands for Thursday through Saturday, affecting all 115 McDonald's restaurants nationwide, the state-run Bolivarian News Agency reported.
Aren't the protests of Columbus Day (Sunday, Monday observed) getting a little old?
Fifty fun words. This has always been one of my favorites:
Tatterdemalion - a person with tattered clothing or of unkempt appearance. This word has, to my mind, a "bouncy" rhythm to it and use it often. I know several people who could have this word attributed to them...
Just the sesquipedalian in me, I guess.
Plants have feelings, too!
ZURICH -- For years, Swiss scientists have blithely created genetically modified rice, corn and apples. But did they ever stop to consider just how humiliating such experiments may be to plants?
That's a question they must now ask. Last spring, this small Alpine nation began mandating that geneticists conduct their research without trampling on a plant's dignity.
It's getting brutal out there in presidential-campaign land, and some are saying that John McCain is being too tough in his attacks on Barack Obama. But McCain hasn't yet said why the world is too dangerous a place to trust our fate to Obama. I'm waiting to see an ad like this in the next few days:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKs-bTL-pRg]
No, sir, we didn't need that mean-spirited photo-ID provision for voters, which was just a nasty Republican plot to keep honest, hard-working, downtrodden Democratic voters from exercising their franchise:
