Michael Goodwin is a little bit behind the times:
Last week's headlines prove the point: North Korea fires missiles, Iran talks of nukes again, Iraq carnage continues, Israel invades Gaza, England observes one-year anniversary of subway bombing. And, oh, yes, the feds stop a plot to blow up tunnels under the Hudson River.
World War III has begun.
If you have a son or daughter heading off to college whom you have been coddling all these years, you might want to rehink it in the next couple of months, WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME:
An excellent question: Where are Star Wars critics now?
North Korea's threatening spate of missile launches — including an unsuccessful try with an advanced version of its Taepodong 2 Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile that is capable of hitting the United States — has sparked a cacophony of talk from leaders and foreign policy experts around the world.
What are we fighting against? The fundamentalists who think this is what civilization should be like:
Muslims who fail to pray five times daily will be sentenced to death under the rule of Islamic clerics who have taken over the Somali capital Mogadishu.
Go ahead. Blame such insanity on Western deecadence and imperialist arrogance.
I've known some doctors with lousy bedside manners, but this guy takes the cake:
A judge has ordered the state Board of Medicine to stop disciplinary proceedings against a doctor accused of telling a patient she was so obese she might only be attractive to black men and advising another to shoot herself following brain surgery.
First, we had the finger in the Wendy's chili, and now:
A woman who tried to extort money from the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain by putting a dead mouse in a bowl of soup was sentenced to a year in jail.
It used to be easy for anti-establishment rock stars (who manage to stay anti-establishment while making millions from it, by the way): Just support the liberal. It's apparently a little tougher these days, now that Iraq has beome THE issue, as we see in this account of John Mellencamp's ire:
How The New York Times might have covered the American Revolution (via boortz.com):
I guess I come down on the "be honest" side. You can't persuade people to change unless you make them understand what the problem is:
Is it OK for doctors and parents to tell children and teens they're fat?
That seems to be at the heart of a debate over whether to replace the fuzzy language favored by the U.S. government with the painful truth -- if kids are obese or overweight, telling them.
Well, I guess not all border issues are insurmountable:
Wildlife officials in Mexico, the United States and Canada have agreed to work together to protect the Monarch butterfly, which makes a spectacular migration every year from Canada to Mexico.
Potential presidential candidate Evan Bayh says this about Democrats and Iraq:
. . . the Democratic Party has "a diversity of views ... about what to do in Iraq," which may have muddled the party's stance.
OK, I'm convinced. I am for accountability in education, but you can now count me among those who think we're so obsessed with testing students that we don't have the time to teach them anything or, more important, give them the desire to learn. We have the state ready to release massive amounts of data:
I hope you don't lose too much sleep over this, but the Brits don't like us much these days:
The YouGov poll found that 77 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement that the US is "a beacon of hope for the world".
[. . .]
A massive 83 percent of those questioned said that the United States doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks.
New Jersey has shut down. Did you notice? Do you suppose many people there did?
The dice stopped rolling, dealers quit shuffling and slot machines fell silent Wednesday as New Jersey's casinos closed for the first time, the latest victims of a five-day state government shutdown that showed no signs of ending soon.
Am I being insenstive if I wish Cindy Sheehan the greatest success, if you know what I mean, with her peace diet?
About 150 protesters sat in front of the White House on Monday to savor their last meal before starting a hunger strike that some said will continue until American troops return from Iraq.
I think this member of the Fort Wayne-Allen County Airport Authority should be gracious and leave the board so that someone with more time and/or interest can be appointed:
Sports agent Eugene Parker has attended less than a third of the meetings of the Fort Wayne-Allen County Airport Authority, on which he serves, in the last year. Even so, he continues to have the support of Mayor Graham Richard, who appointed the Roanoke-based lawyer to the board in July 2004.
Most people aren't paying attention to this. I think it's going to be a big deal, but I have no clue how it's going to turn out:
Indiana started taking applications Monday for statewide video franchises, upending the decades-old system by which each locality decided which cable company or companies could operate on its turf.
Indiana House Democratic leader Parick Bauer writes in USA Today about his displeasure over the Indiana Toll Road deal. Keep your eye on the cards -- he deals one or two from the bottom of the deck. Though the state is leasing the road to a private consortium, Bauer keeps calling it a sale:
