Welcome back to school, kids. Football games, band practice, boring food in the cafeteria and, oh, yes, your ISTEP tests. Sharpen your pencils and get lots of sleep, but don't worry. It's just your entire future that's at stake.
Welcome back to school, kids. Football games, band practice, boring food in the cafeteria and, oh, yes, your ISTEP tests. Sharpen your pencils and get lots of sleep, but don't worry. It's just your entire future that's at stake.
People keep missing the point of Indiana's time-zone debates: Oh, we'll have an even-more-confusing patchwork of zones, and people will still make fun of us rubes, boo-hoo. Certainly that might be true if the federal Department of Transportation were to grant all the requests from counties that want to switch zones. It won't. It will consider patterns of economic activity, which means the burden of proof will be on those who want to change.
Even in Indianapolis, home of the dreaded UniGov, not everyone is an enthusiastic supporter of consolidated government. It's worth noting that the sheriff seems more opposed to the interim committee than consolidation itself. The General Assembly gave its permission for the merger of city and county police, but the office of sheriff is a constitutionally mandated one, so the sheriff would end up in charge of the consolidated police departments.
The News-Sentinel won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1982 flood. That's when a newspaper can really shine -- when disaster strikes, and people desperately need to know what's going on. Well, there was this tiny little diaster in New Orleans, and the New-Orlleans Times-Picayne has done heroic work in continuing to publish. It certainly deserves at least consideration for a Pulitzer. But the Pulitzer people have these rules, you know.
You can probably figure out what the vulgarity is. If people never said anything but nice things, we wouldn't need a First Amendment:
"As much as you might shake your head at what kind of reasoning is involved, it's not prohibited," Conboy said. "A person who wants to make a statement in public, that doesn't invoke a violent response, is protected by the constitution."
If your only Katrina goal is to find one more reason to disparage Bush's brain or to reflexively defend him no matter what, you probably won't like this article. But if, like most people, you're just trying to figure out what went wrong and what we can learn from it, you will find it thoughtful and insightful. Peggy Noonan batted about .500 as a presidential speech writer (she came up with "a thousand points of light" and the unlamented "read my lips -- no new taxes").
John Roberts has finished his testimony, and nobody touched him or made him flinch. The only question remaining is how many Senate Democrats will vote for him. It had better be quite a few, or the party will show itself to be completey out of touch with that "mainstream" everybody keeps talking about.
Robert Wise will be remembered mostly for "West Side Story" and "Sound of Music," two of the most successful movie musicals of all time. But I will always appreciate him for 1951's "The Day the Earth Stood Still," still one of the best science fiction movies ever.
And here I thought Germany was such a happy-go-lucky, fun-loving country. Ve haf vays of making you frown!
Lordy, lordy ... this is just . . . I mean . . . how can? . . . I can't understand . . . what a bunch of . . . aarggh! Does Tom DeLay actually believe this nonsense, or does he think Americans are witless fools? One of DeLay's fellow Republicans, Jeff Flake of Arizona, wondered if "we've been serving in the same Congress." I think a fairer question is whether Mr. DeLay is even on the same planet.
This article about telecommuting (or "teleworking," a new one on me) talks only about pressure from rising gas prices and telecenters that allow people to do work closer to home, thus missing completely the real revolution: The ability of more people, because of technological advances, to do all their work without even leaving home. My brother lives in Hill Country, Texas, a good four-hour drive from his office in Houston.
Headline writers live for chances like this. Congress makes it so easy.
Politicians are among those expressing bewilderment that blacks and whites can look at exactly the same set of Katrina facts and come to such diametrically opposed opinions. Wonder how that puzzlement breaks down among Democrats and Republicans. Just asking.
Not much to say about Day 3 of the Roberts hearing. His confirmation is seen as such a sure thing that Democrats seem to have lost heart and Republicans are asking even easier questions, if that is possible.
Warning: You can really get sucked into this site and spend hours and hours there. It features daily podcasts of old-time radio shows such as "Fibber McGee and Molly," "The Shadow," Big Band concerts . . . If you listen to the first epidsode of "Gunsmoke," with William Conrad as the voice of Matt Dillon, pay attention to the early part where the marshal is complaining about all the people willing to exploit a bank robbery and double killing for their own reasons.
Let's see. Elected officials do things for people, who are grateful, who then vote for those officials again. It's called "constiuent services," and it's pretty much how politics has always worked. Most politicians, though, are smart enough not to leave a paper trail that might be embarrassing to have to explain.
At some point, is it possible that science and religion will meet, as we get closer to the beginning of the universe and the mind of God? Just asking. Read a little quantum mechanics if you want to really start to wonder; Newtonian principles do not explain everything. Oh, and don't miss this:
If you don't mind the fact that we're going to have a de facto national ID card in the United States, then you probably aren't worried about the possiblity of getting a Citizens Service Number. Just think of all that stuff about you already in computers, waiting patiently to be gathered together and . . . sometimes it's easy to get paranoid.
Here are the highlights of Day 2 of the Roberts confirmation hearings yesterday. Note how many different ways various senators try to get the nominee to give a hint on how he might vote on certain issues that might come before the court. A nominee can't answer such questions because that would mean he couldn't hear cases with an open mind. So, senators are trying to get Roberts to violate one of the most sacred judicial tenets.
So you don't have to do all the work, here are the most obnoxious Katrina quotes . . . so far.
