Techie Manager

This is ridiculous…

This sort of thing is why I stopped watching TV news years ago.
P.S. Go Ron!

From CNN:
WASHINGTON (CNN) — At a town hall meeting in South Carolina Wednesday, Arizona Sen. John McCain was asked if there is a plan to attack Iran. McCain began his answer by changing the words to a classic Beach Boys’ song.
“You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran?” the Republican presidential candidate said. Then, [...]

I could have told you this…
A new survey of 1,502 adults released Sunday by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that despite the mass appeal of the Internet and cable news since a previous poll in 1989, Americans’ knowledge of national affairs has slipped a little. For example, only [...]

Good essay from Steve Olson:
When did America become a nation of frightened wimps? When did we cross the line from courage to cowardice? Was it sometime in the 1990s? After the Oklahoma City bombing? After the Columbine shootings? After 911?
When did we decide to allow the police to smash into private homes without knocking and [...]

How timely…
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

Excellent Economist article on why the war in Iraq failed:
What went wrong? The most popular answer of the American neoconservatives who argued loudest for the war is that it was a good idea badly executed. Kenneth Adelman, he of the “cakewalk”, has since called the Bush national-security team “among the most incompetent” of the post-war [...]

Disturbing editorial in the NY Times. And, no, I do not trust our current administration…and I’m not even a liberal…
A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. So it was with a provision quietly tucked into the [...]

Very apropos to the book I’m currently reading… c/o Reason Magazine’s Hit & Run blog:
If you want to celebrate Thomas Paine Day in Arkansas, this has got to be a time that tries your soul.
The proposal by state Rep. Lindsley Smith, Fayetteville Democrat, to commemorate Jan. 29 as “Thomas Paine [...]

Brilliant.