Posted over on the New York Times, waiting for approval.
( Oh my god, politics, don't read this )

I ended up writing a letter to Salon about the "Infinite Debt"/Dateline NBC takes on debt:
There's another article on the same topic which absolutely horrified me recently: "Infinite Debt" by Thomas Geoghegan in Harper's. It lays out in stark detail how the abolition of usury laws in the US (under the tender ministrations of credit-industry ( Read more... )

I don't like writing this sort of thing, and I'm going to try to avoid doing so in the future. It started as a reply to a piece by Glenn Greenwald of Salon on the sudden turn-around by Senate Democrats on the issue of torture. Senators Feinstein and Wyden, fierce advocates against torture during the Bush Administration, are suddenly backtracking as ( Read more... )

A response to a rather horrifying editorial in the NYT ("The Jungle, Again"), about the rather remarkable and egregious persecution of workers in a slaughterhouse.
Of course the Bush Administration enjoys persecuting the poor and weak! How can anyone claim to be surprised by this? The overprivileged sociopaths that now rule this nation, virtually ( Read more... )

Sir ( Read more... )

A letter to Salon about Narnia in neon, an article about the children's television of Sid and Marty Krofft (subscription or ad-watch required ( Read more... )

For some reason two of my letters in Salon on this topic were selected as "editors choice". Here's the thread. I've replaced various other user names with variations on [user], to protect their privacy - silly though that is, since the posts are public on Salon. This will be quite long, by the way! There's also a bit of repetition, both within the ( Read more... )

Last post tonight, I promise!

PointI'm no genius, but when the original Iraq authorization bill came around it seemed totally obvious to me that it was handing George W. Bush a blank check to do exactly what he desperately wanted and needed to do: get this country into a war that would give the Republicans the whip hand over the Dems ( Read more... )

The story was run while I was on vacation. I find it interesting that the MBCR spokesman was flat-out misleading in the story; he claimed that a locomotive could only pull so many coaches, which is true, but overlooks the fact that the #715 Franklin train only has six single-level coaches at most - which is almost certainly well below its maximum ( Read more... )

In Salon's advice column today there was a letter from a woman whose boyfriend was visually checking out other women - even when they were together. He was apparently trying to hide it, but I guess he wasn't good at it, because she caught him several times.

My boyfriend is checking out chicks while I'm standing right there!My sarcasm mode ( Read more... )