That, apparently was the one-word response of Press Secretary Robert Gibbs this morning. In his first term in his first year in office, President Obama has been awarded The Nobel Peace Prize. I’m clearly not the only one who’s kind of surprised by this; the President himself, by the look of him on the television […]
Yeah, I know, Banned Books Week was last week, but consider it read that I’m just running a little late. That, and I didn’t have anything particularly interesting to post about it until today, when I found this, a letter from a librarian to a library patron who challenged the inclusion of a book called […]
Scalzi dropped an interesting statement last night, asking if it makes sense to anyone else: As I get older, I worry less about “life being fair” and worry rather more about justice. For my part, I think it does, though to talk about it, one needs to define, exactly, "fairness" and "justice" mean (which is […]
The President is clearly a Jedi master of this element of the Dad-ric arts. Witness Mr. Obama at yesterday’s event promoting Chicago’s quest to host the 2016 Olympic Games: This only really works if he was making hmmmm…zzzshhssszzzz…..hmmmm…zacht! noises, which, come on, you know he was doing (and quite possibly, quoting Darth Vader as well). […]
We all know that Obama gives a good speech, and last night’s health care address to a joint session of Congress was no exception. While I’m still one of those who think that the President’s team ought to have made single-payer the opening debate position, and then compromised on the “public option” idea, I think […]
This guy wants to be the Governor of my state? Not with stuff like this on his record. From the Washington Post: “At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master’s thesis to the evangelical school he was […]
…but from what I’m reading in this Salon piece by Stephen Amidon, there’s a lot that’s right about the quality and egalitarianism of care in the British NHS. In the piece, the author (an American) describes his experience with the NHS while he was living in London, describing in some detail his experiences with both […]
NPR listening can be really expensive. We’re just minding our own business, driving home from our weekend away, and catch today’s episode of Fresh Air, in which Terry Gross spends the hour talking to author and journalist T.R. Reid about his book The Healing of America. The book discusses Reid’s research and investigations into the […]
I’ve been writing a lot about the health care debate these last few weeks, both because I think it’s terribly important that we catch up with the rest of the post-industrial world in the way we take care of our citizens, and because I think it’s terribly important that occasional bits of information make it […]
