"We should make the Social Security system a source of ownership for the American people," President Bush declared in his 2004 State of the Union speech. This muddled phrase was apparently meant to amplify the sentence that came before it: "Younger workers should have the opportunity to build a nest egg by saving part of their Social Security taxes in a personal retirement account." This is one of President Bush's favorite ideas and it's a central tenet of his evolving... Read more
In January, before the State of the Union address, the rumor was that President Bush would use the speech to unveil his vision of the "Ownership Society." The former part-owner of the Texas Rangers was going to outline a sweeping domestic agenda around this theme, we were told. Conservative columnists like David Brooks helped to lay the groundwork for the speech, offering a preview glimpse of what this Ownership Society agenda would look like. Ownership, it turns out, was a... Read more
Sept. 11 changed everything. Before 9/11, for example, most Americans probably didn't worry too much about Finnish theologians infiltrating America's nondenominational seminaries and infecting our unsuspecting, red-blooded American theology students with their Scandinavian theories of pneumatology. Read more
Left Behind is rife with continuity errors of a sort. Yet these inconsistencies are consistent in that most of them seem to involve the myopia of fundamentalist American Christianity — an ignorance or amnesia to any suffering or need that exists outside of the tiny protective bubble that surrounds our main characters. Hence a bored, idle doctor treating our hero while ignoring the plane-crash victims directly outside. Those curious about the editing process that allows such gaping holes in continuity... Read more
Left Behind, pg. 59 Buck Williams and the authors have been so busy checking his e-mail that they seem to have forgotten he has a gory wound on the back of his head from his odd and violent pratfall on the tarmac. He’d better see a doctor. Maybe we could just have one wander by: Buck kept pressing a handkerchief soaked with cold water onto the back of his head. His wound had stopped bleeding, but it stung. … when... Read more
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." — Inigo Montoya The big story this week in Delaware involves the state's corrections officers (i.e., prison guards) who have been working without a contract for more than three years. The state is faced with a terrible shortage of corrections officers. Of the 1,830 posts, 271 are open — meaning everyone else has been working longer hours. Corrections officers have begun refusing to work... Read more
Left Behind, pp. 57-58 I’m not sure, but Steve Plank — the delusional and anti-Semitic executive editor of Global Weekly and Buck Williams’ boss — may get his name from Jesus’ parable/proverb, translated this way in the NIV: Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all... Read more
I'm from New Jersey, so I pretty much have to link to this — Bruce Springsteen's New York Times op-ed: … for the last 25 years I have always stayed one step away from partisan politics. Instead, I have been partisan about a set of ideals: economic justice, civil rights, a humane foreign policy, freedom and a decent life for all of our citizens. This year, however, for many of us the stakes have risen too high to sit this... Read more
Bob Murphy broadcast New York Mets games from the team's inception in 1962 until his retirement at the end of last season. I have been listening to this man's voice my entire life. As a kid, I'd listen to Mets games in bed, with an earpiece plugged into my AM clock radio. The pitching staff was Seaver, Koosman and Matlack. The announcer was Bob Murphy. I've lived in the Philadelphia area since college and I've never been able to tune... Read more
When Mobutu Sese Seko sold the needy for a pair of shoes and looted his national treasury, we knew what to call it. When Ferdinand Marcos sold the needy for 2,000 pairs of shoes and enriched his family at the cost of his people, we knew what to call that. When Robert Mugabe, under the guise of "land reform," confiscates functioning farms in his hungry nation and gives them to his wife and other relatives to become their private plantations,... Read more
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