Politics

YEARNING FOR A GOLDEN AGE….Greg Beato has a great paragraph today on people who pine away for the past: It’s always easy to pick the best from the past (i.e., Casablanca) and compare it with the mediocre of the present, then conclude that they just don’t make them like that anymore. But anyone who bothers […]

PRESCRIPTION DRUGS….I have often wondered about the names given to prescription drugs: Prozac, Viagra, Xanax, Motrin. Who comes up with them? Is it just the marketing department, or are there rules to be followed? And what are they supposed to mean? Wonder no more! This article in the Economist was so interesting that I’m going […]

MORE ON ASTROTURFING….A few days ago I wrote about Republican “astroturfing,” where a bunch of Republican activists all sent the same form letter to a bunch of small newspapers and got them published. It’s “artificial grass roots” letter writing ? astroturfing. Today, Gary Stock ? who also apparently has too much time on his hands […]

HOW MUCH OF A WARMONGER ARE YOU?….Dwight Meredith recommends that we all go visit The Wild Monk, a new blog written by a frequent commenter at Dwight’s site. So I did, and while I was there I took “The WildMonk Iraqi-War Personality Test.” Ah, we’re all suckers for these tests, aren’t we? I scored a […]

DOES PAUL KRUGMAN DRIVE AN SUV?….HOW ABOUT AL SHARPTON?….Tapped is on quite a roll this morning: Krugman, SUVs, guns, Al Sharpton….they’ve got all the bases covered. Check it out.

ANTI-AMERICANISM….OK, since I posted some skepticism about anti-Americanism in Europe the other day, it’s only fair to reprint this poem by Harold Pinter that was published in the Guardian today: Here they go again, The Yanks in their armoured parade Chanting their ballads of joy As they gallop across the big world Praising America’s God. […]

CATS AND DOGS….I know it’s an old schtick that’s been mined dry, but I always get a laugh out of the whole cat people vs. dog people thing. Especially when it’s sincere, as in this post from Bill Sjostrom: I am a dog person. I do not get cats. I do not mean that I […]

ISN’T TAX POLICY INTERESTING?….HERE AT CALPUNDIT IT IS!….A couple of months ago, in a rant about the Wall Street Journal’s “lucky duckies” editorial, I noted that when you take all taxes into account, tax rates are close to the same for all income groups. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I printed a chart showing […]

DOING THE WRONG THING….Hesiod links to this story in the Detroit Free Press today: Heather Pebbles, an employee at a Babies R Us, noticed a baby left alone in a car in freezing weather, so she called the police and then used the store PA sytem to track down the baby’s mother. Here’s her manager’s […]

JOHN LOTT EXPLAINS….I got an email from Mary Rosh/John Lott this morning: From: MaRyRoSh@aol.com To: CalPundit@cox.net Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 5:39 AM Subject: Sorry You are correct. The MaRyRoSh pen name account was created years ago for an account for my children, using the first two letters of the names of my four sons. […]