Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Barack Obama would do well to take a hint from the "Duck Dynasty" candidate's victory: Medicaid expansion is popular, even if Obamacare isn't. Riser was a Jindal acolyte in the state legislature who saw first-hand the governor's approval rating dip as he opposed the expansion of Medicaid. That's the dilemma Republicans face: As unpopular as …
Continue reading "Should Have Nationalised Medicaid to Start With"
I guess it was inevitable sooner or later, but now we're here: last Tuesday, Chattanooga's City Council approved an ordinance to extend employment benefits for the city to domestic partners and not just those joined by civil marriage. As is the case with many unicameral legislatures, it takes two readings to make this official, and …
Continue reading "It's Crunch Time in Chattanooga for Same Sex Benefits"
This piece is, in some sense, obligatory. Just about everyone alive and out of the crib then remembers where he or she was when they learned that Jack Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Although there have been recent potshots at the Boomers’ obsession with the subject, it’s not a bad …
Continue reading "Camelot Not Quite: My Reflections on JFK, Fifty Years After"
What a difference two decades makes: Predicting the imminent collapse of the U.S. dollar, a Russian lawmaker submitted a bill to his country’s parliament Wednesday that would ban the use or possession of the American currency. Mikhail Degtyarev, the lawmaker who proposed the bill, compared the dollar to a Ponzi scheme. He warned that the …
Abraham Lincoln, that is: A public university in President Abraham Lincoln’s home state of Illinois is adorned with a plaque that states Lincoln – arguably the most famous and influential president in American history – was a Democrat. Lincoln was a Republican. History is such a stinker sometimes...
National Journal's Ron Fournier is sorry: I'm sorry you campaigned for reelection on the famous false promise: "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan. Period." I'm sorry your aides debated whether to tell the full truth (that people could keep their insurance only if it hadn't …
Continue reading "Thinking and Living Bureaucratically in America"
Recently I had a round of correspondence with a county official in Washington state re pile drivability studies and their place in the contract process. (If you're looking for some explanation of this, you can find it here). His question was as follows: During the bidding process, is the contractor's sole basis for anticipating the …
Continue reading "My Perspective on Driven Pile Drivability Studies"
Now that my serialised posting of My Lord and My God is done, we can tackle what is, for Anglicans at least, the obvious question: what relationship does this have with the Sydney Anglicans' contention that subordination does, in fact exist in the Trinity? This has been batted around since the issue first hit the …
Continue reading "Why Sydney Anglican Subordinationism is Lame"
After Hallmark stepped into it: Critics took to Twitter and Hallmark’s Facebook page, accusing the company of making a political statement by using the word “fun” to replace “gay.” Some Facebook commenters said they would never again buy Hallmark merchandise and that the change amounted to the company rewriting Christmas classics in the name of …
For an introduction, explanation and links to the entire work, click here. We have come a long way in our theological adventure concerning the deity of Christ and the nature of the Godhead. Our friends from the Watchtower who have followed us this far are probably glad that such a trip is finally coming to …
Continue reading "My Lord and My God: The End of the Journey"
