The announcement that the Fed Cuts Interest Rate by Quarter Point is another nail in the coffin of dollar hegemony. Dollar hegemony, for those of you who aren't familiar with the term, is the phenomenon whereby the status of the dollar as the world's premier reserve currency affords the greenback "privileges" that other currencies lack. …
The Mother of All Tax Reforms and Battles, Spiritual and Otherwise
Charles Rangel is proposing the "Mother of All Tax Reforms." But he may not know the origin of the phrase he's using to describe it. It's obviously a takeoff of Saddam Hussein's "Mother of All Battles" description of what turned out to be (for him) the rout of the first Gulf War. In a place …
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The Class Dilemma of the Edwards Campaign
The news report put out by the Carolina Week staff (video below) and the attempt by John Edwards' campaign to get it pulled shows the dilemma that every candidate that runs on the left has in dealing with the "contradictions" (as Mao Dun would put it) in advancing their cause. Conventional wisdom would have us …
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Terror watch list swells to more than 755,000
The terror watch list has expanded to include more than 755,000 names. Almost six years ago I wrote Levelling the Playing Field, and proposed the following hypothetical government action in the wake of 9/11: Enacted restrictions on who could fly, empowering the government to "prequalify" travellers on the commercial air system. In a country as …
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Why I Cannot Vote for Hillary, and Other Matters
Greg Cruey has come back with some interesting points in his response to "Keeping Liberals Entertained." But let me start with his last one, namely voting for Hillary Clinton. One of the enduring problems with the current occupant of the White House is that he will not change his idea when events demonstrate that it …
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Keeping Liberals Entertained
Greg Cruey of the Universities Weblog referred to my piece on the litigation between the University of California and Christian schools as "entertaining." I'm glad to be of service. Liberals are a hard bunch to entertain. Especially these days, since, if they succeed in defeating the domestic Christian Right, they still have to beat the …
Making Up Our Minds on What We Believe
In his piece Why Does Turkey Hate America? (an interesting subject in itself,) "Spengler" puts the central issue of Christianity (and Islam, for that matter) as succinctly as one could want: I have never believed that such a thing as "moderate Islam" exists, any more than I believe that "moderate Christianity" exists. Either Jesus Christ …
Today It’s Socks the Cat. Tomorrow It Will Be You.
If Hillary can dump Socks the cat, she's capable of doing anything. Our reaction:
The Two Hard Questions About Evangelicals Moving Up
D. Michael Lindsay's book Faith in the Halls of Power documents the rise of evangelicals in American society. That's an interesting subject, one that I dealt with some in Taming the Rowdies. But I think there are two hard questions that need to be answered before people on both sides get too excited about this. …
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Turkey fears Kurds, not Armenians
America is not responsible for chaos in the Middle East. The Middle East has known nothing but chaos for most of its history. The colonial policy of the European powers after World War I left inherently unstable structures in place that must, one day, meet their reckoning. But America’s obsession with the surgical implant of …
Positive Infinity 