I like to check in from time to time with Dublin’s Intrade prediction market to see what bettors are thinking about U.S. elections. Intrade (presumably) is a for-profit version of the Iowa Futures Market created some years ago by the University of Iowa to test the accuracy of political predictions when money is at stake. Those predictions have proved to be […]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Lamp Shade Photos
You know those terribly embarrassing photos from high school? The ones where you were cross-eyed with your tongue thrust sideways or sporting a peach fuzz mustache atop a Frankie-Says-Relax tee shirt? (That wasn’t me.) I can’t help but think that the photos being posted by this week’s Wall Street protesters will one day become fodder for bachelorette parties […]
Read the rest of this entry »Pondering the Death Penalty
I used to be against the death penalty. Then I read the transcript of the torture and murder of a teenage girl by two men in the 1980’s. They audiotaped their barbarity for kicks, taking turns in the back of a van doing things so cruel that I had to stop reading about them. It […]
Read the rest of this entry »The Rug Under Our Feet
Ughh. I’m going to have to re-think everything…
Read the rest of this entry »When the Fire Goes Out
On Election Day 1989, while working ballot security in Harlem for the mayoral campaign of Republican Rudy Giuliani, I saw the most extraordinary thing. I was in the passenger seat of a car stopped at 125th Street and Lexington Avenue as an African-American volunteer for the Democratic candidate, David Dinkins, carried an elderly black woman in […]
Read the rest of this entry »Feting a Crook
Rep. Charlie Rangel (D) will be feted today at the unveiling of a portrait he, himself, commissioned with $64,000 raised from special interest PACs while he briefly served as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Everyone will be there – the House Republican leader, Nancy Pelosi (D), New York senators Chuck Schumer and […]
Read the rest of this entry »California, Bon Voyage
Disaster enthusiasts have long predicted that the San Andreas Fault would one day sever California from the U.S. mainland. Too late. It has already happened, and it didn’t take an earthquake to do it. Stoned radicals – they just have to be – have accomplished what the earth’s crust has long resisted. West Hollywood, […]
Read the rest of this entry »Ahmadinejad’s Tiny Violin
Has anyone not had the following conversation over a large pitcher of beer at some point in life? “If you had a rifle and a clear line of vision on Adolph Hitler in, say, 1922 — when he hadn’t done anything terrible yet — would you take the shot, knowing what you know now?” […]
Read the rest of this entry »Thanks But No Thanks, Uncle Sam
I’m in trouble with my wife again. Not a lot of trouble because a.) she is crazy about me for some reason, and b.) I suspect she agrees with me, deep down inside, on the very thing she is mad at me for this time. But I’m marginally in the dog house this week nonetheless. […]
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