It was disappointing and embarrassing today watching C-SPAN pull up file footage of Barack Obama saying he believes that marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman. I cringed.

I'm hoping in my heart that this is one of those situations where someone ran the poll… Read full post »

The Lisp Programming language turns 50 next week. Lisp is the second-oldest “high level” programming language. Fortran is the oldest.

I'm honored to have been chosen to speak alongside a really distinguished list of speakers at a celebratory event to be held in Nashville on Monday.

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Obama showed great judgment in assessing what was important here and what wasn't, and in holding back against the temptation to chase pointless things. He didn't confuse the battle with the war in the way McCain seemed to, which speaks to his understanding of tactics and strategy, however McCain want… Read full post »

Due to a recent change to OS, the "My Recent Comments" suddenly became dramatically… Read full post »

“I think John really has to focus on the economy. I think he should not hesitate to criticize Sen. Obama's economic proposals, which I think would make the recession worse,” Lieberman said during a visit to rally GOP campaign workers and woo Jewish voters in Greater Cleveland. “I

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“I think there have been quite a few reporters recently,” said Mr. McCain’s closest adviser, Mark Salter, “who have sort of implied, or made more than implications, that somehow we’re responsible for the occasional nut who shows up and yells something about Barack Obama

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I have recently been thinking about a game I’ve not played for years, called Stratego®. It was fun to play in some ways, but bothered me in others because once you played, people would know your strategy. After the game had played out, people could inspect what you’d done, so it… Read full post »

Scott K suggested that Saturday Night Live should not be featuring the real Sarah Palin until the hate speech at her rallies is under control. I totally concur with him there. Assembling people in numbers and whipping them up into a hate-filled frenzy is dangerous. While the United States makes a… Read full post »

To his credit, John McCain today seems to have tried out a few of the ideas I suggested in my article An Inconvenient Hate. Did he get the idea from me? That would be fun, but it doesn't matter. Regardless of why he did it, let's just always be unambiguously thankful and… Read full post »

It's a loathesome practice, hate-mongering. I don't know why someone would do it at any time. It's just destructive and serves no good end. But, if it even makes sense to say it this way, John McCain is picking an especially bad time. As a nation, we're too on edge for… Read full post »

Why does Trader Joe's insist that Splenda® is not healthy, and therefore refuse to stock foods containing it, while being happy to stock large amounts of chocolate and other foods full of fats or sugars?

What is with this stubborn insistence that natural foods are what's healthy and that foods… Read full post »

One of the cascade effects we're going to see really soon, if the government does not block it, will be people missing payments on credit cards and finding that their credit card rates shoot through the roof.

For the last many months, credit card companies have been quietly issuing complicated… Read full post »

I think Bush doesn't believe in Democracy.

He says he does, of course. But independent of the Newspeak that pours forth when he speaks, his actions make it clear that he doesn't care at all about what the American people think.

It isn't any one thing. It isn't the… Read full post »

My question tonight is simple: Why don't politicians engage us to a greater degree as partners in what is alleged to be our own Government? I'll probably have more to write on this another day, but for today I just want to offer the text of a hypothetical speech I was… Read full post »

Just after the VP debate tonight, Joe Blow wrote the following in his article Still "Not Ready to Lead":

The only thing I have to say in her defense is that she came off looking a lot better than in previous media encounters, which begs this question: Was she sandbagging… Read full post »

There may be lean times on Wall Street, but it's Christmas at Wal-Mart. They're starting it early this year because some shoppers “need to spread out their Christmas shopping over a longer time-frame than they may have last year.”

Leaving aside for just a moment the various arguments mad… Read full post »

On Real Time with Bill Maher recently, Andrew Sullivan was raising the issue of home ownership and lamenting the fact that there is special preference for buying homes in the tax law. Why discourage renting?

This issue is personal to me because I once did some home repairs and paid… Read full post »

Am I the only one who wonders if the Republicans actually plan on an every-few-years electoral failure as a way of giving them cover for the excesses of their policies? I almost think they'd like to lose this one at this point because so much stuff is about to fall in,… Read full post »

Sometimes my posts or my comments run long and I don't notice. That's because I have a nice big 1600x1200 LED screen. So text I write often doesn't seem so long to me until I see it posted next to something someone else wrote. Oops. I hope all my readers have… Read full post »

I've been pondering what happens if the Republicans lose confidence in Palin. They have to know she can't do the job. I'm sure they're just trying to find a way to spin the inevitable.

Long before the election started, I said that Romney was the one to worry about. I'm… Read full post »

On the discussion thread for Paul Levinson's blog post Obama Should Reject McCain's Call to Postpone Friday Debate, Tim4change writes:

First, forgive me if this is a repeat of someone else's comment: I think this one is a no-brainer. Go ahead, have both of them go back to Washington and

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I've been asking everyone I know who they're supporting in the election. I'm a political independent who's supporting Obama, so it's probably no surprise that my friends are either independents or Democrats supporting Obama as well.

Once in a while, though, I find someone who's supporting McCain. Th… Read full post »

At my personal web site, I occasionally write essays on various political topics, and there's an essay about the FDIC that I just went back and re-read and found myself to be pretty happy with it for as far as it goes.  But today I thought I'd expand on it a… Read full post »