Good consumerism vs. Bad Consumerism
By Alexander Rai04/26/2005
Piles of car magazines, worn posters dangling on walls peppered with tack marks, a desk littered with corpses of writing utensils whose gelatin life force have long waned, assignments from school and work heaped askew, licentiously co-inhabiting with half used nose wipes whose yellow blotches of viscous wetness had hardened into a fibrous clot. Coins of denominations casting a metal menagerie on the dust laced deskscape. Troves of useless pennies, some shining like gaudy Mexican tourist trinkets, others crusted with 60s vintage gringo dirt and lint: strewn like clamshell tokens of conscience. Dust specks layering every possible article and surface, the slightest movement of limb setting off a sneeze. Welcome to suburban life in the capital of world consumerism.
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The Aryan-American’s chagrined embarrassment: The sentimental fallacy and criminal inconsistencies of the extreme Right Wing
By Alexander Rai04/21/2005
Ann Coulter, a 44 year old thinly curved blonde, is the conservative right-wing’s most strident mouthpiece. Piecing in radical interpretation of homespun values with xenophobic hypertension; her rough garment of polemic invokes the image of the moisturized skin of an ill-tempered transvestite soaking under a burlap dress after a hard night’s work.
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"Walk on Water": Learning To Be Light In A Heavy World
By Alexander Rai04/16/2005
Eyal is an ace hit man working for the Mossad, the infamous Israeli secret service. On a mission to assassinate a Hamas leader on vacation leave to Turkey, “Walk on Water,” an Israeli Academy Award Winner of 2004 and official selection of the Toronto Film festival that same year, Eyal introduces the troubled and nuanced narrative of the conflict between Arabs and Jews in the memory of the uneasy Jewish past with Germany.
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Conservatives target America’s colleges and universities
By Robert Adler04/14/2005
Claiming a pervasive liberal bias in academia, conservative students at the University of North Carolina have sued professors, “wanted” posters have pilloried academics in Colorado and Indiana, red stars have been pasted on professors’ doors in California, and politicians have introduced versions of a so called "Academic Bill of Rights" in 14 state legislatures and in Congress.
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Death Tax Woes – A Moral Argument
By Michael Hussey04/14/2005
Listening to the debate over the future of the estate/death tax highlights a striking deficiency in the conservative game plan. The left blames their recent election-losing streak on their inability to communicate with the public on a moral level. In the case of the estate tax, the proponents of the tax are the only side presenting the argument in a context of morality, and they will win this debate unless those arguments are countered on the same level.
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IRS Plans Private Revenue Hunters
By Mike Pechar04/10/2005
The Internal Revenue Service has announced plans to hire contract firms to collect taxes, paying them a bounty of up to 25% of the money they recover. Deputy IRS Commissioner Rich Morgante said the project is scheduled to start by the end of 2005.
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Pope Talk and Middle East Fundamentalists
By Dennis Fox04/08/2005
I've been skimming all the talk about Pope John Paul II's funeral and the impact of his quarter century in power. Although the mainstream reports I've seen are as superficially respectful as one would expect, it's been good to see the many bloggers and alternative media columns dissecting JP's regressive defense of Catholic orthodoxy. I especially liked this from David Corn:
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Israel/Palestine Political Impressions
By Dennis Fox04/07/2005
During a month-long December/January visit to Israel and the West Bank, I quickly noticed the obvious: many Palestinians and Israelis hoped Mahmoud Abbas's expected election as President of the Palestinian Authority would end the violence and lead to a Palestinian state. The optimism was refreshing, but I didn't share it.
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Illegal Alien Girls Held On Fear of Suicide Bombing Plot
By Mike Pechar04/07/2005
From a report in the New York Times:
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Clinton Aid Gets Plea Deal for Document Destruction
By Stephen Macklin04/01/2005
When the story broke that a former Clinton Administration National Security Advisor had removed highly classified documents from the national archives, and had destroyed some of them, Sandy Berger claimed it was an accident. Today it was announced along with his plead deal that Berger acknowledges the incidents were not inadvertent.
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