News of the Dead

It’s so over.
Health care, financial reform, pick an issue: they’re all lost, and the depth and breadth of the failure is simply staggering. I find nothing in this article by Michael Brenner (Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations) at Huffington Post to disagree with. In fact, a few days ago I posted and [...]

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You probably need to read this piece by Matt Taibbi, but you won’t be happy afterwards. It’s entitled “The Health Care Bill Dies?,” and he doesn’t need the question mark. Here’s the last paragraph:
This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a [...]

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I happened to glance over at the feeding frenzy at the “free box” adjacent to the recycling center: someone had dropped off a couple boxes of clothes, and half a dozen people were tearing into the donated items, flinging them right and left in a mad rush to find something that fit. I looked more closely: one of them was a big guy with a beard, maybe 30 years old, wearing a beat-up hat and wearing a dress. Well, who doesn’t like matching outfits, I told myself. Fling, rip… I could hardly watch, even with the comic relief.

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I see how it all works now, and the whole thing is scaleable! Very scary.
All I wanted to do was find a pair of what used to be called “tennis shoes” (or “boat shoes” in Maryland), those formerly ubiquitous low-cut white canvas sneakers of days gone by. In past decades, I’d just go to my [...]

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I just heard this from a friend of mine who delivers firewood:
Driving back with a full load of cut piñon from his ranch (a large parcel of forested land on top of a mountain), the heavily loaded truck hit a big rock in the road and cracked the differential case or cover — I didn’t [...]

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This afternoon I deep-cleaned the bathroom, or at least the parts that count.
There’s a stack of tiny little shelves that get filled with dust, mirrors, jars & tubes that need a mercy wipe, the [avert your eyes] bathtub, toilet, all that stuff. And then there’s The Sink: the encrusted mineral deposits around the faucet require [...]

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The following is from a Wall Street Journal article I found today entitled “On the Street, Disbelief and Resignation” concerning the plight of the poor investment bankers, who now have nothing to do and are barely making ends meet:
Inside what’s left of Wall Street, investment bankers are doing all they can to cope with a [...]

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