Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for December, 2007

1 Womans Vu of 2007

Posted in Culture, In The News, Media, Politics, Sports, tagged , , , , , , on December 31, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

This is the time of year when retrospectives abound. I spent the weekend perusing the Internet, watching a little TV and reading this and that magazine. You pretty much know what everyone was focusing on, which is to say everything from the Presidential race and the deaths of various political and cultural icons over the [...]

Read Full Post »

Man-Made Disaster

Posted in In The News, Politics, tagged , , , , on December 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is, as everyone has figured out, bad news. Bad for Pakistan. Bad for its enormously unpopular leader Pervez Musharaff. Bad for the population, which, having experienced everything from a devastating earthquake to a recent outbreak of bird flu, finds itself once again hopelessly trapped between a weakened dictator and the press of [...]

Read Full Post »

Good Tidings

Posted in Culture, In The News, Media, tagged , , , , on December 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Come ye now and let us dwell not upon angry disagreements about the meaning of Christmas; nor spend undue amounts of time thinking of the pain of traveling cross-country to see family we scarcely know (though we may spend undue amounts of time in the airports or on the roads). Let us turn our minds [...]

Read Full Post »

Stranger Than Fiction

Posted in In The News, Politics, tagged , , on December 18, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

The primaries are upon us (on top of us really) and the pundits are getting whiplash trying to follow the bouncing polls. Maybe they deserve twenty lashes for bouncing the pols from frontrunner to has-been and back again. Somehow these early primaries and the hooplah that surrounds them seem as divorced from reality as possible. We have commentators asking [...]

Read Full Post »

Drugged with Power

Posted in In The News, Sports, tagged , , , , on December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

If you’re a fan of baseball, which I am, the recent report from George Mitchell about steroid use is disappointing. It’s also unsurprising.  Maybe that’s because the other sport I loosely follow, professional cycling, has also been severely injured by recent drug use revelations. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig made clear in a statement that although specific ballplayers [...]

Read Full Post »

Amen to That

Posted in Culture, In The News, Politics, tagged , , , on December 9, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Last evening I went to a taping of a panel discussion at Princeton University on the separation of church and state. The show was  Dan Rather’s online program on HDNet.  I wanted to see Dan, of course; I’ve been worried about him since the CBS contretemps but can report that he looked hale and hearty. [...]

Read Full Post »

Them’s Fightin’ Words

Posted in In The News, Politics, tagged , , , on December 5, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

A friend of mine was reviewing his work week, which he felt had gone very well. A high school history teacher and varsity coach, he was pleased because his cross country team had swept its division and his Comparative Government students, involved in a model UN exercise, had been named best large delegation. “And to top it all [...]

Read Full Post »

Practicing Democracy

Posted in In The News, Politics, tagged , , on December 4, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

It’s interesting to watch democracy in action in other countries.  In Russia, the elections seemed almost as controlled as in Communist days, consolidating more power for a man nearing the end of his constitutionally mandated limit but showing no signs of departing.  The charasmatic and infuriating leader of Venezuela tried a power grab and his referendum [...]

Read Full Post »