SerPolUS_IDES

On the stimulus, the correct story is the big story - the macroeconomic story. According to private forecasters -- not talking Obama administration folks, but private firms that are paid by other private companies to accurately analyze the market -- the stimulus worked.

Americans of both parties overwhelmingly oppose a Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations and unions to spend as much as they want on political campaigns, and most favor new limits on such spending, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

J.L.A. Garcia sees as wicked the viewpoint he attributes to Singer: "He has little use for most of the central elements of ethical sensibility and compunction, seeing rights and virtues as mere instruments in the service of maximizing the satisfaction of interests; and indeed he vigorously rejects the notion that there are distinctively human values-a view he dismisses as the pernicious consequence of "speciesism."

W.B.Wilcox (Yale research fellow) on C.Smith's "Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want" - a book which denies evangelical views are monolithic, or a threat to political moderation & tolerance.

Discussion about Tea Party movement, & article about it on 2/1/2010

FINANCIAL PAGE about the contradictions of economic populism…

Visit to a Tea Party group in Kentucky gives keys to Tea Party's origins & concerns

Wheatcroft lauds Orwell's clear vision about tyrannical tendencies (whereever he saw them, on left or right) & his influence on our language. Though his novels aren't in the world's top literary tier, Evelyn Waugh (with whom Orwell shared an unlikely mutual admiration) described Orwell's greatness in terms of his "unusually high moral sense and respect for justice and truth." Orwell's epitaph could be his own praise for Anatole France's "passion for liberty and intellectual honesty."

Lee Siegel recapitulates an indictment of American life that displeased both right and left - pervasive narcissism resulting from "a decadent definace of nature and kinship." "Long-term social changes," Lasch wrote, have "created a scarcity of jobs, devalued the wisdom of the ages and brought all forms of authority (including the authority of experience) into disrepute."

Matt Beynon Rees (former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time mag) writesprovocative mysteries set in today's Palestinian territories - adopting a humanist perspective focused on ordinary people. A modest protagonist, an aging schoolteacher Omar Yussef, is no one's idea of a hero. But he proves his courage by daring to keep an open mind in a closed society.

Argument that the scientific frame of mind played a leading role in the emergence of democratic governance and individual rights.

In 2010: $50-75 bucks.day very easily from close to home (to avoid flying - yr-round from New York, seasonally from Boston) - go on older ship, shoulder/off-season,Carib or Eur(hi compet'n) inside cabin (Norwegian has window to hall), Avoid alcohol,spa,boat shore excursion,on-board Internet. No tips in Europe.

The author discusses the current timeliness of the 1914 book, "Other People's Money," by Louis Brandeis (future Supreme Court Justice). Melvin A. Urofsky is a Brandeis scholar and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

China has nothing comparable to the research, industrial and economic resources of the United States. Yet the Chinese are blowing us away in the technology race to the future

In China, 42 high-speed rail lines have opened or are set to open by 2012; the U.S. hopes to build its first high-speed line by 2014. The Chinese bullet train, which has the world's fastest average speed, travels 664 miles from Guangzhouon the coast to Wuhan, deep in the interior. In a little more than three hours. Travelling the same distance from Boston to southern Virginia, the train takes less time than Amtrak's fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston to New York. By comparison, the United States hopes to build its first high-speed rail line by 2014 - linking only the 84 miles between Tampa and Orlando, Fla.

Karl Rabeder, an Austrian Horation Alger, decided he'd be freer if he gave away his fortune to a micro-credit philanthropy he set up in South America. He does not pass judgment on other rich people who don't follow his example

The price of heating oil has risen to about $3.01 a gallon, triggering the LI quandry: Which is the best bet, oil or natural gas?

Q're to help answer question (9/18/09)

Peterson (Secretary of Commerce under Richard Nixon) argues that It's time for corporate leaders to step up with a Marshall Plan-type movement that takes an active role in the public interest.

'"Being unable to stop filibusters can make the party in power look ineffective," said Julian Zelizer , a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University , who's written extensively on the filibuster. "The Republican goal now is to make Obama look like an ineffective leader." Although minority Democrats used the filibuster extensively from 2006 on, 'Republicans appear to be taking the filibuster to a new level. They've filibustered 15 nominees to mid-level jobs that formerly got routine approval;' all but one ultimately were confirmed.