It seems we are about to embark on a long overdue “dialog on race”…
I believe that, fundamentally, we don’t want to talk about it. Some of us like to rant about it, for sure, but if the rest of us actually talked about it calmly and rationally we would steal their spotlight. And really, it would be uncomfortable. Americans really aren’t used to being uncomfortable. We will go to any lengths — even selling our own liberty — to avoid it.
Here we are in the thick of the election season and, as always happens during such times, we hear endless declarations from the candidates about the various problems that they will fix for us if we will only vote for them, and endless discussion from activists and advocates and self-declared victims and would-be policy-makers about […]
I expect, then, that he runs his practice strictly on a cost-reimbursement basis. After all, any money he or his staff take home at the end of the day to pay their mortgages or to feed their families or to buy cars and gizmos or to pay for entertainment — whatever money they take home to live their lives — comes from profit.
My wife and I are worried about having enough money for a comfortable retirement. With the states of the economy and the world as they are we have been quite anxious. So I’ve come up with a plan:
The current debate over reform of the Social Security system has taken on all the qualities of an argument between 6-year-olds, reduced in essence to the intellectual content of the classic “Is not!”, “Is so!”.
At some point in listening to the endless debates over how much the government should spend and how that spending should be allocated – in other words, in the debate over the fundamental operations of government – it occurred to me that one of the problems we have in discussing such things is that very few people actually know what we spend already. ‘Conservatives’ decry “welfare spending” and want to beef up defense; ‘liberals’ demand “butter before guns”, convinced that we spend only a pittance on social needs and a fortune on the military. But when I looked at the actual numbers (for FY2004 at the CBO web-site) I was somewhat surprised at how the money is actually allocated, and I would bet that most people share my ignorance. I would further bet that if you asked ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ to guess at the allocation of federal resources you would get vastly different estimates, with ‘conservatives’ grossly over-estimating and ‘liberals’ grossly under-estimating the relative weight assigned to “social programs” (and with them reversed on “defense”).
The question of the day seems to be whether Spain’s election results and subsequent announcement that they would withdraw their troops from Iraq amounted to an exercise in democracy or an act of appeasement. Notwithstanding the vehemence and sanctimony accompanying pronouncements either way, the answer may simply be “Yes. Both.”
The rebellion in Haiti that brought U.N. peacekeepers to the island early in 2004 came during the heat of the Democratic presidential primary season. As a result every candidate felt the need not only to make some pronouncement on the situation but to criticize the administration for its response. At times it seemed the response itself was irrelevant to the critique – politics demanded criticism whatever the policy might be.
Notwithstanding their characterization by opponents of the war in Iraq, arguments in favor of war were never as simplistic or one-dimensional as “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, imminent or otherwise, and never presumed any direct link between Iraq and the attacks on the World Trade Center.
The issue of abortion is once again forming the backdrop for the political show of our election cycle. And, as for the last thirty years, it is the bogeyman in the shadows, obsession of the few, ignored by the many until it is needed by politicians to frighten voters when they seem to be happy with the opposition. Abortion is universally recognized as divisive and intractable, a subject to be used for advantage among partisans but avoided in polite company, a fuse you can light but cannot control.