Glenn Greenwald has addressed this already and as per usual, did an amazing job parsing the rhetoric of the Beltway Elite, however, there are a couple things I wanted to add to his analysis. 

For those of you who haven't yet read Glenn's column:

 The Washington Post decided to address… Read full post »

Lately, every time I log onto facebook, I get into some tit-for-tat regarding health care reform with someone I don’t know thanks to the status update that has been making the rounds. You know the one: no one should die or go broke if they can’t afford health care, etc. I… Read full post »

Once upon a time, a British DJ by the name of Benny Benassi had the original idea of gathering together five or six thin, heavily made up,18-22 year old-ish scantily clad women to put in a music video.

 He then had them operate a variety of power tools while making… Read full post »

I have posted quite a few times on my experiences as a loan officer in Subprime Central--Orange County, CA--in order to try to convey that the house of cards was built on shaky ground in the first place, and give a perspective of the loan industry that isn't often offered in… Read full post »

As the bombs rain down on Gaza it is interesting to note yet again the manner in which the the mainstream media betrays its bias. One can believe that Israel is justified in its actions or not; one can believe that Hamas is a terrorist organization or not. The purpose… Read full post »

Writing in the opinion section of CNN, Ruben Navarette Jr. makes an attempt to defend his admiration for Sarah Palin with his contention that she represents "small town values". He does not elaborate with much specificity on what exactly these values might be, except to say that " The ide… Read full post »

Va. pharmacy follows faith, no birth control sales

 This headline appeared about seventeen hours ago on Yahoo news, courtesy the Associated Press, and alongside commentary by women's health activists, included these words from one Catherine Musket, who says she will patronize the pharmacy even t… Read full post »

As someone who was a loan officer during the peak of the subprime feeding frenzy, I have followed the financial meltdown with interest, and have been alternately perplexed, annoyed, and amused when I hear pundits commenting that the markets currently are not "working properly", or that that over-regu… Read full post »

During the Vice Presidential debate, Sarah Palin made sure to go ahead and remind all of us that while "greed and corruption on Wall Street" certainly contributed to the current economic crisis:

..."we need also to not get ourselves in debt. Let's do what our parents told us before we… Read full post »

As Jon Stewart recently pointed out on the Daily Show, we have developed a fascinating form of political rhetoric in which our candidates speak in a finely crafted code to their potential constituents in an effort to convey their policy goals  in such a way as to not really be accountable… Read full post »

I have written about the mayhem that resulted when the managers of subprime loan shops deliberately hired  a young, ignorant, and inexperienced sales force, and then threatened and berated them into selling as many loans as possible. Still, however, one could come away with the impression that t… Read full post »

Is it so simple then? Loan officers lied and cheated, and buyers made bad decisions, and that's that? Could all of this, as one commenter suggested, happened under the Clinton era, and were all loan officers (including me) really bad, greedy people who wanted to make a buck and didn't care… Read full post »

Are any of you asking yourselves how this could happen? How companies such as Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers could fail so publicly and spectacularly after a combined total of over 200 years in business, somehow managing to endure two World Wars and a Great Depression but not the Bush administrati… Read full post »

9% isn't THAT bad, right?  see, out of the categories that weren't specifically reserved for women--categories such as best actress, best supporting actress, etc--only 9% of the people nominated were women. One of them was Heidi Klum, a model turned reality TV host, and one was Tina Fey, who was… Read full post »

The premise of the question makes a few assumptions: 1. that the students should do the sacrificing, not the system, and 2. that school is for training students to "compete". having addressed the first part of these assumptions in an earlier post, i'll turn to the disturbing premise voiced in #2.… Read full post »

Who else got an email from Senator Clinton about the Bush administration's latest effort's to protect the religious beliefs of America's health providers? For those of you who didn't--here a short excerpt from the Op-ed she wrote in the New York Times:

LAST month, the Bush administration launched ...… Read full post »

The premise of this question is so wrong as to be patently and manifestly absurd. See exhibits A and B: 

 exhibit A: My cousin goes to an elite ivy league school that shall remain nameless here. She studies liberal arts because she wants to enjoy learning for the sake of learning. When… Read full post »

The scorn heaped upon community organizers by the Republican National Convention is just a tad ironic, given that Reagan claimed that community organizations could fill the holes left by cuts in social spending. 

 The overall message was that military service was the only kind of service th… Read full post »

I don't think I've had such a vitriolic, irrational, and maniacal hatred for a public figure since Paris Hilton's meteoric rise to fame after the release of her sex tape. In the past four days I have tried to figure out exactly why Sarah Palin, who actually looks more like a… Read full post »

This is another post on Evangelism in America. I am in a doctoral program in a secular university, where I study religion. I did a paper on Evangelism and patriotism post-9/11. Here is an excerpt.

How, exactly, did it come to pass that our government was hijacked by the… Read full post »