Let's admit it, Democrats. Now that the election is over, we can take the mask off and show our real agenda. We all know that Mitt Romney was right: We liberals are just dying to get out there and apologize to everyone for everything.

Because we all know how ashamed liberals… Read full post »

I believe in redistributionism.

I believe that the people who have the most in society have a responsibility to transfer some of their largesse to those who don't. And it is the role of government to oversee this transfer.

I believe not all of the poor are lazy.

I believe there… Read full post »

Soft Underbellies

On an underground platform
The rattle of a train amplifying on the tracks
Cells in their hands
Glowing business white and blue

In the nuclei of those cells
Photos of their children
Howling in the sea foam
Lie in the folds, unseen, almost forgotten.

Two weeks ago, we took the kids to the Mississippi Symphony (yes, we have one of those), and in his introductory remarks conductor Crafton Beck called the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth Symphony "one of the most beautiful pieces in all of classical music."

I listened to it then and again now.… Read full post »

 

We all know you are an Applehead. So go ahead and gush about this one.

I won't pretend I don't like Apple products. That made the book more interesting to me, because I'm familiar with the products that Apple produced over the years. The first Apple computer I ever used… Read full post »

From Absolom! Absalom! by William Faulkner:

There was something curious in the way they looked at one another, curious and quiet and profoundly intent, not at all as two young men might look at each other but almost as a youth and a very young girl might out of virginity itself… Read full post »

The conventional wisdom about the fall elections, especially the presidential one, is that it will be decided over the current unemployment picture. Which may be true, but if it is, we will be choosing our leaders over a large bucket of crap -- or, as I like to say, like we… Read full post »

A word about soccer. It isn't boring. That's a prejudice.

If two basketball teams play each other to a final score of 99-98, people say, "Wow, that was a great game! It was close all the way to the buzzer!"

And if two soccer teams play to a 1-0 final? That's… Read full post »

"That government is best which governs least." -- Anonymous

Surprised that the lack of attribution for this quotation? If you are like me, you probably thought this remark was made by Thomas Jefferson. As it turns out, there is no evidence that Jefferson ever said any such thing. The scholars at/… Read full post »

From Life Itself, Roger Ebert's memoir: When April with its sweet showers brought flowers to the lawns of May and birds filled the air with melodies, Dan-Dan the Yo-Yo Man made his annual pilgrimage to our playground at St. Mary's School. (p.49) This is a parody of the first…

Read full post »

When I was in medical school, ties were required on all clinical rotations. Ties for men, equivalent dress for women. Even in surgery we were expected to remove our surgical scrubs and put on a dress shirt and tie before we rounded on the floors. It was a discipline I… Read full post »

About a month ago, I had an accident at work. I put one of my gel pens in my lab coat pocket without placing the cap on properly. The pen leaked and ruined the coat and the dress shirt underneath.

Pens and I have a very uneasy relationship. Most people don't… Read full post »

So you read a book about global warming. What are you, a liberal?

Actually, I'm a scientist. And like a scientist, I draw conclusions by collecting the available data and figuring out what it means. Data have nothing to do with politics, no matter what the politoidiots say.

So I guess… Read full post »

Today I finished the last part of my Internal Medicine recertification. I can't say I was pleased by the process. Although I understand the need for some kind of certification process to guarantee physician competency, I think the American Board of Internal Medicine is going about this in all the wro… Read full post »

Why did you read this book?

Not because of the HBO series, which I have never seen. I pay the cable company a king's ransom every month. There's no way I'm paying extra for a movie channel. No, what first pricketh my interest in this medieval fantasy novel was a story… Read full post »

In instances like this, yes, there is a federal role. Yes, we're going to find the money. We're just going to need to make sure that there are savings elsewhere to continue to do so.

-- US Rep. Eric Cantor, August 29, 2011

Setting: The Cantor family home, near Richmond, VA.… Read full post »

Now that the pseudo-crisis of the debt limit is over, the real crisis begins. The stock market continues to stumble, faster since the so-called resolution was passed on Monday. It was hardly a resolution. it was a joke. And the stock market is proving what we all knew to be true/… Read full post »

I am horrified to find that it has been 9 months since my last post. I can give the usual excuse, that I have been busy, but as a teacher of mine was always fond of saying, "Busy people always have time."

In other words, the people who make excuses for… Read full post »

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, I see no point in revisiting the misery of that week for me and my family, for venting outrage over the government response, or weeping over the wound New Orleans suffered. Instead, a  list of a few things I lost in the storm, and miss still.… Read full post »

First off, I want to say that I am a big fan of Book TV. I love that there is at least one channel on cable that devotes serious time to books. We've got Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's 6 minute interview segments that are often devoted to a book, but… Read full post »

Congratulations, Nick Saban. No one thought, after taking Alabama to the BCS Championship in college football, that you could top yourself so soon. But boy, you pulled it off. The biggest hypocrite in the United States for the month of July. Great job, champ.

Here's Nick at an SEC press conference… Read full post »

Saturday, June 12th is Loving Day, a great American holiday. I have written about it before, but feel so strongly about it that I write about it again.

Loving Day is the annual celebration of Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia, a 1967 Supreme Court Decision decision tha… Read full post »

Today I open C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity once again, because I need it. I first read Mere Christianity about a decade ago during a crisis in faith. It was and has been one of the most consoling books I have ever read. And I don’t think books are worth much if… Read full post »

As Super Bowl Sunday approaches, we're seeing more and more of the human angle stories about players, fans, and the cities the two contenders come from. Stories about several Haitians playing in the game, about Katrina and the Saints, about Peyton Manning's connections with New Orleans, about… Read full post »

You know all those jokes about Mississippi and indoor plumbing? Well, this past week, they were all true.

The recent cold weather that blanketed the entire country struck Jackson, Mississippi, too. We had roughly 60 consecutive hours below freezing, which is very unusual for the deep South. The resul… Read full post »