Category Archives: politics

A symbolic gesture

This past Friday’s news dump was an agreement between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s camps that Hillary’s name will be put in nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Both sides are trying to sell this as the last step towards bridging the gap between Obama and Clinton supporters, but the only way that assertion could be made more ludicrous would be to resurrect Neville Chamberlain and have him wave a sheet of paper in the air proclaiming this move to bring "peace in our time"…

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Fanfare for the common blah

The Olympics are coming up here in just a couple of days, and if you’re like me then you already stopped caring about them a long time ago. In fact, I’m already getting a head start on not caring about the 2012 Olympics. Seriously, dealing with the Olympics is enough of a struggle in and of itself, but this time around we have the double whammy of an Olympics event marketed on the “special date” of 2008.08.08. I thought those kinds of date-marketing were okay…

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Qualifications

Even back before the United States invaded Iraq, some people on the left were pointing out how the current administration wasn’t talking about Osama bin Laden that much. At the time, though, those voices were kind of on the fringes; the nation as a whole was still not far enough removed from the terrible events of 09.11 that it was all too trusting of the administration’s words and actions. It’s only been in the past few years that there has been widespread understanding that overthrowing…

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It makes you drink

The presidential election cycle slowed down enough this past month or so to allow news organizations to trumpet the fact that Belgian beverage maker InBev is purchasing Anheuser-Busch, the makers of that most American of beers, Budweiser. A hue and cry came from trailer parks all over this country, not only because another American company was being snapped up by a foreign conglomerate, but because most people know next to nothing about Belgium. Seriously, could you find Belgium on a map of Europe? Did you…

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Is it November yet?

For all that this presidential election gets talked up as being so historic, and for all that it has generated an unprecedented level of enthusiasm (at least for as far back as my own memory stretches), I seem to get more and more tired of it by the day. It was kind of a given that once Obama got the nomination he’d start moving to the centre, but I guess I allowed myself to get caught up in that whole "he’s not that kind of…

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