Josh's Blog

Tue Jan 5, 2021 @ 4:05 pm

What's going on, 2021

Back in May, when the US passed 100,000 Covid deaths, the NYT ran a sadly beautiful interactive piece that attempted to memorialize and contextualize …

"all this"

I’ve been pretty down since the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg late last week. There’s a lot of folks online with dire predictions for the future …

Blow

We are, each of us, a little wind. Mostly, we are good little winds. We blow a little, here and there. We do what we can to increase joy and diminish …

What We Didn't Know Has Hurt Us

There's a fascinating article at CJR, "What We Didn't Know Has Hurt Us", about the explosion of classified documents under the Bush administration.

I found this bit mind-boggling:

Far more troubling was the revelation in 2006 that more than twenty-five …

Bush's Economy

So, you think things are bad? The Washington Post can tell you just how bad, in glorious, sickening detail:

President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists …

The view from over here

An excellent editorial by the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland sums things up nicely:

Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration …

Read more… • Posted in: 2008 election

Thu Oct 2, 2008 @ 1:15 am

… how many conservative chatterboxes have actually heard Pelosi's "hyper-partisan" speech (transcript, video). Maybe hyper-partisan speech is, like, subliminal, or something, but I don't see anything here to get all offended over. In her…

First debate

This is my first time watching the US presidential process from abroad. I've lived abroad before (a year in Germany and two in Canada), but never managed to overlap with a US election before. I was part of a course in persuasive speaking during the 2000 …

Read more… • Posted in: politics • Comments (1)

Thu Sep 11, 2008 @ 4:40 pm

Of pigs and lipstick

NPR has a great overview of the current scandal/gate/tempest-in-a-teapot brewing in US politics. Hearing more of Obama's speech, it's clear that the "pig" comment refers to his "that's not change" riff. Out of context, I guess it's easier to associate …

Read more… • Posted in: 2008 election

Wed Aug 20, 2008 @ 7:25 pm

"The pro-Obama Dungeons and Dragons crowd"

What the frack?

In a post on the McCain Website on Monday, Alexander Goldfarb wrote, “It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons and Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans …

Read more… • Posted in: politics • Comments (2)