McCain’s lies, revisited

In today’s news, TheHill.com brings out the old Lilian Helmann, statistics, bromide, applying it to that dishonorable, disgusting John McCain. Here, according to Mark Mellman, is the case against John McCain:
Yet John McCain himself stands behind the lies and the dishonor. There is not a kernel of truth in the statement that Barack Obama called [...]

The McCain Sex Ed Ad: Who’s lying?

The politial season being fully upon us, I have this fantasy that every day I’ll be able to review a political ad for its content and determine the truth behind it. Of course, that won’t happen because I have other serious responsibilities.
Wait a minute; what did I just say? Our most fervent civic obligation, we [...]

The Book of Judges and American Life

In the middle of the main section of the book of Judges is the famous story of Gideon who defeated the Midianites with 300 soldiers. The layers of wisdom contained in this story call for repeated readings, but right now I want to focus on the aftermath to Gideon’s triumph.
What happens, in a word, is [...]

Charles Gibson, The Bush Doctrine, and Sarah Palin

This is not a political web site and the only reason I’ve commented on the Republican convention and not the Democratic is because I was traveling during the Democratic. I’m not a dogmatist in politics, longing only for those with authority to allow others in authority to fulfill their responsibilities without interference, while decidedly not [...]

Interpreting political ads

Here in North Carolina we’re having an election for governor, so there are plenty of ads to persuade us to vote one way or the other, which is a great place to apply the enthymeme to syllogism exercise that I described in the blog entry below.
In an ad I just saw, a woman who used [...]

Freedom, Scale, and Education

Freedom, having been reduced to the right to do and say whatever you want - with the rapid and empty qualifier “as long as you don’t hurt anybody else” - has gone the same way everything else goes when its nature is changed. It is somewhere between imperiled and nonexistent.
If we reduce freedom to the vacuity [...]

1901 - The Cat Escapes the Bag

From Diane Ravitch’s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (essential reading for anybody who wants to understand American education - and that must include teachers! Doesn’t it?):
In 1901, sociologist Edward A. Ross… explained that free public schooling was “an engine of soical control.” It was the job of schools, he wrote, “to collect [...]

A Pretty Relevent Application from the Same Essay

If we believed in the absolute reality of elementary moral platitudes, we should value those who solicit our votes by other standards than have recently been in fashion. While we believe that good is somehting to be invented, we demand of our rulers such qualities as ‘vision’, ‘dynamism’, ‘creativity’, and the like. If we returned [...]