So….I didn’t really think McCain would pull the Ayers thing tonight during the debate. I figured that, having warned Obama that it was coming, there would be no surprise. Moreover, before the debate, and even before it came up during the debate, I thought Obama was trying to lure McCain into bringing up the Ayers [...]

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In response to Obama’s comments about being surprised that his relationship with Bill Ayers was not brought up during the second debate, McCain says,
“I was astonished to hear him say that he was surprised I ‘didn’t have the guts’ to do that, because the fact is, the question didn’t come up in that fashion,” McCain [...]

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Commentary on the hacking of Governor Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account

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Discusses some of the ways that the internet is helping to foster a better democracy

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No politician ever claims to be be soft on crime. Quite the reverse: All politicians call for the legal system to be tough on crime. One result of this, at least in the United States, has been, over the last 30 years, to create a push for stricter and more mandatory sentencing laws. While tightening [...]

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One often hears the mantra, “keep it simple.” Yet, in our complex world, issues like globalization, global warming, and terrorism have so many variables and dynamic interrelationships that they defy human understanding. Often, desiring to make a difference, some kind of difference, business leaders and politicians, among others, often insist on simple, easily comprehensible [...]

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In a detailed article posted to the blog Climate Change and Sustainability, Lester Brown makes some startling claims about the state of the world. He contends,
This troubling situation is unlike any the world has faced before. The challenge is not simply to deal with a temporary rise in grain prices, as in the past, but [...]

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Discussion of readiness for democracy

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People commonly say that elections are determined by who has the most money. A look at the data gives some interesting and at times surprising insights to this conventional wisdom. Consider the following three items:
1. There are several websites that seem to do a pretty good job of tracking and presenting campaign finances and related [...]

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TIME magazine has named Russian President Vladimir Putin the “Person of the Year” for 2007, although the writers took great care to stress that they are not honoring or endorsing him, just acknowledging the tremendous influence that he has on world events. TIME also notes that while Russia has somewhat receded from the American public [...]

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