It has been quite a relief not to have to do the daily sweep.
As it happened, the day that I published the essay announcing the feature would stop, the person who had been helping me when I was out of town wrote me an email to tell me that an illness in his family would keep him from helping me again. That, by itself would have forced me to recruit more help or stop.
Even though I don't miss the pressure (and drudgery) of doing the sweep, I do miss reading all of the good writing that I saw over the past year. From time to time I will do an Around and About feature that will single out some of the good writing and put it in a familiar format. I will keep it down to four or five essays that I think are worth recommending.
There will be good essays that I miss simply because there are too many good essays in the period between my trips Around and About.
Analogy for Absurdicus: A Chance to See the Big Blue Lie Machine from the Other Side
I say, let's take a serious look at the files at Colorado State University, where the records of Bob Schaffer's trip are kept. Let's examine them openly and honestly. But that's clearly not what absurdicus, Taylor West, and Mark Udall's other surrogates are after. They want to throw together a bomb made of political mud and slime, hoping that on detonation the name "Jack Abramoff" might stick next to Bob Schaffer. They don't care if there's any real evidence.
Health care psychosis For more than 20 years, crusading politicians have promised to deliver better health care to more people for less money simply by saying "make it so." With rare exceptions, the resulting legislation exacerbates economic distortions, makes insurance impractically expensive, drives insurers out of the state, and creates worse problems than originally existed.
Senate Bill 217 seems to be a desperate attempt to "do something" while buying time to figure out what to do. What it does best is to create case studies in irony, hubris and cognitive dissonance.
Big Labor Ritter Low on Credibility Colorado’s Democratic governor has aligned himself with union leaders, and now he’s stuck. Bill Ritter’s attempt to portray himself as a business-friendly moderate candidate in 2006 has been exposed as the charade it was. Katy Atkinson is right: Ritter doesn’t have enough credibility left with business leaders to convince them to stop the ballot initiative that would protect workers from mandatory union fees.
Several Questions For Senator Obama There is, indeed, a huge divide in America today. And it is one that Barack Obama can no more bridge than he can leap tall buildings.
Oh, he'll get a [-nother] pass on this one from Democratic voters; this just won't play too well in the Fall, when those same Americans are faced with a choice between him and a genuine American war hero.
Propagandizing the climate debate Man-made theory advocates often bring up the argument that there is a “scientific consensus” that man is the cause of global warming. This is, at the very least, disingenuous, as a growing number of climatologists, geologists, paleontologists, and other scientists are raising questions about the science as more evidence shows up. These scientists, who simply do not get enough publicity because their ideas are not in line with the media elite, bring up such issues as the 1500-year climate cycle going back one million years; the substantial correlation between the sun and global climate throughout history; the notion that, while carbon emissions increased, global cooling occurred between 1940 and 1980; and the fact that the climate models used to predict climate trends are inaccurate (pointing out, for instance, that they can’t even predict past climate conditions) and there is an alternative, scientific way to test the models.
Five good essays, all well worth reading.
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