One of the advantages of living in the Jersey suburbs with your sixty-three year old retired father is that you get to perform all manner of menial tasks in a futile attempt to mitigate his desire to prevent idle hands from lingering about. (It’s worth pointing out that my Internet traffic in recent weeks undoubtedly proves just how Sisyphean his task really is.) Yesterday it was shampooing urine stains left by my now deceased geriatric dog out of the carpet in our living room. Today it was blowing the leaves on my front lawn as my uber-conservative neighbor pounded cold . . .

Continue Reading »

I’m waiting for the Republicans to bring their game.  The Democrats have an intelligent, well-educated candidate [elected editor of Harvard Law Review — no gentleman’s C’s here!] who’s the most inspiring orator since Lincoln.  He’s got a detailed plan to try to drag our economy out of the sewer where it was left by Bush and like-minded rich guys after they took all the money out of it and an incredibly well-coordinated grassroots operation run by volunteers that has raised record-breaking amounts of money from combining tiny little donations from a LOT of tiny little people like me.

The Republicans, . . .

Continue Reading »

After a false start — www.eisenstadtgroup.com seems to be a hoax — I can’t definitively link Joe Plumber to Charles Keating.  True, his name is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, and Robert M. Wurzelbacher, Jr., was Keating’s son-in-law who served prison time after his conviction in the Keating scandal. But for all I know, Wurzelbachers may be as common as Smiths up there in Toledo.

Still, after watching his interview with Katie Couric right after the debate, I do wonder who found him and how.

Joe sounds like he works for McCain, saying things like “We’ve seen who McCain is — we don’t . . .

Continue Reading »

I have no idea who everyone is pulling for in this primary season, and I know a lot of people were probably watching the speeches on super tuesday. But I just had to share this video if others out there were Obama fans. The Will.I.Am video is making the rounds more, but this video is why I am more excited about Obama than any candidate in my lifetime. He has an uncanny ability to capture the emotions of so many years of settling between uninspiring and misguided.

For the . . .

Continue Reading »

A few days ago, a friend of mine sent out an email with this year’s List of Banished Words, as deemed thus by the language lovers over at the Lake Superior State University. The premise, for those of you who haven’t come across it before, is simple: you know the word that gets used any which way and people throw them around like a gold coin in Scrooge McDuck’s vault and you go from noting that hey that’s not what that word actually means to wow that word sure does get thrown around to irritation at the . . .

Continue Reading »