Many progressives urge Kerry to get tougher with respect to Iraq — “cut and run,” deadline for troop withdrawal — echoing Kucinich. McGovern tied that in ‘72 with Vietnam and where did it get him? Only in ‘68 would it have been possible with the charisma of Robert Kennedy. Kerry is no RFK. Besides, there is no comparison — no aerial bombing killing millions, no 30,000 US troops [at RFK time] killed — even though the same knuckle headed policy exists. What the progressives fail to take into accou...

      1.          Will Nancy Reagan’s plea for stem-cell research change the right’s viewpoint? 2.          If it’s true that Kerry asked McCain to be his running mate, diminish respect you might have had for Kerry? 3.          Do you believe that the Reagan funeral was overblown? 4.     &nb...

Is a decent standard of living a given? Certainly not for those not willing and able to work for it. The untold millions, however, who undergird the perceptive glamor of living and working in the United States by toiling as garbage collectors, landscapers for home associations and municipal locales, hospital maintenance, school and office custodians, window washers, pet groomers, housekeepers, nannies, and thousands of other toils to keep the nation’s productivity viable, most assuredly earn t...

The brouhaha over No Child Left Behind is hallucinatory, particularly with respect to accountability and testing lacking sound philosophic principles of education by a posterior “devoutly to be wished”-syndrome. To begin with , it is presumptuous to surveil a time honored system that has developed, however imperfectly, the underpinning of extraordinary knowledge for the nation. Since its inception public education has always collegially monitored its own academic accountability through endle...

    A divided America cannot be simplistically defined by the rich and poor. That in relative terms, no poor person here would exchange citizenship with that of a poor person from any underdeveloped country is nonetheless as inadequate as comparing Saddam’s atrocities to abuses in state, and military prisons abroad. The fact is we can and are expected to do better. The same comparison of apples and oranges apply to corporate salaries of CEOs and that of modest profit-taking of sm...

Although I'm now into another novel and do not write blogs with the same frequency, I am still very much a fan of JU. I've learned recently from Brad that feature articles require some HTML editing and helps clear up why so few of mine have been featured. But my major gripe is in the point system governing user points--I'm not into the arcane system of what constitutes top blog sites, leaving that to professionals. Since I joined JU some six months ago, I have been trolled to the tune of over 1...

There are no easy answers to an exit strategy in Iraq. As Colin Powell implied, you break it, you own it. Bush has no alternative but to “stay the course” pretty much alone; anything else would be an admission of defeat. Kerry, too, has no other alternative until such time he actually possesses the tools of the Presidency with which he can set a completely new approach. Of course, Bush’s staying the course has changed dramatically from its original intent of setting up a permanent strategic...

  Is it possible to wave the flag, to be patriotic and still be for peace, or must we always be for war in the name of defense? Is it impossible to pursue idealistic but aggressive diplomacy, or must we always be driven by pragmatic, economic or strategic gain? There is little doubt that a superpower must keep in touch with the world but should it be meddlesome or advisory in reflecting our values? For fifty years the policy with respect to Cuba has been little more than “give us your poo...

When feeling good about life we are able to block out the bad, which we know is ever lurking, yet somehow we are blest — the bad is for others. The young mother in a grocery aisle turns her back on her child secured in a shopping cart and is confident that the child will still be there — missing children are for others. When we drive by a serious traffic accident, we are momentarily saddened by the awful things that happen to others, yet we are comforted by automobile commercials that motivate...

John F. Kerry should be boldly presumptuous and sit down with committed politicians and choose his cabinet before the convention. Since America is still in a wartime frame of mind, the VP should be Wesley Clark. Secretary of State should be tough minded but strong on peace, therefore Howard Dean Secretary of Defense: McCain or Gen. Zinnia Attorney General: John Edwards Secretary of Veteran Affairs” Max Cleland. Secretary of Labor: Richard Gephardt Secretary of Health an...

Government costs are Little League compared to the costs to sustain free enterprise. Take social security, which takes a large regressive tax from one’s payroll. Contrary to current thinking this money is immediately invested — or impounded? — in Treasury bonds yielding 5 or 6% at the present time because the Baby Boomers have not yet reached their retiring years. As a result the retirement coffers are still growing, though this trend has only a few more years to go. This is not all bleak; for...

Newsweek ran an article "The Price of Democracy" on taxation which is misleading and frustrating when in the end the writer, Samuelson,  concludes that any reasonable compromise is experientially unrealistic and that we are stuck with the rigidity of the present system prone to over extended manipulation. Jerry Brown, when running as a candidate for President in ‘91 proposed a 13% flat tax with a “post card” tax form that would get rid of the HR Blocks and the likes of Turbo Tax, not to...

The message that Abu Ghraib prison scandal sends is primarily the revulsion Americans and the rest of the world have in common, from appalling to Un-American. A more important issue, however, is the current system of the Army foremost and the authoritarian love affair Americans have with the armed services that can do no wrong. Since the first Gulf War it has been spoon-fed by politicians extolling — particularly the Army’s — virtues and extraordinary specialization in its deft strategies even...

As expressed earlier in my blog “They Belong to All,” that proper ceremony is due our ward dead when they arrive a Dover Air Base, but what about the wounded — where is the recognition? In a stunning and heart-tugging story in last week’s Washington Post , its foreign service writer Karl Vick indicates that of the 3,684 wounded in combat one-fourth came from April’s bloody count. Fortunately half of these were light and the wounded troops sent back into action; the other half or about 900, hal...

Notwithstanding that this blogger thinks that military intelligence — indicative of all US intelligence agencies — has brains in the seat of its pants in taking pictorial evidence in a digital world that was bound to leak out and thus invoke more chaos — such as the horrific beheading — in an already dangerous Iraq, the current commotion over the prison abuse is a legitimate concern not only that a handful of ignorant, poorly trained reservists were in the main responsible for its own inhumanity...