Free Speech and the Peaceful Public Order

I arrived home from my sister Mary’s funeral Saturday evening, and saw that Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several other people had been shot during some kind of meet-and-greet in her congressional district. I’d never heard of Giffords, but was discouraged that such a thing would happen – it’s hard enough just given our political process to get good people to run for public office, and it was of course a terrible tragedy for the people involved. It seemed to me that it had been a long time since something like that had happened. As I read t...

Slander as Political Fashion

Boy, am I growing weary of the political environment. What George W Bush did for for international relations with his “with us or against us” rhetoric, Barack Obama is doing to the political climate within the country with his treatment of political dissent. Of course, nations actually do operate in an environment of mutual belligerence, which is forever flaring up as actual warfare in some corner or another, whereas nations are supposed to operate, internally, with a civility stemming from civitas, but why split hairs? Perhaps it’s unfair to blame Obama...

Is It Enough Yet?

I suppose there are crazy things going on all the time, but there seems to be a concentration of them happening all at once. Every day brings news of more layoffs, and I wonder how many people will be unemployed before the spiral stops – and of course, I wonder if I will be among them. Meanwhile, more and more Ponzi schemes and other financial wrongdoing is being unearthed daily. Stewards of funds are being revealed as thieves, and countless reckless investors are finding out that the investments they gleefully thought were too good to be true, actually ...