As an old Political Science major, I must express frustration. The Google shows me few Ohio statewide polls, and most of them are either on the governor’s “race,” which is already over, or generic ones about Congressional elections which are so meaningless I won’t even bother with a link. As I

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter went on national television and gave a speech that was soon called the “national malaise speech.”  It pissed off a lot of Americans because they didn’t want to hear it, even though much of it was true at the time. I want to focus on

Yes, I know this book was featured on the FDL Book Salon back in May. I didn’t read that live; only skimmed it after the comments were closed, and I probably wouldn’t have commented on it anyway, but when I saw Ghosts of Tom Joad, a Story of the #99Percent at

Well, you’ve probably heard a lot lately about all of the proposals being put forth to deal with the Brand New and Improved Terrorist Threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria(ISIS), or as the current Fascist President of the United States calls it, the Islamic State in the

On this Labor Day of 2014 I’d like to reflect on something that happened across the Atlantic almost exactly 100 years ago which caused repercussions which shaped the world into which all of us were born. Most Americans nowadays haven’t even heard of it, perhaps because no American soldiers and

Local politics can be fun. Several years ago, the City of Cleveland and a number of other local municipalities put up portable robotic radar camera speed traps, more commonly known as traffic cameras, all over the place. There are only a dozen or so of the infernal things, but they

Cuyahoga County Executive Ed Fitzgerald, who won the Democratic nomination for governor of Ohio against virtually no opposition, is set to fade away. I personally think it’s a good thing. So do most other Ohioans. In the face of recent polls showing incumbent Republican Governor John Kasich maintaining a solid

We’ve all heard the Obama Administration and our corporate media strongly implying, if not out-and-out declaring, that Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH 17 with a surface-to-air missile last month, therefore, Vladimir Putin and Mother Russia itself are responsible. Now, according to a story from

I saw something I have never seen before today. A major American television news network, CBS, aired three, yes three, stories in a row that at least allowed for implicit criticism of Israel. All three had the same focus, the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian children at the hands of

Ian Morris is an Englishman, an archaeologist,  and currently a professor of history at Stanford. I recently read his latest book, War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, published this year. If nothing else, it was worth it because his theory of