From Yahoo News: “BP had 760 safety violations in the past five years and paid $373 million in fines, Sullivan said. By contrast, Sunoco and ConocoPhillips each had eight safety violations and ExxonMobil just one, Sullivan said.” My question is why did it take an ecological disaster for the various U.S. regulatory agencies to...
Don’t be a DouChe’
My office is near several colleges and universities here in Chicago and I often see young, impressionable students congregating on the sidewalk wearing the emblematic Che’ T-shirts, glorifying the life of a mass murder. What exactly were the fruits of Che’s revolcion? “A typical Ché t-shirt costs more than the entire monthly salary of...
Collateral Damage In A War Of Choice
Use the links below to go directly to the updates: Updated on 4/12 Updated again on 4/21 Recently, the website WikiLeaks released an annotated, edited video from the gun-camera of an Apache helicopter from 2007. The video shows the helicopter shoot several men, some armed others not, two of which turned out to be...
Partisan Rancor and Rank Misconceptions
A recent conversation on Twitter has again reaffirmed a long-standing theory of mine that the partisan rancor we have here in the U.S. is partly attributed to the very common misconception that the U.S. is a democracy, ruled by the majority. The founding fathers did not establish a democracy ruled by the majority, but...
Everything Hasn’t Been Said
President Obama said last week that “verything there is to say about health care has been said…” which implies we know everything there is to know about health care reform, neither of which is true. The current log jam in health care reform isn’t paralysis by analysis — it’s partisanship and power-grabbing and just...
Gun Debate Reloaded
That’s the front page headline of today’s Redeye, a free rag distributed by the Chicago Tribune. The two-page spread begins on page six with the following paragraphs (full story here: At the age of 15, Monica Sanders answered her phone to learn that her friend had been fatally shot in the stomach by another...