In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s surprise election victory, a lot of Hillary Clinton voters bitterly blamed the result on those who had cast “protest” votes for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson or Green candidate Jill Stein (or for other, even more marginal candidates)—an echo, they claimed, of Ralph Nader’s impact on the 2000 election, where […]
The Sub-Prime Crisis: My response to a response to a response
A friend of mine—an enthusiastic supporter of John McCain, or at least an enthusiastic opponent of Barack Obama, but otherwise a nice guy—forwarded a rather cute PowerPoint presentation that provided a rather snarky interpretation of the recent fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis. (I don’t know if the PowerPoint is available online anyplace—if I can […]
Olmert triumphs in poll – humiliating What’s His Name the Minister for Something or Other
In a recent poll of 345 Kadima voters, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert triumphed over one of his fellow Cabinet members. Asked whom they would prefer to be Kadima’s next candidate for Prime Minister, the voters chose Olmert over the other minister by 8.7% to 5.8%. The only candidates the voters liked better than the […]
Living in denial
Perhaps things are just as bad in the rest of the world, but it seems to me that the Middle East is suffering from an epidemic of denial: denial of the Holocaust, of course, but also lots of less spectacular denials of generally accepted fact*. This phenomenon does not bode well for our happy little […]
A Hedgehog’s Hasbara
Last week I attended the second day of a conference on “The Media as a Theater of War, the Blogosphere, and the Global Battle for Civil Society”. (Unfortunately, I missed the first day, which actually covered a lot of the stuff I was most interested in. My immune system and assorted pathogens disagreed with my […]