| The Fed Fiddles While Stocks Burn and Crash
I hate to bash Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, but I'm going to for a few pages. Here's the deal. The current economic threat is screaming for an aggressive inflation solution. Inflation comes from the Fed. Forget about the inflation the Fed has caused over the past 90 years, and the doubling of the money supply to goose markets for the past eight. A lot of that was dead wrong, a theft of our children's future, coming at an unnecessary time. However, when economic crises hit, the government must inflate. Must. Aggressively, preemptively, not reactively, or else calamity will strike, deflation will result, a black hole sucking until depression hits. It is a lot easier to stop inflation during boom times than to reinflate an economy during a major bust. Japan taught us that. Ironically, this is supposed to be Bernanke's strong suit.
Clinton Campaign Stung By Third-Place Finish
A few hours before the caucusing began Thursday night, Bill and Hillary Clinton were seen striding through the Hotel Fort Des Moines with a look of consternation on their faces. The caucuses marked the culmination of a dispiriting week for the Clintons as a series of polls presaged a possible Obama victory — so long as a projected massive turnout of young and first-time caucus-goers materialized. And so it did with an estimated 212,000 Democrats showing up to caucus, almost twice as many as in 2004. The groundswell of Democrats responding to Obama's and Edwards' call for "hope" and "change," respectively, flooded and stalled the vaunted, fine-tuned Clinton electoral machine. The enormous institutional and organizational power of the New York senator's campaign - ranging from a laundry list of endorsements by elected officials to the celebrity clout of Bill Clinton to a brigade of hundreds of snow-shovelers who cleared the driveways of elderly caucus-goers–wasn't enough to overcome the emotional call to a new political dynamic that seemed to turbo-charge the Obama campaign.
Dallas, I love you, but I've found Austin
Over here, in the corner, is Charlie Hatley, whaling away. "Unhhhhhhhhhhh," he groans, jaw slack. The boxing dummy bucks, sways, threatens to fall over from Hatley's blows. The kids outside the ring stare, saucer-eyed. They love Hatley, 19, the superstar of the place, ranked second in the nation at 141 pounds and a seven-time national champion so good, so quick, so ferocious, the guy Hatley was supposed to fight for the gold at an international amateur tournament in Puerto Rico three weeks ago instead backed out. .
Wine, women and snogs
The latest show from the National Theatre of Scotland is being created by some of the country's most celebrated talents. Starring Cumming and Tony Curran, both of whom have successful careers in America, the play is directed by John Tiffany, who staged the phenomenon that is Black Watch. Euripides wrote The Bacchae shortly before his death in 406BC, and it was performed the following year at the Dionysia, the Athenian drama festival, where it took first prize. The play concerns Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and theatre, whose late mother Semele was a member of the Theban ruling family and whose father Zeus is king of the Gods. As the play begins, Dionysus is returning to Thebes after seducing and converting much of what we now know as the Middle East. .
Online Opinion Poll
I struggled with the format I wanted for my 2007 retrospective. How should newspeople and bloggers quantify the "Top Ten Stories of 2007"? I could rank stories by number of posts and length: the DQ Miracle Treat Day might come out on top, followed by the TransCanada Keystone pipeline, teacher pay, and health care would probably come out on top. I could rank posts by how many comments they drew: again, teacher pay was a big draw, as well as health care, abortion (even without David's persistent efforts), and local politics (remember the new gym?). I could rank posts by how often they drew Google searches: alas, the biggest non-story of the year, Shawn Cable, would win that one hands down, although lately the Lakota treaty withdrawal has been topping the searches. Perhaps later -- heck, perhaps as a side project in my doctoral studies! -- I'll do a quantitative analysis of the 640 posts and hundreds more comments.
Dan Rodricks
Icompare the names in reports of killings in Baltimore with the names of men who called The Sun during the last 10 months to ask for help in finding jobs that might get them out of dealing drugs or other potentially deadly crimes. So far, I know only of one man who came in from the street for help, returned to his old lifestyle and ended up dead because of it. The lesson for Easter: Life can be renewed April 16, 2006 There are young men out there - teenage boys from Baltimore to Columbia, from Aberdeen to Annapolis - who will be making decisions this spring. Some will have to decide where to go to college in the fall, or which lacrosse team to play with this summer, or which girl to ask to a prom. Some will have to decide whether to continue to be a stickup boy or a young thug who sells heroin.
Never a bad time talking to Salerno
Salerno probably could have worked anywhere at any level as a reporter. He stayed in Chicago and moved his family to Crystal Lake because that's the life he wanted.
"Everybody loved Randy and he could fit in any environment," Weir said. "But his sunlight and oxygen were his kids, his wife and Chicago. … I'm honored to have called him my friend. Just make sure you hammer how much he loved those kids."
Taking the air out: Days after WJMK-FM 104.3's Steve Dahl wisely backed out of an on-air "Win a Date With Drew Contest" suggested by Drew Peterson's lawyer, the blowback continues.
Peterson was doing a live interview Friday for Shepard Smith on Fox News Channel's "Studio B." The suspect in the disappearance of his fourth wife around three months ago happily talked about how he went on Dahl's morning show to take the air out of Dahl, but then Smith started asking more substantial questions.
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