Breaking The Rules With The Gap
Are we all looking around for rules to break for the holidays? Focus groups and psychological research in advertising shows that we probably are -- the Gap ad is only the latest example in a long held tradition.
Greenspan, Paulson, Bernanke, and Geithner were the leaders of Bush's financial Wrecking Crew. The Obama administration promoted these architects of the financial disaster and demands that we hail them as heroes because they, and Wall Street, only wrecked the economy -- they haven't (yet) utterly destroyed it.
Are we all looking around for rules to break for the holidays? Focus groups and psychological research in advertising shows that we probably are -- the Gap ad is only the latest example in a long held tradition.
I'm tempted to say that the US is plainly unable to cope with the economic crisis in a serious way. So long as economic thinking is mired in a world that disappeared with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, we're stuck.
I'm not saying I don't support this weak health care bill (it's better than nothing), but if it gets any weaker and cuts into the Constitutional right of women to choose, really, does the good still outweigh the bad?
When you're making an animated film, one of the big differences is that you can add scenes, change dialogue, and re-write as you're going along.
We consider ourselves a democracy, yet we salute the flag of a Republic. No idea is more central to the concept of a republic than what used to be called civic virtue, but what today would be called "giving something back."
The new task force recommendations on mammograms are not a blanket, one-size-fits-all prescription for every woman. Guidelines should never replace a dialogue with your own doctor that considers individual risk.
Was the Vietnam War an act of prescience, or simply a prelude to today? You decide. The first 1000 people who respond to this blog will receive a free DVD copy of last Friday's PBS show, Bill Moyers Journal.
We come from a history of disregarding feeling as frivolity, and prior to Oprah we hadn't paid attention to its heft. She understood that our emotional lives inform every single thing we do.
Surprisingly, the best informed and most relentless financial reform crusader is not a committee chair at all but a back-bench Senator from Washington state, Maria Cantwell.
One of the many problems with Michiko Kakutani's lame and flamboyantly irrational New York Times review of Eating Animals is that it suggests her own irrelevancy.
By looking at what our most revered presidents have said about the meaning of Thanksgiving, we can get a better idea of the purpose of our national holiday.
You may feel daunted by the number of pages in these health reform bills, not to mention the legislative language that is often impossible to decipher. But here are some important provisions you should know about.
By ignoring recommendations on mammography, Sebelius demonstrated why the government has been unable to rein in health care costs: Even when testing is found to be harmful, our leaders still demand more tests.
No, American friends, France is not a country of "cheaters." The affair of Thierry Henry's hand, the scandal of the France-Ireland game that we won, but should have lost, has outraged many in Paris.
To put it bluntly, Twilight sucks. (Sorry, that pun is too irresistible). One moody high school girl lusts after an even moodier vampire and the result is a potential $100 million opening weekend at the box office?
It is not known if the uptick is the result of an actual increase in cases, or instead the result of a rise in the number of agencies participating in the program.
This weekend, thousands of Arkansans convened at the Statehouse Convention Center for a mass free health clinic, the first of its kind in Little Rock.
Palin's tactic of appealing to the worst impulses of the electorate has a long history in the Republican Party. Palin inherited the mean-spirited values of another politician with a gleaming smile: Reagan.
The underlying premise to the value of holding a positive focus on a positive outcome contains two basic fundamentals: (1) energy follows thought and (2) the universe rewards action, not thought.
With so much information readily available at the tips of our fingers, the slow pace of information dispersal from the government only engenders distrust. The contrast between government and our real-time real life is simply too stark not to be frustrated by.
We as a nation have not been upholding ample support for the arts, despite the deep spiritual healing that it can bring -- its joys, its shared experience, its sense of what and who we are.
The endless tangle of bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the JFK assassination will probably never be satisfactorily resolved.