Book Review: Ron Chernow’s "Alexander Hamilton"

I highly recommend author Ron Chernow’s comprehensive biography on this country’s first Secretary of the Treasury. Some biographies gloss over early years as a fast-forwards means to reach the main events of a subject’s life. Chernow devotes a lot of pages to Hamilton’s early years, and for good reason. If one’s youth forms his or her person as an adult, one can see Hamilton’s birth in Caribbean poverty and his struggles to…

We have been on hiatus as our team of engineers worked on software problems we had experienced. Today we will film again. My guest will be Jeff Cox,  an Indianapolis attorney. We shall discuss "What I would do if I were President of the United States." 

Personally, I question Jeff's judgment, as he is a Cleveland Indians fan. I am a fan of the Chicago Cubs National League Baseball Club. I do not question his judgment because Cleveland has not won a World Series in either of our…

   I lived in Chicago. Corruption was so ingrained in the politics that books were written on the subject. The Machine of Mayor Dailey (the first) was efficient. People took the matter for granted. He was long dead by the time I arrived in the City of Broad SHoulders. But his Machine lived on. There was the occasional Federal indictment, and a sitting or former Governor seemed always in the dock. The system was built on sugar. Call it what you will---cash, payola, kickbacks, whatever. The…

MY PLAN TO BALANCE THE BUDGET!

   The budget quandary continues. With straight faces, Republicans and tea baggers defend tax cuts for private jet owners while millions are unemployed, our schools suffer budget cuts, and government services are shut down.

   Once more, let us see what we could do to right these matters.

   1. Cut the budget? Cut military spending.

   About 20 percent of the budget, or over $70 billion, goes to military spending. We do…

"Super"-Congress!?

   Congressional leaders, unable to resolve the crisis on the debt ceiling have, according to this morning’s HuffPost, proposed creating a body comprised of members of both houses to enact budget legislation. The details are fuzzy, but the net result is the same.

   They propose to alter the structure of the Federal government in conflict with provisions of the United States Constitution without the inconvenient steps of the process of…

Oslo Chaos

   When mindless acts of terror (is the phrase redundant?) Occur in the world, will people please not immediately ascribe those acts to believers of Islam?

   Until yesterday I would have thought "Oslo Chaos" was an oxymoron or the name of a Norwegian punk-rock band. (Anachronism warning: are there still punk-rock bands?)

   Someone exploded a bomb in downtown Oslo. A couple of hours later, a man opened up with an automatic weapon and killed (at last…

Legalize All Drugs, Part 1

   A substance people consume to ease the pain of existence was made illegal. Because it was illegal, but the demand for it was high, a thriving black market for the substance developed. Criminal elements soon took control of that market and, frequently, warred with each other. Bystanders were killed. Today those bystanders would be called "collateral damage." Illegality did nothing to diminish demand for the substance. People still wanted it. They…

   At about 5:00 in the afternoon of the 2008 election, I told my wife I either could go to the basement and smoke a cigar (where I have an air purifier to dissipate the smoke from my Churchill) and come up for the returns, or wait until 7:00 or so and (maybe) be too hammered to appreciate several things, amongst them the outcome of the vote. She told me to enjoy my cigar.

   The cigar took about two hours to smoke. I walked into the living room as the first states’ tallies were…

Murdoch has acquired political power in a fashion similar to Ecclestone's conquest of Formula One racing. I guess because I am in Indy, I ponder such matters as F-1, particularly since we no longer see it raced here. The guy who took over F-1, Bernie Ecclestone, rose Bormann-esque through the F-1 bureaucracy to take over that form of racing world-wide. Nobody paid him much attention until it was too late.

Murdoch was born in Australia, and naturalized as a citizen in the United…

   The economy is in shambles because (1) Bush II helped his frat brothers at the Yale chapter of Deke and gave them and their peers huge tax breaks in 2001 and (2) took us into one-and-a-half unnecessary wars. I say one-and-a-half because after 9/11 Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan. We were justified to seek him out and capture or kill him. Other than that, our experience there has been the same as that of the British in the 1920s and the Soviets in the 1980s. Those who fail to study…

Really, Call Them "Teabaggers"

   Its participants prefer to call it "tea party." They take offense—major-league and personal—at the label "teabaggers." When I wrote a blog last week on "Hoosier values," I made reference to participants in whatever this thing it is they have—I think Tony Soprano called his and his fellows’ activities "this thing we have," and it was not waste reclamation—teabaggers as teabaggers. I wrote:

Prologue

   This is a riposte to comments made in response to a blog my friend Paul Ogden was kind enough to run on his website, "Ogden on Politics." In his response, one David Ditton suggested that if I "disagree with so many values of the average Hoosier" perhaps I should relocated to Massachusetts, New York, Washington, or California. This "love it or leave it" attitude was not new when I heard it expressed in the 1960s.

   "Values" are more complex than…

   Indiana provides for secret ballots, outlaws the buying of votes, and makes no reference by name (the proverbial elephant, and in this case his/her pal donkey, in the room) to either of the two "major" parties 

   Tomorrow will appear on this site an essay on the unconstitutional nature and illegality of the Indiana primary election system. The statutory scheme is farcical. So stay tuned---or on-line or whatever the appropriate term would be in the early 21st Century.