Sunday, May 22, 2005

Today's Required Reading

Can you say "Lame Duck"?

You know that President Bush is done when the very socially and fiscally conservative newspaper, "The Business" has an editorial that rips him to shreds for foreign and domestic failures. The editorial entitled, "Home and away, the Bush doctrine unravels" ends with
"At home and abroad, the president has reneged on his own higher vision. As a result his administration looks rudderless and the purpose of his second term increasingly pointless."

Ahhh....music to my progressive ears.

Also on today's required reading list is Paul Krugman's article explaining how America is increasingly in hock to the Chinese and how that is a problem for us. In the short term it has allowed us all to have low interest rates and housing prices to skyrocket, but in the long term Chinese financing of American debt hurts American competitiveness in the business world and mutes our voice for human rights and democracy. Just goes to show that my parent's mantra "live within your means" makes sense on a macro-economic scale too.

Added later on Sunday. The New York Times has an excellent article on the rise of evangelism entitled, "On a Christian Mission to the Top". It is very interesting. I have two minds about the article...the first is that as soon as a religious movement becomes invested in the current power structure, they have a vested interest to keep it that way, so I'm not so excited about evangelicals trying to "reclaim the Ivy League for Christ".

Yet I read this "[Tim Havens] rededicated himself to serving God, and by his senior year he was running his own Bible-study group, hoping to inoculate first-year students against the temptations he had faced. They challenged one another, Mr. Havens said, "committing to remain sexually pure, both in a physical sense and in avoiding pornography and ogling women and like that." What is not to like about that? Do my faithful readers have any thoughts on that?

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