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The Redistributor in Chief It is certainly an embarrassment. The ease with which John McCain and his team have elicited jeers from his supporters at the mention of “sharing the wealth” is an apt indicator of the brain damage sustained by a certain portion of the American populace over the years. With its roots in the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s, the McCain campaign has pushed the buttons of the Cold War, tarring Barak Obama as a “socialist” for advocating what has been a part of the American landscape since 1903: the graduated income tax that places a larger tax burden on citizens with greater wealth. After enduring years of Bush administration policies that effectively transferred inordinate amounts of the nation’s wealth to those already wealthy, after witnessing the handover of $700 billion in a bailout of investment bankers and Wall Street manipulators, after seeing the loss of millions of jobs and the foreclosure of millions of homes, one would think that the great majorit...
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SMIC

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Just when we thought it safe to go back  to Paris...or Bordeaux...or Toulouse... with everything collapsing around him, French president Emmanuel Macron tried a dribbler. In baseball terms, that means getting the ball back to home-plate before another player (most often the pitcher, catcher or first baseman from the opposing team can do the same. In this case it didn't work. Acting on a plan hatched by the previous government, the proposed cure in French politics turned out to be an attack on the third base line, more suited to a remark by the man guarding third than anyone. The awarding of 100 euros monthly has the rancid aroma of a bribe. The SMIC, the Salaire Minimum Horaire as it is known in France as a bribe) adds some money to the monthly check workers get Macron, who received 70% in some areas of France when he was elected, was not as popular this time.
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New Years Thoughts

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Yes, I know. In reality it is all arbitrary, this New Years crap. It's a new year every moment, depending upon where you start from. This linear time thing just provokes more questions, for which there are no apparent answers, yet we still persist in asking them because... that is what we must do. My wife and son are in the next room singing songs in Basque, a language that has no apparent antecedent, from a people whose origins are unknown, a bloodline that apparently runs as an ancient tangent to the rest of what we call the human race. So we continue on in the world of what is apparent, with joy and trembling at the wonder of it all.
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