Year: 2014

The Sisters Tsarnaev have been nothing but trouble. Double, bubbling trouble. While their Boston Marathon bomber brother Dzhokhar awaits trial this month for the bloody 2012 attacks that killed three and injured hundreds, his elder Chechen immigrant siblings Ailina and Bella remain on the loose in the U.S. after their own frequent run-ins with the […]

Last week I said the Environmental Protection Agency has become a monster that does more harm than good. But logical people say, “What else we got?” It’s natural to assume greedy capitalists will run amok and destroy the Earth unless stopped by regulation. These critics don’t understand the real power of private ownership, says Terry […]

“Use your tools to fix their car,” a key tenet of the idea of triangulation, should be the lynchpin of the Republican midterm campaign of 2014. The president has found a compelling issue in income inequality. Now it is up to the Republicans — not to challenge the issue’s legitimacy as a national concern, but […]

There are things that really puzzle me. Some life insurance companies charge lower premiums if you haven’t made a life-shortening lifestyle choice. Being a nonsmoker is one of them. Actuarially, that makes sense because the life expectancy for smokers is at least 10 years shorter than for nonsmokers. Insurance company policies charge higher premiums to […]

I’m not really into the political cannibal thing. And I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that eating humans — even in metaphor — is still a sin. But there’s something unspeakably attractive about the Democrats’ eat-the-rich campaign as they approach the mid-term elections in November. President Barack Obama and his crew need to excite their base. […]

So much for non-ideological foreign policy. When Barack Obama ran for president he vowed to be non-ideological. He was a pragmatist and a problem-solver. It wasn’t just that George W. Bush’s ideology was awful, ideology itself was a kind of sinful stupidity. “What is required,” Obama declared the day before his first inauguration, “is a […]

Last week, as riots in Ferguson, Missouri decrescendoed and the country held its collective breath over the question of the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, rappers Diddy (formerly P. Diddy, formerly Puff Daddy, formerly Sean Combs), 2 Chainz, The Game, and Rick Ross, along with 10 of their […]

The current stock market is earning a deserved reputation as being coated in Teflon. Bad or disappointing news just doesn’t appear to stick, and has done nothing to slow the market’s upward trajectory. Bad news is good and good news is good news. But where does this all end? A minority of investors have begun […]

U.S. President is headed to Europe this week. There used to be a time prior to his election when he would travel to Europe and inspire the masses — mostly on the strength of their own idealistic projections. But now, never has a Nobel Peace Prize laureate seen so many global conflicts erupt on his […]

Last week President Obama admitted that his administration has not worked out a strategy on how to deal with the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as a dominant force in the Middle East. However, as ISIS continues its march through Syria and Iraq, many in the US administration believe it […]