The Fortnightly Rant

The Fortnightly Rant for January 29, 2010, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 254, No. 9, retroactively posted on Saturday, January 15, 2011. Well, democracy has certainly seen better fortnights. On January 19th, Massachusetts voters turned up their noses at the Democratic candidate, the late Martha Coakley,[1] and elected Scott Brown, a Republican. With Brown’s election, the U.S. Senate’s Democratic caucus will have a mere 59 votes, facing a mighty 41 Republicans on the other side of the chasm. As a CNN headline put it, “Brown’s election tips Senate balance of power to GOP.” [2] A few days later, on January 21st, five members of …

Read moreLet the Bad Times Roll

The Fortnightly Rant for January 15, 2010, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 254, No. 8, retroactively posted on Thursday, January 6, 2011. Following a Congressional ban passed in July of 2008, American corporations stopped importing childrens’ toys from China containing lead. Lead is poisonous; children exposed to a sufficient quantity of it — an alarmingly small amount — suffer from abnormal brain development and lower IQs. Unfortunately, in response to that government intervention in free trade, those corporations began importing childrens’ toys containing cadmium. Cadium is not just poisonous, it is also carcinogenic. Children exposed to sufficient amounts of cadmium will not grow up …

Read moreThe Wheel of Doom

The Fortnightly Rant for January 1, 2010, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 254, No. 7, retroactively posted on Thursday, January 6, 2011. When the Founding Fathers cooked up our Constitution 222 years ago in Philadelphia, they very carefully divided up the powers of government among three separate branches. They feared that otherwise too much power might fall into the hands of the diabolically clever. They might have been worried about the wrong people. Thanks to the diligent efforts of the nation’s news media, we have learned a great deal over the past year about a sub-set of the U.S. population to whom most us …

Read moreBernanke, Schmernanke