Author Archive

Candace Talmadge

The state courts, at least in the county where I reside, mete out much the same treatment to potential jurors as suffragists received a century ago. Officials offer glowing lip service to the importance of jury duty, similar to pompous lectures about women’s paramount domestic role. The hot-air distraction was/is designed to keep women and juries from recognizing their sequestered and powerless condition.

Gruel.

Juries powerless? Surely these panels’ decisions can be a matter of life or death sentences in capital crimes. True, but the maneuverings of attorneys on both sides of a case combine with rulings by the judge to keep jurors separate from a lot of background information that might actually help them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Candace Talmadge

Director James Cameron’s billion-dollar, award-winning blockbuster, Avatar, bears a striking resemblance to Dances with Wolves in its basic plot. White guy from a military background encounters an indigenous population, falls in love, decides their values and way of life are superior to his, and casts his culture aside.

Dances With Wolves in space?

Of course, there are some refinements to Avatar, mostly the over-the-top technical effects that make this film possible and that are woven into the storyline. The white guy, a crippled former Marine named Jake Sully, uses an avatar, a biomechanical fictional being that is genetically engineered to be half human and half Na’vi, the inhabitants of the planet Pandora. With it he is able to walk again, breath air that is poisonous to human beings, and mingle with the natives to learn their ways.

Read the rest of this entry »

Candace Talmadge

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

If Nobel Prize winning author Sinclair Lewis were alive today, he would have to rework his statement. A timely version might read, “When fascism comes to America, it will smile and wink like Sarah Palin and carry a cross.”

Best you can do?

The book’s name is similar to the title of Palin’s recently published autobiography. But their monikers and their main topic are the only things the two have in common. Unlike Going Rogue, Going Rouge is a compendium of essays and columns that thoroughly and often wittily skewer the former Republican vice presidential candidate and ex-governor of Alaska. The authors form a roster of well-known leftwing and progressive commentators.

Many of the pieces were written in the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign once John McCain tapped Palin as his running mate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Candace Talmadge

“It’s never gone away, the nightmare of November 22, 1963,” a recent article in Vanity Fair laments. Yet the writer dutifully toes the line, insisting that the official explanation about the murder of President John F. Kennedy 46 years ago is correct.

Ahem. One of the major reasons the nightmare continues is because the official explanation is a tissue of lies and distortions.

The 1964 Warren Report, thrown together to appease the public, instead unleashed a torrent of critical books, documentaries, and movies that is unabated close to five decades later. This onslaught was entirely predictable. For every action (the grotesque cover-up), there is an equal and opposite reaction (numerous attempts, however misguided, to set the record straight).

The nightmare goes on because we the people have never learned the truth about what happened in Dallas, and we know this, in our heart of hearts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Candace Talmadge

There is no scorn like that heaped upon those who dare suggest that the official explanation for the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy is worthless.

For decades now, the mainstream media have derided as a tinfoil-hat nut anyone who questions the 1964 Warren Report’s “lone gunman” thesis, despite the fact that the U.S. House of Representatives 15 years later determined that Kennedy most likely was the victim of a deadly conspiracy.

Congress reached this disturbing conclusion three decades ago, yet pursued it no further, a reticence echoed in the Barack Obama administration’s utter lack of enthusiasm for investigating, let alone prosecuting, the previous administration’s wholesale trampling of the U.S. Constitution.

There’s a good reason for this hesitation, according to James W. Douglass, who penned JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2008). Backed by extensive research, Douglass argues eloquently that Kennedy was slain as a warning to future presidents and members of Congress not to challenge what President Dwight Eisenhower labeled the “military-industrial complex.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Candace Talmadge

The U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (DADT) toward homosexual members of the armed forces is more accurately described as “snitch and ditch.”

Under this odious law, passed by Congress in 1993, the military command is not to look into or inquire about (“don’t ask”) the sexual orientation of potential recruits or active service members without evidence of disallowed behavior.

Snitch and ditch.

Recruits and service members, for their part, may not engage in homosexual conduct or openly talk (“don’t tell”) about their sexual orientation or same-sex relationships while serving in the military.

The wording of the DADT statute attempted to remove the president’s authority over military separations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Candace Talmadge

The statistic was plastered all over the news recently. Candidates for jobs outnumber the positions available by six to one.

We’re right where our corporate masters want us. Scratching and clawing for what few jobs still exist in this country or terrified that our current employment will vanish any day now.

Nothing to see here.

So we keep our mouths shut, put our heads down, and work endless hours of unpaid overtime in the vain hope of staving off the pink slip. The only guarantee in today’s workplace, however, is that jobs in businesses of all sizes are flooding out of this country, never to return.

Have we had enough of this nonsense?

Read the rest of this entry »

Candace Talmadge

The insurance industry whines constantly that runaway, frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits and excessive payouts are the cause of rising U.S. healthcare costs.

We’ve already disposed of that pernicious myth in a previous column. Now it’s time to focus on the insurance industry’s own shoddy business practices and just plain old greed.

Incompetence

Carriers having problems with medical malpractice payouts have primarily themselves to thank for their woes.

Let’s do a simple analogy. When a person wants to buy auto insurance, the first thing the insurance company does is use that person’s driver’s license to obtain the person’s driving history. Too many accidents or moving violations on the record, and the insurer declines to issue a policy.

This is a business process known as underwriting. The insurance company gathers information to make an informed decision about whether or not a person is a good candidate to take the risk of issuing that person auto insurance. The record of the person’s driving behavior is a major component of that assessment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Candace Talmadge

Never let pesky facts get in the way of a profitable myth. The myth in question: Runaway medical malpractice lawsuits are causing outrageous hikes in U.S. health care costs.

Here’s the reality: Medical malpractice total costs were 0.6 percent of all U.S. medical costs in 2008. Actual medical malpractice lawsuit payouts have fallen to less than 0.2 percent of this country’s total health care spending.

Not what you think.

And the actual number of medical malpractice payouts in 2008 was the lowest since the federal government began keeping national records.

These numbers come from a report published in July by Public Citizen, which analyzes medical malpractice payout data from the National Practitioner Databank (NPDB).

Read the rest of this entry »