Author Archive

Uncle Dave’s Provocative Idea of the Week

He’s back with another brain-stretcher of a mega-concept. David Brooks is writing about a national “gentility shift,” a long-term trend in how Americans are organizing their society, that he suggests may be a root cause of today’s new kind of economic pain. This has to do with younger people mostly—what those with more…

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Kristof Praises ‘9/11 Healers’

In today’s NYTimes, columnist Nicholas D. Kristof writes about Susan Retik and Patricia (Fleming) Quigley, who co-founded Beyond the 11th after their husbands were killed in the 9/11 attacks as a way to reach out to women in Afghanistan who, like them, lost their husbands in violent incidents. Patti (Fleming)…

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A Modest Proposal: Voluntary Fed Taxes in 2011 to Break the Back of the Great Recession

The following might sound like it came out of the movie “Dave,” in which a presidential look-alike who runs a temp agency (Kevin Kline) winds up being secretly installed as president after the real prez has a stroke. At first manipulated by an evil chief of staff (Frank Langella), “Dave”…

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