Salon (no, I haven’t renewed yet) is running a review of Bill Greider’s new book, The Soul of Capitalism. Haven’t read the book, but the review has me pretty pumped.

I’m sure you all can remember back to the early ’90s when Rolling Stone ran a series of back and forth on politics, economics, etc, between Greider and PJ O’Rourke. Yep, at one time, Rolling Stone was not irrelevent. This is all about the same time that MTV was pushing ‘Rock the Vote’, etc. Even though PJO swayed me towards conservatism, Greider was always worth a read. Apparently he still is.

The relatively high standard of living enjoyed by citizens of the United States is in part due to the vigor of capitalism, but it is also due to people believing that higher standards were possible, Greider stresses. Somewhere, he suggests, the average American has lost that sense of possibility. Whether he or she has been beaten down by rhetoric that suggests that any restriction on the capitalist engine will undermine the economy and mire us all in command economy poverty, or whether the obvious corruption and failure of government to serve the interests of the people first have disillusioned us about the ability of our institutions to work in the future, isn’t necessary to determine. The point is that our national character, eventually, will demand that we ask for more.

I think Bill just made my list of to-reads. Maybe I’ll drink the progressive kool-aid yet.

US Uses Patriot Act to Pursue All Crimes

“The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders, federal officials said.”

Why do programmers and mathematicians mix up Christmas with Halloween?

We got to see Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Frighteners Satuday night in a double-feature hosted outdoors on the grounds of a former state-run sanitarium. Then we made our own double-feature on Sunday with The Rundown and Underworld . All-in-all a good movie weekend.

I think every article I have seen about electronic voting at Salon.com has been by Farhad Manjoo. The man really seems to have it out for electronic voting. With Another case of electronic vote-tampering? (9/29/2003), Voting into the void (11/5/2002), An open invitation to election fraud (9/23/2003), and Hacking democracy (2/20/2003) Farhad has made his stance clear. What is dissapointing about this is that Salon.com, following in the steps of nearly every news outlet, is only presenting this viewpoint clearly leaving the opposition relegated to the letters column.