Thanks for article on SS privatization. I'd been thinking lately along the same lines, but would characterize it perhaps a little more cynically. As an MBA I've studied the market [primarily in the early 90s]: Technical analysis was rapidly replacing fundamental analysis. The market had become psychological. Now with the DOW at 10,000--the fundamentals of the US economy doubtful--the huge impact of the so-called Plunge Team [officially goes by another name] and with the many mysterious accounting reforms--the market is adrift in artificiality. It is a pyramid waiting to fall. There is only one thing to keep it afloat [as all of the excess funds available to prop it up have been "invested"] and we're talking about the need for a whole lot of money. And so we have privatization of SS. I don't think it's as much about another bull market as it is about another round of large-scale Ponzi capitalism. It's SS injection or people start to poke around, determine that there is really nothing fundamental supporting the PE ratios and the whole thing takes a nosedive. It's find a new source of funds or go home. It's about pushing the US community further out into deeper water.

I guess I can call myself one of the Dylan generation since, at 63, I'm the same age as him, but the prose stylists that allured an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of Latinate gentility were always those of American rough-housers: first, in the mid-fifties, Jack Kerouac, then Edward Abbey, then Hunter Thompson.

Thank God I never tried to imitate any of them. Thompson probably spawned more bad prose than anyone since Hemingway, but they all taught me that at its most rapturous, its most outraged, its most exultant, American prose can let go and teach you to let go, to embrace the vastness, the richness, the beauty and the grotesqueries of America in all its thousand landscapes.

The Broadway in Columbus Series's "Thoroughly Modern Millie" opened Tuesday night at the Palace Theater with a tight, light and thoroughly enjoyable musical cream puff to adorn the Palace stage.

This is, of course, no major work of angst or passion.  Miss Saigon has come and gone. 

But as advertised, Millie is a perfectly lovely milk chocolate trifle, served light and frothy.  The performances are clean, competent and engaging.  The staging is unpretentious and credible.  The lines are delivered right, the music sung nicely, the pacing reasonable and the plot line so thoroughly predictable as to be downright relaxing. 

Lead Darcie Roberts (Millie) and her cohorts Stephanie Pope (Muzzie), Robyn Payne (Miss Flannery) and Pamela Hamill (Mrs. Meers) balance each other nicely, while the men---mainly Bryan McElroy (Jimmy) and John Ganun (Trevor Graydon), along with Emir Yonzon (Bun Foo) and Richard Feng Zhu (Chin Ho)---more than deliver on their end of the bargain. 

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable evening, easy on the eyes, ears and psyche. 

The following documents are supporting documents in the Blackwell presidential election sanctions case in Ohio. For more information about the sanctions, read the following articles.

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1138, http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1102, and see other articles in the Election 2004 department.

Briefs

MEMORANDUM OF UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE JOHN CONYERS, JR. AS AMICUS CURIAE IN OPPOSITION TO MOTION OF SECRETARY OF STATE BLACKWELL FOR SANCTIONS PURSUANT TO CIV. R. 11 AND S. CT. PRAC. R. XIV, §5

MEMORANDUM OF UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE JOHN CONYERS, JR. AS AMICUS CURIAE IN OPPOSITION TO MOTION OF SECRETARY OF STATE BLACKWELL AND OHIO’S TWENTY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTORS FOR SANCTIONS PURSUANT TO CIV. R 11 AND S. CT. PRAC. R. XIV, §5