The Prattler

The Reader’s Digest Empire
Saturday, November 25, 2006
The British Empire stood for over 200 years, a bulwark against simplicity and a beacon of cricket. The most recent attempt at empire, in defense of liberty and against variation seems to be ending badly and soon, smothered in a benevolent romance. O, Americans, we love peace not wisely but too well. And freedom. And the law.
I intend Othello to be my last metaphor about my country’s
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Remembering Milton Friedman
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Milton Friedman passed away this past Thursday, not before his time. The first to win the Nobel Prize for economics (1976,) Friedman was a perceptive theoretist, a confident advocate and a concise economist. We needn’t consider his fate in the next world. Friedman’s economic theories, which have outlived most contemporary economic facts, formed the machinery with which successful central
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Hosing Off
Saturday, November 11, 2006
The American people have stood up, left their sofas, turned off their televisions and joined together in that greatest of united national exercises, hosing off the mud after a campaign. Beginning now we have other, more wholesome, matters to discuss just as soon as our traumatized, afflicted American heads can turn from politics to religion and art, meaning celebrity tomfoolery.
Things have
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The Prattler Exdorsements
Saturday, November 4, 2006
Tuesday will be election day and, naturally, the Prattler has kindnesses to offer the candidates and recommendations for those of my readers eligible to vote in California’s 25th Congressional District.
GOVERNOR: Schwarzenegger (R) v. Angelides (D). Surprisingly, the successful action hero and dismal comic actor has been for three years now, lousy at politics and excellent at policy. If Zen
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Trick or Treat
Saturday, October 28, 2006
“Here lies the body of the Republican Party
Corrupt, and, generally speaking, hearty.”
-Ambrose Bierce, 1882
On consecutive Tuesdays, Americans will twice be visited by witches, vampires, the undead, dead heads, spidermen, werewolves, rat-faced boys, the elected lovers of rat-faced boys, mummies, giraffes, goblins, ghosts, goons, and gaggles of geese. In short, we
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