http://barrycasselman.com Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:22:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There is an unprecedented dream-like quality to this year's mid-term national elections. Normally, regardless of political conditions, the two sides engage in a comprehensible back-and-forth competition for votes. On some occasions this produces a one-sided result, but there is at least some kind of debate about ... http://barrycasselman.com/?p=1256 A family is a living novel. Only a few families’ sagas are ever written down; even fewer are ever published and read, but every family has come directly from the first families whenever they arose and wherever they emerged on this little planet hurtling ... http://barrycasselman.com/?p=1247 Less noted in the discussion this year's mid-term elections, preoccupied as it has been with party labels (and which party will be in control of the senate next January), have been signs of rejuvenation in the Democratic Party's centrist wing. (This trend, I hasten to say, does not ... http://barrycasselman.com/?p=1240 Since the 1970s, I have been writing about my concern about the impact of public pension funds on the local, state and national economies. My original interest was provoked after I read Peter Drucker's brilliant and prescient book "The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to ... http://barrycasselman.com/?p=1234 After Tuesday primary results came in from several states, several media analysts and commentators repeated their opinion that voters were surprising conventional wisdom. Hello? There is, in fact, no conventional wisdom worth talking about this political cycle. I am suggesting that the surprises have only begun. No incumbent ... http://barrycasselman.com/?p=1227 The political news is not very good for Democrats as they approach the national mid-term elections in only two months, but there is at least one bright new Democratic figure who is about to enter the national stage after the votes are counted. After Democrat Robert Byrd, ... http://barrycasselman.com/?p=1222 I'm only a city boy, but even I knew, driving through rural Wisconsin recently, near the St. Croix Valley, that the corn stalks are unusually high this year. The weather has been remarkable for some time, i.e. colder than normal in some places during the winter and ... http://barrycasselman.com/?p=1214 Barack Obama has a huge ego. This is not a unique condition for someone who has been elected president of the United States. Even men and women who have not been elected president have huge egos. He also has concluded, I believe, that he is a political ... http://barrycasselman.com/?p=1206 There are bumper stickers which label current hostilities in the Middle East as "Endless War." This particular theater of war has lasted for nine years, and may seem interminable both to its proponents and critics, but I want to make a simple point about warfare and human ... http://barrycasselman.com/?p=1199 As I have been suggesting for some months, President Obama may be the first incumbent in the past century not renominated by his own party. His popularity has fallen steadily, spurred on by his radical political agenda and the lavish style of his incumbency in the ... http://barrycasselman.com/?p=1189