By Steve Erbach on Thursday, October 25, 2007 8:53 AM

Who's your favorite public official?

(published 29-Oct-2007, Appleton Post-Crescent)

In school I thought that one of the female Congresscritters might be worth admiring because there's no way she could be worse than her male counterparts. I've always liked Mike Ellis, ever since we used a couple sound bites of his back in my radio days for our annual blooper tape. But that probably isn't the best reason for liking a public official. I also like and support Congressman Ron Paul, even to the extent of being one of the people that hold up those "Ron Paul for President" signs you see on highway 41. Judging by the ratio of thumbs-up to other, less congenial hand gestures I've seen, lots of other folks like him, too. The guy makes sense, he's intelligently consistent, his voting record is Constitutionally superb, and he tells it straight. His Texas constituents have re-elected him n ... Read More »

By Steve Erbach on Friday, October 12, 2007 6:56 AM

Then consider what erstwhile Vice President Al Gore said upon being notified that he had won this year's Nobel Peace Prize:

We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.

It isn't political at all! Why haven't I gotten the message? It must be that my spirit is suffering a moral dilemma or conflict or something. The Vice President says so!

Actually, as P. J. O'Rourke put it so piquantly, I've had an epiphany. I've achieved regime satori. And I just remembered that the Nobel committee gave the Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat in the early 90's. (Arafat, by the way, is still in stable condition in a grave in Ramallah.)

By Steve Erbach on Thursday, October 11, 2007 7:06 AM

It took a British judge (stories in the Times of London, New York Times, and Agence France Presse) to utter those words describing parts of erstwhile Vice President Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth". He said those words when handing down his ruling that the movie could, indeed, be shown in 3500 British secondary schools, but that

the Oscar-winning film should be accompanied by government guidance notes and to distribute it without them would breach education laws prohibiting the ... Read More »

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The Town Crank

By Steve Erbach on Saturday, October 06, 2007 2:29 PM

USA Today has put together a superb interactive preference quiz for the 17 Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates still in the race. "Superb" because after you answer each of the 11 questions you can see which candidate falls in line with your answer. Here's a snapshot of my own results:
There are sliders provided for you to weight the results based ... Read More »