Obama bludgeons Al-Qaeda without any physical weapons

It was entirely predictable, of course. By undoing many of the Bush Administration policies regarding the treatment of prisoners of the so-called "War on Terror" and reducing the war rhetoric aimed at residents of the Middle East, Obama has done some significant damage to Al-Qaeda without the use of any physical weapons The Washington Post reports that Al-Qaeda is reeling these days, because it has lost its best recruiting tool: George W. Bush. Barack Obama's election has resulting in a strong barrage of words by Al-Qaeda, claiming that Obama has killed innocent Muslims and that he is even responsible for the violence in Gaza.

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The long convoluted path to sanity, then celebration.

Today I am celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States.   I know that most of you already think of Obama's inauguration as old news, even though it only happened a few short hours ago.   Nonetheless, I am still celebrating and I'm proudly linking to a…

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Judging the violence of others

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written an excellent multidisciplinary work on the meaning of life, entitled The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006). I am presently reading Haidt's book for the second time, paragraph by paragraph.  This is clearly one of the books I would take to a…

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So Much Bigotry, So Little Time to Banish it . . .

Just when I think we're making progress, we go and pull the one-step-forward-ten-steps-back trick.  First, a friend tells me about how her daughter was treated recently in a suburb of New York City.  The daughter is 17 and African-American, although my friend is Caucasian.  Her daughter was adopted from Sierre…

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