Sten Gazette

Another Halloween is over, so we can get back to important things like getting ready for Christmas. If we’re lucky, there will be only one more interruption, namely that quaint US American holiday “Thanksgiving” when we get together as families, pretend we don’t hate each other, and participate in two activities that best represent our greatness as a nation– stuffing ourselves with food, and watching emulated blood sports on TV. Eleven months from now the armies of the War on Halloween will be surging and these comments will be available to anyone who cares to read them.
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The January 13th airstrike by the CIA against a village in Pakistan is old news now. The target was al-Quaida second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, but it is still unclear if he was among the 17 people killed in the attack. According to published reports, the Hellfire missile attack was launched from one of three CIA operated Predator UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) seen in the area of the strike. The attack was said to have been ordered a Deputy Director of the CIA, although naturally that can’t be confirmed. The story has been overshadowed by recent events, but there is one crucial question which was never asked– since when does the Central Intelligence Agency carry out combat operations? Read the rest of this entry »

By Richard J. Schneider

With a few exceptions, the Democratic Party should welcome in its newest member: President George W. Bush. The exceptions include defending the legality of his domestic eavesdropping program, making his tax cuts permanent, and nonsensical approaches to health care. For those of you wondering about the War in Iraq – that’s a lost cause. Congress gave that one away when it authorized the invasion. This year, I’m not going waste much time talking about our new method of pounding democracy down the throats of unruly Middle Eastern states. Suffice it to say that Bush, during his very first campaign for President, was dead set against nation-building. Now he’s the Builder Bob of this frustrating construction job. Read the rest of this entry »

Heartache in the White House. The Administration’s secret weapon, the National Security Agency, has been dragged out of the closet and exposed to daylight. The White House is in mourning, because the President is being prevented from doing his job. How can we expect Mr. Bush to protect us from The Terrorists if he isn’t free to ignore treaties, international law, and the US Constitution? Only those with something to hide could conceivably object to the US Government reading their mail, tapping their phones, and following them around. The Administration’s position is that the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply to the President, and they are completely free to ignore it. Because we are at war. With The Terrorists. Read the rest of this entry »

Minimum wage laws are complex, with Federal and State rates often in conflict. It’s generally agreed, however, that the Federal minimum wage is not enough to live on. The math is pretty simple– minimum wage for a 40 hour work week amounts to an annual gross income of just over $10,000. There are few if any places in the US where that is enough to purchase the necessities– housing, food, clothing, and transportation — to say nothing of luxuries like health insurance. Read the rest of this entry »

We take it for granted that a compass needle will point to the North, but in fact the Earth’s magnetic field has reversed its polarity many times and some think we are due for a reversal any day now. The fundamental paradigms that underlie the structure of a culture are subject to change, of course. They can and do evolve over time to reflect the nature of the world and our place in it. Seldom, however, is a core value reversed– visibly, in a matter of a few decades… Read the rest of this entry »

We said we were done talking about the referenda and we are, for the most part, but the debate over C & D gives us a really great opportunity to talk about propaganda, which is after all one of our core themes. One of the more prominent terms in the debate is the “ratchet effect,” and it is a nearly perfect example of propaganda technique. Read the rest of this entry »

Off-year elections in Colorado can be conducted by mail ballot, and the county electoral offices began sending out the ballots on Friday. A majority of mail ballots will be returned within a week of receipt, so further campaigning is is increasingly irrelevant as we approach Election Day. There are exceptions of course, and some genuinely unfortunate circumstances. Most counties use mail voting because it is ultimately less expensive, spreads out the vote processing work-load, and results in a significantly higher turnout. But they are not required to do so, and Adams County will require its voters to visit a polling place on November 1st. Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent syndicated column, “shrill lefty” Molly Ivins takes the Republican administration to task for a long series of what she calls Petulant Pique (PP) appointments. These are “Bush appointees named during the administration’s frequent fits of Petulant Pique…in the immortal childhood spirit of “nanny-nanny boo-boo, I’ll show you.” The context for the article was appointment of a male veterinarian to head the women’s health section of the FDA. Which came right on the heels of the Heckofa Brownie Affair, in which a clearly incompetent administrator was removed from his post. Or not– turns out Mr. Brown is staying on as a consultant, specifically tasked with “investigating” the mess he made. Ouch! Read the rest of this entry »

On November 1st Colorado voters will be asked to decide Referendum C and associated or conditional Referendum D, which have generated more debate in print and on the air than any other referendum in recent memory. Our recommendation? Vote no on both. Our natural inclination is to vote against anything that gives the government more power or more money. And if a power and money issue is not clearly supported by one party and opposed by the other, there must be something fundamentally wrong with it. Read the rest of this entry »