Ward on Words

So three years ago, I moved away from a state that half of the residents want to leave. We left Illinois to settle (for now) in the Tar Heel state. And I have to say - coming from a state everyone wants to leave, a state that has nothing in the coffers but a lot of IOUs to state employees looking for their pensions, a state with political corruption famous throughout the nation - nothing I witnessed in the Land of Lincoln has prepared me for politics in the Tea Party Tar Heel state. Nothing in Illinois - not a series of governors on the path to jail, not Blago and his big mouth (and fondness for Kipling), not RM Daley and his crony capitalism that helped the Loop grow pretty flower boxes and a very expensive Bean as the neighborhoods withered, not the epic failures of privatization set into play by Daley before he retired - none of this prepared me for politics in North Carolina. That's how crazy it is in this state today. When we moved to North Carolina from up north, it w...

I have not read Tim Geithner's memoir of the crash, Stress Test. [I did read Hank Paulson's memoir of the crash - and discovered that we shared three things in common - birding, residence in Barrington IL (I lived there once, a long time ago) and a love of the boundary waters near Ely MN. Otherwise, Paulson and I do not see eye-to-eye on much, particularly on his handling of the bailout.] I don't know if I will read Geithner's book. It is well-written, says Michael Lewis (author of Liar's Poker) in a NY Times review. But as I read Lewis's review, I wanted to throw the book at a wall - and I don't even own the book. Lewis quotes Geithner as saying: "We did save the economy, but we lost the country doing it..."  (My God! Is the economy "saved"? Not in my neck of the woods! But the country was indeed lost as a result of the crash.) Lewis goes on to say: " Geithner seems genuinely to believe that the details of the behavior in...

Earlier this year, Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times, was not happy with the reception given to h is wife's story in the Guardian about a cancer patient. Emma Keller's story looked at the "ethics of tweeting a terminal illness" and focused attention on Lisa Bonchek Adams, a woman tweeting and blogging about living with Stage IV breast cancer. Emma's post was so polarizing that the Guardian took it down (here's a cached version .) A couple days after Emma Keller published her story about Lisa Bonchek Adams, Bill Keller wrote a piece about Adams as well. It was called " Heroic Measures " and it essentially called on Lisa Adams to shut up and die already. Here's how he opened the essay: LISA BONCHEK ADAMS has spent the last seven years in a fierce and very public cage fight with death. Since a mammogram detected the first toxic seeds of cancer in her left breast when she was 37, she has blogged and tweeted copiously abo...