Author: Marc Jampole

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My small study may demonstrate that ads for shady products dominate talk radio.

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Every media outlet has its share of advertising for shady products that don’t perform as promised.  Colon treatments, male enhancement treatments, hair loss treatments, speculative investments, Internet business ventures that don’t require you to work, companies claiming to help people get out of debt, lump-sum structured settlement companies, companies that sell you incorporation materials or […]

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The triumph once again of the politics of selfishness

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We’ve now learned that Scott Brown voted for the Massachusetts universal healthcare legislation when he was a state senator, but intends to vote against the current federal legislation in its current form.  Senator Brown gave his reasoning in a sound bite that National Public Radio ran for a few hours after his election victory over […]

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There was more than one cause leading to Scott Brown’s Senate win, but the media did its share to set the stage.

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There were many elements that led to Scott Brown defeating Martha Coakley to fill Ted Kennedy’s senate seat: The attractiveness of the candidate as a person: NPR has already discussed his viability as a presidential candidate. The uninspired campaign run by the Democrats until they were in trouble. The dumb luck and/or inspired planning to […]

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Are we really fated to die away like the dinosaurs?

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I’m reading a wonderfully insightful book on the extinction of species by Richard Ellis titled No Turning Back.  He describes in easy-to-understand language the details of all the mass extinctions that have occurred on the earth, relates the story of how many individual creatures may have gone extinct, and makes an objective presentation of current […]

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To claim that one cold year disproves global warming is to ignore a heap of scientific evidence.

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I asked my assistant Colette to look for any articles online or in print that claim that the current cold winter disproves global warming.  She found a number of such claims made; here are some examples: Rush Limbaugh in a January 8 broadcast. Marc Shepard in the January 10 American Thinker. Mark Finkelstein in a […]

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If you ask the questions a certain way, you can use the answer to prove what you want to prove.

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Over the past few weeks, the news media have been full of reports of surveys from The New York Times, CBS News and Quinnipiac University which reveal that President Obama’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, especially among whites.  The Times and CBS polls both report that Obama ended his first year in office with […]

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There’s far too much conflating of the fictional with the real in nonfiction prose these days.

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I keep running across examples of nonfiction writers using fiction as examples or proofs of trends in the real world.  Now there are some occasions when a discussion of aspects of one or more pieces of fiction or works of art can illuminate a real-world trend.  For example, what people are wearing and eating in […]

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The likely healthcare bill reminds me of Al Gore in 2000. If it fails, we’ll regret the alternative for decades.

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One of the big discussions among liberals and lefties these days is whether or not to support the likely health care bill that will result from merging the House and Senate versions of health care reform.  In the most recent New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg lists some of the prominent lefties who have already come out […]

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Is it now in our national character to put a bandage on a foot when a hand is bleeding?

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The way that the National Basketball Association and some NBA teams have reacted to the Gilbert Arenas controversy has me more convinced than ever that one characteristic of our age (and here again, we are similar to the court of Phillip II of Spain) is to attempt to solve a problem by ignoring it and […]

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Instead of making banks and businesses act ethically, Roger Lowenstein tells consumers that they don’t have to.

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In “The Way We Live” column of this week’s New York Times Magazine, Roger Lowenstein notes that about 10.7 million families owe more on their houses than the homes are currently worth.  He advises those people to do what any smart bank or business would do, which is to walk away from the loan and […]

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