Ken Martin’s Blog

That’s a weird title for a post on my own blog. Well, here’s the story: there’s another Ken Martin. Actually, there’s a bunch of us, but there’s one in particular who is the campaign manager for the ”Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment”. So folks are searching the web for him and seem to stumble in [...]

Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues [...]

Loved it.

Pretty blunt, Ken. Yeah, I suppose. But what else can it be called when a city government takes someone’s property not for a bridge or a road (things historically understood to fulfill the “public use” concept in eminent domain), but just because they want a shiny new commercial district. Keep in mind that this new [...]

Last Friday (I think) I heard a long interview of Christopher Hitchens concerning his latest book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. He is a well-spoken and witty man, but during the interview he failed to progress much further than anger and weak logic, all with a dogmatic yet inexplicably founded moral tone. There’s [...]

I listen to a lot of old time radio shows; Johnny Dollar, The Shadow, Superman… things like that. They’re often very good little dramas, and they don’t require my visual attention. They were the mass media of the time. And unlike today, there weren’t thousands of choices for content, and there was little freedom concerning when [...]

Local weekly newspaper City Pages has an article about the Maplewood City Council happenings. It’s a nice summary of the view of some. It’s not terribly balanced, but that doesn’t make for as easily interesting writing. It’s good to have the topic brought up, though. And I hope concerned Maplewood citizens study up on what’s [...]

No, not MLK… c’mon, have some respect. Here’s the audio of the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, given on August 28, 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Now that I’ve started to become more familiar with Lincoln, the speech strikes me as very like Lincoln’s work. Not too long. Elegant language. Rich analogy. [...]

Sorry to leave my severe finger wagging at the East Side Review on top for so long. I’ve been buried. Sometimes work is work, and so work has been. And we had a head cold take a few of us down. And diagramming Greek is just not taking hold in my head. And I’m teaching [...]