The Questioning Librarian

There is nothing quite so insulting to one's intelligence as a snake oil salesman. Even worse is one who comes back to the same place, peddling exactly the same shoddy goods as the first time. An editorial that appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review last week is one of the finest examples of snake oil salesmanship that I've read in quite a while. The author, hailing from the conservative Commonwealth Foundation, is hawking the same old batch of peculiar remedies that conservatives have been promoting since the early eighties.  Pennsylvania's population is declining, he laments, and it's all because of the reckless tax and spend policies of Governor Wolf! Breathlessly, he relates just how many Pennsylvanians are leaving the state, crushed under taxes, longing to breathe free elsewhere. If only the state would slash taxes, our residents would want to stay, and corporations would beat down the door to open up shop here--utopia would be achieved! This argum...

What do presidents as diverse as William McKinley, George W. Bush, Harry Truman and both Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt have in common? Each one issued more executive orders than Barack Obama. The chart  from The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is useful in charting both the number, and the frequency, of executive orders both past and present. Two things are quite evident when you start to look at the numbers. The first, interesting as a student of history, is that up until the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, fated to be president at the ending of Reconstruction, no president issued more than one hundred executive orders during their time in office. After Chester Arthur, no president has issued fewer than one hundred executive orders, even those who served only a single term.  The second thing looking at the numbers reveals is that Barack Obama has issued fewer executive orders than nearly any president in the last century, wit...

A few weeks ago, I decided to write about the "workforce plan" at my alma mater, Clarion University. Towards the end, I noted that the root of the problem came from the anti-education administration of Pennsylvania's current governor, Tom Corbett, who was happy to keep funding the state's jails but didn't feel nearly as kindly towards education in the state. This is but one facet of an administration that has an absolutely shameful record on many points. If the actions of this man and his administration haven't made you angry yet, you aren't paying attention. While Corbett continues to blame the President for the cuts to Pennsylvania education, he himself must bear the responsibility for $1 billion in cuts to K-12 education. I've seen widely varying figures as to just how many educators lost their jobs as a result, with numbers as high as 20,000 (though I suspect that those numbers include not just teachers, but also the numerous support staff wh...

After their absolute thrashing in the last election, pundits have been eager to weigh in, predicting the death or imminent demise of the Republican Party. This is, perhaps, premature; some of us well recall that after their defeat in 2008 the same pundits were eager to declare that the GOP was dead , only to be unfortunately proven wrong by the emergence of the Tea Party. Yet while it is too early to order a tombstone for one of our two political parties, it is not a stretch to say that the current Republican Party is on a downward spiral and shows no sign of having learned anything from the past two elections. In fact, despite a few Republican figures calling for a time of reflection, many in the right wing seem to think that the problem was not their ideology, it was that they were not ideologically "pure" enough--ironically echoing sentiments expressed following their loss in 2008. While Romney won the majority of white male votes (and those who frequently attend church...