22 to 27. Books I Read on Vacation

22. Red Lights by Georges Simenon - This book was flat out awesome, the guy is such an amazing writer. This is the story of a young married couple who set out one Labor Day weekend to drive to Maine from New York to pick up their two children from summer camp. Written in the 1950s when there were far fewer prohibitions against drinking and driving, the husband and wife get into an argument about the husband's need to stop at the road side bars for drinks. And it gets darker after that.

23. The Road by Cormac McCarthy - This is a PA novel about the life of a father and son as they travel westward after some kind of massively destructive event has burnt out and killed most of North America. It is a superficial but entertaining novel.

24. Ernest Hemingway A Life Story by Carlos Baker - There are no shortage of Hemingway biographies but this one is widely acclaimed to be the best of the lot. Partially because it was written in the late 1960s when many of Hemingway's compatriots were still alive and were able to share stories about him and partially because the author doesn't hold back any punches. He portrays Hemingway as a literary genius but also shows him for the petulant self centered man that he was.

25. The Whistleblower of Dimona by Yoel Cohen - In 1986 Mordechai Vanunu gave information to the London Times who published a story disclosing, what many people already knew, that Israel was in fact a nuclear power. This book is the story of Vanunu his conflicted childhood and early adult years, his rejection of Judaism, his disclosure to the London Times and his eventual capture by Mossad agents. The author is a professor of mass communications so he spends a lot of the book discussing the details of how the Times handled the story which was not that interesting for me. The story of Vanunu himself, however, was fascinating.

26. Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon - This one is not as good as Red Lights but nonetheless it is better than most novels. This is the story of a successful business man in a loveless second marriage who one day disappears mysteriously and ends up living a seedy life in the south of France. It's a good quick read.

27. White Death by Robert Edwards - The badness of this book cannot be described and I was so looking forward to it. It is supposed to be the story of the Russian invasion of Finland in WWII but the author screws up the writing so badly that reading it almost resulted in my White Death.

My Take on the Mid-Term Elections

Democrats across America are seemingly overjoyed by their election victory on Tuesday. They shouldn't be, because a big reason that the Democrats won was because they fielded right wing candidates. For example, in Philadelphia the Senate candidate who beat the incumbent and absurdly Christian Rick Santorum, is pro-gun, anti-gay and anti-abortion. The Senate candidates who won in Montana, Virginia and Ohio share the same vintage. Further evidence of this is that one of the few anti-war candidates, the Republican Senator from Rhode Island, lost in his bid for re-election.

What has happened is that the Republicans have maintained the shift to the right introduced by the Bush II Presidency and the Democrats have also shifted to the right leaving Americans to choose between the far right and the center right.

So, what has happened is not necessarily good for left leaning liberals.

The good thing about the election is that it has ended the rule of the Neo-Cons in Washington and ended the Bush Doctrine that America should proactively promote democracy in foreign countries. The Neo-Cons's demise is signaled by the departure of Donald Rumsfeld and his replacement with Gates who served under the first President Bush and by the Senate's stated refusal to confirm John Bolton as Ambassador to the UN. It is further reinforced by the increasingly important role that Bush I stalwarts such as James Baker are playing in setting strategy for the government. With the Neo-Cons gone so goes the Bush Doctrine.