New:  My review of the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room.  I end up talking a lot more about the history of Enron than about the film...

Corruption watch!   (last updated 8/25/04)
In 2001, I had a page about the evolving California electricity crisis, and the mounting evidence that power companies were creating an artificial shortage to drive prices sky-high.  Now it's about the Enron scandal and the others that came after it, and their revelations of corruption in the White House; it's called "Enron & Friends".  I've gradually come to cover more and more stories of corruption.  New material is added, uh, sort of regularly.

(2001's original electricity crisis page is here, cut off at a point just before the Enron collapse.  There is also a page of miscellaneous other energy-related topics here.)

I have also been a co-author of a blog on another site, which covers topics related to the War On Terror.  It's called The Rattler.  It's currently inactive, due more to service changes at the blog provider than to the authors.

Here is a list of other political articles I've written:

• Are you one of those who is itching to get rid of the obsolete and cantankerous apparatus known as the Electoral College?  Read this discussion of some of the many reform alternatives available.  If you're a defender of the old system, you might find options here that are more appealing than what you've heard previously.  (minor update 2/22/03)

• (This one's also in the Humor section.)  Take a trip back to those unforgettable fun-filled years of the Reagan administration, with a little software item called The Reagan Years.  Any day you run the The Reagan Years program, it will write out a screenful of news about various events that happened on the same calendar day during the nineteen eighties.  All the scandals, embarrassments, and fuckups, gathered into a single package organized by date.  Go to the The Reagan Years page to read about it and/or get a desktop version, or go directly to http://paulkienitz.net/reagan/ to see today's Reagan history right in your browser.  (Current version is release 3; further material for release 4 is being accumulated.)

• There's also a rant about economics here, as is natural in any discussion of Reagan.  If you have ever wondered why the economy has done so well in the Clinton administration compared to the Reagan years, here's my theory about why.  (updated 10/21/01 with new statistics)

• Here's a rant about why Republicans never seem to let the government get out of debt, which has become relevant again as Dubya has made a push for a further big tax cut for businesses and upper income individuals -- the same groups who, as investors, are already receiving a large part of your tax bill as interest payments on the national debt.  (updated 4/15/03)
  
  (If you're interested, you can view a copy, preserved for historical and archival value, of my pre-election screed on just how lame a candidate George W. Bush was in my view.  Updated 4/15/03 with a postscript: "How well did I guess?")

• And here is somebody else's rant explaining the Supreme Court actions that got Bush into office, which I am preserving a copy of because it's the clearest summary I've found of just what the court did. 
  
  (Did the court "steal" the election?  I wouldn't really say so -- they only did damage control after the original plan didn't quite work.  The actual theft occurred earlier, when Florida's voter roles were cleaned of alleged felons, some 90,000 of the names removed being people who were still legally eligible to vote.  Florida admitted this illegality in court two years later, after it couldn't change anything... and postponed corrections until after Jeb Bush's re-election.  They tried the same thing again for 2004 but were caught at it before the election.)

• One other political piece I've written is hosted on Mike Huben's Critiques of Libertarianism page instead of here.  He put it in his Liberal section.  The article is called I'm Still Not A Libertarian.  It's about 12000 words.

• Finally, there is a page of micro-rants on political topics.  (last updated 6/22/02)

Another site that has occasionally published my political writing is Democratic Underground, such as this short piece warning how our adventure in Iraq would end up supporting and funding pro-Iranian groups... one of the many "surprises" (all quite foreseeable by those who paid attention, including the torture scandal) that later embarrassed us there.