This election is like few others we’ve seen. With so many voters fed up with the course of governing — and with so many candidates struggling to tap into this palpable anger — 2010 brings a new strain of the old throw-out-the-bums electoral fever. There’s demagoguery out there, too, in this season of discontent. So it’s hard to know who’s telling it straight and who’s trying to exploit our body politic at a vulnerable moment.   When and Where...

  Dear Bay Weekly: This debate on the windmills [Pulling Pennies from the Air and The TALL Price of Power, Sept. 30; Correspondence, October 14; Letter from the Editor, October 21] is interesting indeed. A young acquaintance who was going into the business offered to install one at the edge of our wetlands. While spiritually and practically we were all for it, we remembered the constant noise we have heard passing fields of windmills, and we knew we would go nuts with one in our back yard...

  The year’s political babble has the tenor of a neo-Freudian emergency room. Lots of people in obvious psychic pain are loudly blaming government — not mom or dad — for all that’s wrong in the world. So it was a refreshing change to visit the Calvert County town of North Beach, population 1,873, where government seems to work pretty well. So well that all three candidates in the non-partisan race for mayor say they’re setting their electoral sights on making...

Three strangers are wrestling with death. Marie (Cécile De France: Mesrine: Killer Instinct), a French journalist, is revived after nearly being consumed by the Indian Ocean tsunami and emerges shaken by her brush with the afterlife. Marcus, a British schoolboy, is left rudderless when his twin brother Jason is stolen by tragedy (Frankie and George McLaren in their debut). And George (Matt Damon: Green Zone) is a genuine psychic talent who laments his burden of communing with the dead. Through...