On November 26, Pope Francis framed as a call for Catholics to embrace a new evangelization. Prominent among his remarks was this stinging critique of the inequality tolerated by western capitalism. Said the Pope:: Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, …
Rob Ford has been thrown out of a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game for being drunk and belligerent. He groped a female politician at a fund-raiser for a Jewish community group, and was asked to stop coaching a high school football team after having a violent confrontation with one of the players. He has admitted …
Anyone who believed that the GOP would carry the shutdown around its neck like a dead albatross into the 2014 elections has surely begun to grasp what a bit of wishful thinking that was. Already people have begun to move on–the shortcomings of the health care act, eavesdropping on Angela Merkel (I’ll admit it: I …
As we all know, the idealistic sixties died in the selfish eighties.The spirit of “All You Need Is Love” was cooed away by the spirit of “Material Girl.” In the eighties, the spirit of making money was wild upon the land. Big takeover companies took over businesses and fired all the employees to raise the …
America loves its outlaw heroes. We love them when they are rebellious misfits like Bob Dylan, Holden Caufield and Huck Finn. We also love them when they are action heroes, like Batman and Dirty Harry. In our political life, some of our greatest figures have been outlaw heroes like Martin Luther King, who spoke truth …
The government has been shut down for a week now, and I feel nothing but disgust. I don’t want to repeat what everyone else is saying, but I find the Republican tactics in thie matter shameful, bizarre, selfish and patently un-American. The cabal, led by the Koch Brothers, the odious Ed Meese, the Club for …
The other day Paul Krugman talked about the sad and diminishing state of Republican brain power: “How many Republicans know, for example, that government employment has declined, not risen, under President Obama? Certainly Senator Rand Paul was incredulous when I pointed this out to him on TV last fall. On the contrary, he insisted, “the …
In Tuesday’s very interesting New York City primaries, Bill De Blasio, a low key guy with the nearly invisible job of public advocate, came very close to winning the forty percent of the vote he needed to avoid a run-off, and be named as the Democratic mayoral nomination. De Blasio ran hard from the left …
When I worked at Playboy a few years ago, some of the fellows were fond of a saying: “Don’t mess with another man’s blow job.” Crude, blunt, and yet eloquent, the saying had a lot of applications. Don’t criticize another man’s girlfriend (boyfriend.) Don’t come on to another man’s girlfriend (boyfriend.) Don’t interfere with his …
One of the pitfalls in writing about the Civil War is the tendency to see things through a Civil War lens. As a result, one sometimes sees connections between phenomena and events that have no business being tied together. And that’s what may be going on here. Still, when one reads in the Times about …
NULLIFICATION, SECESSION, AND NOW OBSTRUCTIONISM Read More »