Donald Trump will never be president; the media won't let him
April 21, 2011
Tuesday night's "NBC Nightly News" led with a lengthy hatchet job on Donald Trump, the colorful, bombastic, ridiculously coiffed real estate tycoon and reality TV star who has emerged as an early contender for the Republican presidential nomination.
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Don't think taxing 'the rich' can get us out of this bind
April 14, 2011
The Congressional Budget Office says the spending bill negotiated with such fanfare by President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner will cut this year's federal fiscal deficit by only $353 million, which is a far cry from what we were told would be $38 billion in reductions. As someone once said to me, "I'm no intellectual, but I can count."
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What is the purpose of NATO?
March 31, 2011
It was said upon the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April of 1949 that NATO's purpose was three-fold: to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.
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Just what we need, another Middle East war
March 24, 2011
Now what? After attacking Libya "on the fly," as Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it, what's next in this latest chapter of Operation Enduring Blunder? (I like that moniker better than the meaningless "Odyssey Dawn.")
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Mideast burns, Japan suffers — Obama golfs
March 18, 2011
The Obamas are off to Rio de Janeiro this weekend, along with the several hundred members of the presidential travel party. Some of us wonder whether this is a good time for the president to be seen having a good time.
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Why is the United States torturing Private Manning?
March 10, 2011
Ten months after his arrest on charges of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is systematically being stripped of his humanness by his warders at the brig inside the Marine base at Quantico, Va.
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Tolerating Westboro Baptist is the price we pay for a greater good
March 3, 2011
There's no such thing as free speech, argued then-Duke University Professor Stanley Fish in a famous essay nearly 20 years ago. Professor Fish is widely praised or assailed for championing what we've come to know and love or loathe as "political correctness."
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Obama and Boehner: Does smoke get in their eyes?
February 10, 2011
Washington's best-known chain smoker is Speaker of the House John Boehner. Its best-known sneak smoker is President Barack Obama.
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In the Arab world, demography is destiny
February 3, 2011
The current revolutionary mood sweeping the Middle East is looking very much like another real-life example of philosopher Auguste Comte's observation, "Demography is destiny."
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Both parties avoid the brutal truth about entitlements
January 27, 2011
Remember when Bill Clinton said "The era of big government is over?" Remember how we laughed and laughed at the thought? That kind of emotion was stirred in me again when Barack Obama pretended to be Ronald Reagan in his mid-term State of the Union speech Tuesday evening.
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Short attention spans and short memories
August 20, 2008
Nicholas Carr thinks that Google is making us "stoopid." In a recent piece in The Atlantic, he says those of us who constantly surf the Net can't concentrate properly anymore -- that instant access to virtually all information reduces our attention span. Mr. Carr says he can no longer immerse himself in a book or a long article, something that used to be easy for him. Has this happened to you? I thought so. It's happened to me as well.