If you’re like me, it’s difficult acclimating to the new Republican role as The Party That Wants the Numbers to Add Up. Forgive me, but when I see John Boehner, Eric Cantor and the rest striking the virginal pose, halos overhead signifying “zero dollars more than revenues allow,” I can’t help…
When fighting a fire, one strategy is to start another one. When a wildfire is chewing up acreage, setting a fire in its path and letting the intentionally set flames burn away available ground cover can dramatically slow the foe. That’s all we can ask in the face of America’s gun-death inferno.…
Self-evident. It’s what the founders called a certain assertion: All persons are created equal. This, too, is self-evident — or should be: A corporation is not a person. A corporation has no fundamental rights. It is a legal construct, like a parade license. A parade and a corporation both involve…
It's called Chinese handcuffs, a trick that perfectly illustrates why America’s in a fiscal pickle. The thing is, it's not tricky at all. Stick two fingers into opposing ends of the tight wicker tube. If they pull in opposite directions, the tube contracts and won’t release them. But if the fingers stop resisting…
From Associated Press: “The (Newtown) tragedy prompted calls for greater gun controls. But the NRA is resisting those efforts, arguing instead that schools should have armed guards for protection.” That intriguing parsing from the AP is most telling. The National Rifle Association is a separate branch of our government, a statutory…
A review of 2012 found reality television continuing to consume the medium like typhoid. Or, more appropriately, like mononucleosis ravaging a freshman dorm. You might call it all flotsam — but I’m here to report that one reality show truly proved instructive. I speak of “The Really Biggest Loser.”…
Barely attentive to anything that would prevent such horrors — Newtown, Aurora, Tucson — we are entranced by the gripping accounts and vigils and memorial services afterward. We reflect on compelling examples of courage and calm like the teacher who herded her students into the closet and occupied them with Crayons and paper as…
Until now, the last clear mandate coming out of a presidential election was in 1932 when voters demanded of Roosevelt: End this Depression. And make it rain while you’re at it. Notice I said “until now,” and that should raise eyebrows. In this divided, divisive political landscape, how could anyone attach a…
This is brilliant. And to think it came from the folks who made the mess in the first place. The mess is the buying of our government. I can’t believe that Republicans in Texas and Florida have come up with the solution. That solution: urine samples. This may take some explaining, because…
By all rights it will rank as one of TV news’ singular moments — along with Edward R. Murrow tongue-whipping Joe McCarthy, and with Walter Cronkite turning against the Vietnam war. It was the night a Fox News anchor told Karl Rove to get over himself — in so many words. Election Night…