America needs to know: Whether Chuck Hagel has sold nuclear secrets on E-Bay. Whether he has a secret time-share sauna with Vladimir Putin. Whether he’s been a broker for toxic Chinese trinkets. Whether he deals in marked-up black-market Persian rugs. Don’t stop now, Sen.…
DetailsNehemiah Griego was angry. He got angrier, and angrier, and then he got a gun. Or two. On Jan. 19, a day when firearms advocates staged “Guns Across America” events, the 15-year-old Albuquerque boy shot dead all five members of his family. Horrific, yes. But one thing: It could have been worse.…
Details“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of — ah, the hell with it.” “My country tis of thee; sweet land of — Obamacare? I’m walking.” It’s been nearly a century and a half since, in a courthouse beside a bloody battlefield, a severed union was…
DetailsIf 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…
DetailsWhen 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.…
DetailsSelf-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…
DetailsIt'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…
DetailsFrom 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…
DetailsA 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.”…
DetailsBarely 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…
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