There are few independent economists (that is, someone who has not singed up as a partisan for any of the political arguments we have) who do not look at the situation we are in and does not see the need...
Legend has it that Thou must read Trashy Novels Whilst on a Beach, or otherwise vacationing, but some of us did the next best thing: we read about the decline and fall. Not Gibbon: too much heft in that even...
I missed the McCarthy era. Technically speaking, I was around at the tail end of his tenure as ruler of the airwaves and print, but, as a new born, my access to those organs of communication was quite limited, and...
We all know now, after months of this, that oil which does not remain where nature placed it, or does not get "harvested" in a way where we can use it, spews. Apparently, after more than 80 days of continuous...
A week or so ago, a cellist named Dan Cho, a young husband and father who also covered soccer for a few publications in his spare time, drowned in Lake Geneva. I did not know him, but his death has...
The following has appeared here in some form or another a few times. It is excerpted from the acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic National Convention of our greatest President, but it has particular resonance on this glorious day of...
We interrupt our work imposed radio silence to bring you this special bulletin from Sunday's Meet the Press. While all its guests, as usual, read their scripts and say exactly what you would expect them to say given who they...
There is, thank goodness, Rachel Maddow to pick up the slack. And slack picking up is required this weekend, and probably the next two what with the demands made on a person's life outside these posts. (There is barely such...
The woman who wrote and sings these lyrics is not the SUNY/Purchase graduate whose work seems to worm its way into these posts so often, but another graduate of the same school, which either attracts, nurtures or teaches its children...
not the one in my family, who I truly love but the one on the television machine as she calls it, who I love as much as one can love someone they've never met. She certainly comes in handy when...
Yes, we all had such high hopes coming out of the election two years ago. Some cautioned that we had not really turned a corner; that the successful election of a real Democratic president, for the first time since the...
This is a day that has more meaning than many of the artificial holidays we celebrate with such fanfare.This was the day the Allied Expeditionary Forces landed in Europe to liberate it from the greatest tyranny it has known at...
Sometimes, a guy thinks that he has become "Mr. Wilson." Maybe you are not old enough to remember him (though Walter Matthau revived the character in a movie a few years back). He was the Mitchell's next door neighbor and...
It would have been a great post. It would have asked how it is possible that the President of the United States, a year and a half after replacing one whose vice president held secret meetings with oil executives to...
More important than Rachel's illustration of just exactly the "libertarian" or anti-government meme goes was her explanation the next night of how this nonsense has been used to defeat progressive initiatives since well before most of us were around. She...
It's funny how things stick to you. A ten year old boy goes to see "My Fair Lady" and the little joke in lyrics about "Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?" or the even more obviousOh,...
We all remember these lines spoken by the President who had come to rescue the nation, though most of us were not born then and our parents not yet even 10 years old. the only thing we have to fear...
Your blogging fool was born, as mentioned a thousand times before, in Boston, Massachusetts and my first exposure to the history of this country came from people with the same geographic roots. It is, perhaps, slightly different than the...
Yes, the description of one's political opponents or their tactics as reminiscent of Hitler is tiresome and almost always extreme. Hitler's rise to power in a nation that had centuries of issues relating to who its people were and what...
When Francis Bellamy wrote these words toward the end of the nineteenth century, his goal was not so much to present a loyalty oath to the nation itself, as an homage to "the republic for which [the flag] stands." What...
