Watching President Obama’s Q & A with the Republicans Friday, it became starkly plain why entertaining any notion of “bipartisanship” in Washington is so colossally dumb that the very mention of the word ought to bring in a hail of derisive laughter and rotten vegetables. Bipartisanship, as practiced by the Republicans, means “do what we [...]
I don’t know if as Chris Mathews believes, that history was made Friday when President Obama challenged the House Republicans at the opening of their two-day caucus retreat. I do know that although it marked another step in the long-term GOPer strategy to win big in November, it marked a huge misstep. When they drew [...]
“There are many bad men around the world who run countries and we don’t topple them, and indeed in earlier years we had actually supported Saddam Hussein when he was fighting against Iran. The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and certainly an inadequate and unacceptable argument for [...]
During my teen years in the ’50s I was a believer in Christ and fortunately my Lutheran Synod pastor was radical in asking us to follow the humanitarian teachings of Christ and the moral values that bind a culture together in compassion and love of your fellow human beings regardless of their religion or status. [...]
Fittingly or not, on Christmas Day, those who love George Clooney and pay attention to movies bound for the Academy Awards will either find the need to examine their lives more deeply or dig deeper into denial of the life they are living if they go see Jason Reitman’s third movie, Up In The Air. [...]
A hundred thousand protesters are at work in Copenhagen to attack a problem that no amount of science will cure. Only a small percentage of the crowd is American. As protesters look for morale support, they see few Americans not only because the COP15 Summit is in Europe. The US is the world’s largest consumer [...]
Bruce Levine a clinical psychologist in his latest book Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy asked a question that has been on Hag’s and my mind a lot lately, Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set [...]
It’s been curious, in the most delightful way possible, to watch the Republican party rise from the ashes of its last two defeats carried on wings of insular delusion into the ether of pure crazy. This has been happening for some time, of course, but under the careful eye of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay, [...]
Somewhere along the way, the television bobbleheads who are technically supposed to be reporting the “news” gave up entirely on that worthy endeavor in favor of talking about their favorite subject… themselves. Oh, they often elaborately pay faux homage to “real Americans,” meaning those reliably hypothetical wretched souls who don’t happen to rake in millions [...]
Just when most Amercans were beginning to think that part of our problem might be that we’re in too many wars, the Washington Ignoratti declare, with the characteristic oracular certainty that is their unfortunate hallmark, that the real problem is too few. After all, where’s our 9/12 spirit, now that all those hypothetically glorious wars [...]