A Sour Texas Runoff
We shouldn’t read too much — not yet we shouldn’t — into those Texas Republican primary outcomes hailed, depending on your viewpoint, as victories for patriotism or right-wing nuttiness.
View ArticleThe Subversion of Democracy
Not to be overlooked amid the gale of reaction to the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon emission proposal is the EPA’s gall, its effrontery, its smug tone of...
View ArticleThe Pig in the Republican Poke
Sir Isaac Newton instructs us, in the Third Law of Motion, that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. It may be another way of saying that without Barack Obama there might not now...
View ArticleLeave Business-Bashing to the Liberals
The Eric Cantor debacle in Virginia last week demanded a storyline, which was no heavy lifting. In the GOP primary a political newbie had wiped the floor with the majority leader of the U.S. House of...
View ArticleOf 1914 and 2014
And there before us, b'golly, was…the car!THE car. You know? The one positioned, in blood and early 20th-century elegance, at the center of modern history; the open car carrying the heir to the...
View ArticleThe High Court’s Good Lick for Religious Liberty
The U.S. Supreme Court had a banner day, a crackerjack day, with horns and ice cream, as it trumped the federal government’s brazen claim of power and authority to define which religious convictions,...
View ArticleThe Cramdown Artists
What this country almost certainly doesn’t need right now is more laws and regulations; but it doesn’t necessarily need fewer laws and regulations, either. What we appear to need above all else is a...
View ArticlePresident Joe Biden? Hmmmm...
Sarah Palin’s call for the impeachment of President Obama makes no sense. What does the lady want — a national street fight? But a fetching question arises from her enterprise: Could we live for two...
View ArticleAt Last — Someone Did Something
So, then, what are we supposed to think when the governor of Texas dispatches National Guardsmen to the state border with Mexico in order to deflect the onrush of illegal border-crossers? What are we...
View ArticleThe Gospel of the Terrorists: Beat It or Die
Word to Christians from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: Convert, leave, or die. Forget accommodation. Forget religious tolerance and related catchphrases from the always tolerant, perpetually...
View ArticleSo Now We’re in Iraq Again… What?
Is anybody overjoyed, rapturous, bowled over with delight at seeing the United States again involved in Iraq?No? We can move on then. The United States is involved in Iraq. Concerning which involvement...
View ArticleThe Lynching of Rick Perry
All across America, it seems, we have been hearing about the militarization of law enforcement. To the growing list of 21st century social and cultural disorders it seems timely to add the...
View ArticleOur Own Way — That’s All We Want
The modern world has greater, more terrible problems than the Scottish independence movement. But the movement’s — well — movement helps show why some of our problems are the size they are.To wit: The...
View ArticleIf You’re Elected to Govern, Then Govern!
The month of August 2014 came near to producing the libertarian ideal — next-to-no government. Some might argue that August favored the anarchist ideal — no government at all; nothing going on at the...
View ArticleObama Goes to War
Wasn’t that a good one about the president promising an executive order on immigration — only he discovered the time wasn’t quite right, what with an election coming on, so he pivoted to the Islamic...
View ArticleWhat? We Don’t Expect to Win?!
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, just 28 percent of Americans are “confident” that the president’s plan to destroy the Islamic State will succeed. Sixty-eight percent say they aren’t...
View ArticlePoliticians and Other Moral Amateurs
That’s it, that’s it! Why did no one think of it before Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., concocted the solution to NFL violence?“If the NFL doesn’t police themselves” — she meant “itself,” but never...
View ArticleThe Unwisdom of Solomon
Tee-hee; snicker-snicker. Look at those right-wing clodhoppers scrambling for cover. Yes, sir, Highland Park High School, in Dallas, having “reassessed” seven maligned literary classics — among them,...
View ArticleThe Lord and the Courts
The idea of unelected judges defining norms and basic values has never been an appealing one, but it’s a role modern judges seem generally to welcome. Witness the Supreme Court’s seeming step-back on...
View ArticleWhen Duty Doesn’t Call
Americans will cease arguing over the federal Voting Rights Act and its intricacies — oh, I imagine around the time Texas starts exporting ground water to Minnesota, or the Lord returns to judge the...
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