Last week, I had entirely too much fun with the story about TV preacher Pat Robertson calling for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s assassination. Robertson sort of apologized last Wednesday, which in turn satiated the American media outlets that were enjoying the story about as much as I was. But Chavez, hoping to push the story […]
Retirement seems to be one of those events in life that causes observers to forget — or at a minimum, excuse — every awful thing a person did professionally. In that respect, retirement is similar to death. But of all the people to be rehabilitated, Jesse Helms has to be the least deserving. And yet, […]
Even for Fox News, there are times when the network’s exploits stop being funny and start being scary. In what Fox News officials concede was a mistake, John Loftus, a former U.S. prosecutor, gave out the address Aug. 7, saying it was the home of a Middle Eastern man, Iyad K. Hilal, who was the […]
In July, 27 House Democrats unveiled a congressional resolution called H.Res.375 in response to revelations about the now-infamous Downing Street Memos. The DSMs, as they’re usually called, provide an overview of a 2002 meeting between U.S. and British intelligence officials and quote the head of British foreign intelligence as saying “the intelligence and facts were […]
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld (R) may already be hitting the campaign trail in his quest to be New York’s governor, but a new Rasmussen poll shows him starting at a huge […]
Over the last four years, Bunnatine Greenhouse has been pretty much the only career administration official willing to take a stand against dubious (and lucrative) contracts for Halliburton. She won’t be raising any more fuss on the issue — she’s been demoted. Greenhouse, who has served as the top civilian contracting official for the Army […]
I think it’s essential that universities have diverse student populations, but suing a college for “discriminating” against the ignorant doesn’t make any sense. Amid the growing national debate over the mixing of religion and science in America’s classrooms, University of California admissions officials have been accused in a federal civil rights lawsuit of discriminating against […]
We joke about the “Taliban wing” of the Republican Party, but the truth is there are very few Americans, even within the right wing, who literally want to replace our liberal democracy with a Biblically-based Christian theocracy. They do, however, exist — and they have a plan. At a time when evangelicals are exerting influence […]
As we’ve seen on too many occasions, Friday afternoons are frequently used to release embarrassing information that the Bush gang would like to keep relatively hidden from public view — fewer reporters are working and fewer Americans are paying attention. Alas, this past Friday afternoon was no exception. After 28 months of growing controversy, the […]
After having spent my first 21 years in Miami, I know that hurricane watching can become tedious and anticlimactic. Every year, a handful of storms pop up, sometimes they hit land, and sometimes they do real damage, but real catastrophes are exceedingly rare. In fact, most of the time, hurricanes are among the least-scary of […]