MSNBC’s Tom Curry had an online column earlier this week suggesting that the time is ripe for a major third party to step up and have a significant impact on the U.S. political system. At a time when opinion polls indicate that Americans hold both major political parties in low esteem, can a third party […]
Just to follow up on yesterday’s post about Bill Clinton “annoying” Bush administration officials by making a surprise, last-minute appearance at a U.N. conference on global warming, there’s a fascinating back story that highlights the child-like behavior of the president’s envoys to the gathering. New York magazine’s Greg Sargent learned that Bush officials “privately threatened” […]
Guest Post by Morbo You know it’s going to be a bad day when a gang of men dressed entirely in black abduct you, give you an enema, pump you full of sleeping drugs and fly you to Macedonia. This happened two years ago to a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri. His crime was — […]
Guest Post by Morbo I continue to have a strange fascination with the Minutemen, the self-appointed border patrol vigilantes whom I’m convinced are just plain, old-fashioned racists who don’t like Hispanics. A short, but amusing piece in the Dec. 12 “New Yorker” by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan only reinforced my beliefs. Kurtz-Phelan attended a Minutemen recruiting drive […]
Guest Post by Morbo For the smartest woman in the world, Marilyn vos Savant sure says some dumb things. In case you’re not familiar with her, vos Savant pens a regular column in “Parade,” a free magazine distributed with many Sunday papers. Because she’s a super genius — the Guinness Book of World Records says […]
Guest Post by Morbo I won’t be in line waiting to see “The Chronicles of Narnia” this weekend. Because I have kids, I’ve read a lot of kid-lit. Some of it is quite good. Lemony Snicket’s books make me laugh out loud. He loads them up with allusions that he must know only parents will […]
I’ve marveled, on more than one occasion, about the series of scandals tied the Bush administration. But we’ve reached an interesting point in Bush’s presidency in which serious controversies, some of which point to possible crimes, have become so common, they hardly cause any excitement at all. It’s become routine to see a half-dozen stories […]
There’s been plenty of speculation over the years that the president literally believes he’s following instructions directly from God. Seymour Hersh’s recent item in the New Yorker, for example, quoted a former senior official from Bush’s first term explaining that the president told him his belief that “God put me here” to deal with the […]
As long-time readers know, I’ve had an odd fascination with the use of the passive voice phrase “mistakes were made.” Reagan made it famous in 1986 in reference to the Iran-contra scandal, but it’s been used to describe the war in Iraq quite a bit lately. Last year, describing the Abu Ghraib scandal, Bush said, […]
It hasn’t made many domestic headlines, but there’s been an ongoing U.N. conference on global warming this week in Montreal. Predictably, the White House sent a delegation of envoys that, unlike our Western allies, rejects most climate studies and resists a change in environmental standards. It’s the first annual U.N. climate conference since Kyoto in […]