John McCain’s campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, has officially become a rolling punch line to the joke of the GOP presidential primaries.
There has simply never been a primary for either major party as ridiculous as the 2008 GOP effort. Mitt Romney, who would easily have won the Phil Gramm award for financial futility […]

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, by Tom Robbins
The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
The unifying theme of these three novels is the embodiment of contradictions. It’s not exactly a rare theme in literature, and I’m no doubt committing certain literary sins by sitting Franz Kafka down at the same table […]

Documents unsealed in a British court allege that Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s long time US ambassador and a close family friend of president George W. Bush, threatened to withhold terrorism intelligence from the UK if former prime minister Tony Blair failed to subvert a bribery inquiry into payments to the prince from mammoth British defense […]

A recent Barack Obama campaign email carried the tag line “We are the change we’ve been waiting for”, drawn from a speech he made after the February 5th primary extravaganza. The line leaves me cold because my resistance to Obama arises in large part from his inflationary rhetoric, but it nagged at me for several […]

Colin Powell dropped some hints yesterday in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he’s looking outside the GOP for a candidate to endorse.
Powell, who served as the closer for the Bush administration’s sale of an Iraq invasion with an astonishingly dishonest speech to the United Nations, the world and, most importantly, credulous Washington pundits, […]

Serge Kovaleski’s New York Times story on Barack Obama’s youthful flirtation with recreational drugs has been in the works for a while. Obama wrote about his drug use in his autobiographical “Dreams of My Father”, and his mention of the subject prompted a brief flurry of stupidity in December culminating in the resignation of a […]

Continuing on my quest to close enough browser tabs for my computer to regain some self-respect and nimbleness, here’s the second installment of stuff I either meant to write but never quite did, or did write but for some reason couldn’t bring myself to part with the web page I used for material. See here […]

When onlookers asked Ben Franklin what sort of government the constitutional convention had produced, he told them “A republic, if you can keep it.” Well, we haven’t. We no longer live in a constitutional republic. The republic is dead, deceased, demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, expired, late, bereft of life; it is […]

Many months ago when I was writing something about health care I ran across a blog that had a number of entries on the subject, one of which I used in my piece. That web page and 70-some others are still open in my browser, which in retaliation is now consuming most of my computer’s […]

When last we noted the Bush administration’s appalling record on national security, a few items fell through the cracks. The story was on the economic resurgence of opium in Afghanistan following the US invasion that drove the Taliban out of power and ended the group’s short-lived but astonishingly effective ban on opium poppy cultivation. Since […]