Farewell To C.H.
I can’t count the times, down the years, that after some new outrage friends would call me and ask, “What happened to Christopher Hitchens?” — the inquiry premised on some supposed change in Hitchens,...
View ArticleThud Of The Jackboot
Too bad Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket last weekend. If the divine hand that laid low the North Korean leader had held off for a week or so, Kim would have been sustained by the news that President...
View ArticleJohn Walsh, Amy Goodman & Ron Paul
From John Walsh’s letter to Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, on the program’s coverage of Ron Paul: “I have a bone to pick about your coverage of Ron Paul and the five comments that appeared in his...
View ArticleThe Deranged Chorus
A Catholic former US senator from Pennsylvania once rated the dumbest man in the US Congress crested Tuesday night in Iowa’s see-saw battle among candidates for the Republican nomination and ran a...
View ArticleElection Industry In Crisis As Romney Romps Home
He stuck his foot in his mouth a couple of times in the final days, but on Tuesday millionaire Mormon Mitt Romney cantered past the winning post in the New Hampshire primary with 39% of the votes...
View ArticleHere He Comes Again!
Newt Gingrich is a one-man, made-in-America melting pot. Here’s a committed devotee of tooth-and-claw capitalism, vultures perched on both shoulders, advocate of 8-year old black children working as...
View ArticleGoodbye, Gingrich?
Sick with disappointment that I missed the Tin-Tin movie showing in Eureka, I had to settle for Obama’s State of the Union and Thursday’s Republican debate in Jacksonville. Await a presidential State...
View ArticleGoodbye To Afghanistan
The day after the Florida primary, when all eyes were fixed in astonishment on the victorious Gov. Romney expressing his indifference to the sufferings of the poor, the Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta,...
View ArticleHypocrisy & Syria
Few spectacles have been more surreal than senior US officials — starting with the President, the Secretary of State and the US ambassador to the UN — solemnly lecturing Assad and his beleaguered...
View ArticleTime On The Cross With Rick Santorum
Surely Rick Santorum is the most fanatical Christian to run for the Republican nomination in the modern era, maybe any era. Next to him Pat Robertson, billionaire founder of the Christian Broadcasting...
View ArticleSunspots & Republicans
Suddenly the right has gone truly crazy. It must be sunspots. We’re three years into sunspot cycle number 24 and it crests in activity with 59 sunspots in early 2013, the weakest sunspot cycle in a...
View ArticlePardon Power
The Mississippi Supreme Court has upheld two-term Republican Gov. Haley Barbour’s pardons. This quintessential southern good old boy issued 203 of them in January on his last day in office, a hefty...
View ArticleWhy It’s OK To Stick It To Romney For Being A Mormon
Mitt Romney will be the Republican to face President Obama in the fall. Tuesday night was the clincher, as the Mormon zealot won in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington DC. He may stumble on, but the...
View ArticleFarewell, Gastro-Porn
This has been a bad year for grand restaurants in the three- to four-star range and the clang of their closing doors raises the question — is the whole gastro-frenzy that stirred into life in the...
View ArticleAn Envoi For Christopher Hitchens At The Pearly Gates
On April 20 there’s a memorial for Christopher Hitchens at the Cooper Union in Manhattan. There’s a PEN tribute, also in Manhattan, on April 30. Here’s my own little envoi. The regular Diary, tumbrils...
View ArticleWait Till Chen Guangchen Goes On His First Occupy Demonstration In New York
Chen Guangchen, the Chinese human rights activist, got four separate articles in the New York Times for May 5. Jane Perlez and Michael Wines reported from Beijing on the deal that would get Chen and...
View ArticleA Wonderful Fundraiser
It started with lesbian couples in Vermont in the mid-90s, freaked out they’d lose their babies. Vermont Freedom to Marry was born, and is now the most powerful Democratic organization in the state,...
View ArticleBack To 1980
Let me whisk you to 1980 on one of Obama’s miracle drones. In the right-center we had incumbent President Jimmy Carter, derided as a man of peace, el wimpo. True his top foreign policy man was an...
View ArticleThere’s A Cancer On The Presidency, Called Barack Obama
Never trust a president who claims he reads himself to sleep with the help of Marcus Aurelius. That was Bill Clinton, who claimed this thundering imperial bore never strayed far from his hand. Most...
View ArticleDrugs & Repression
A heart in love will decipher every squiggle in a letter as a kiss. In the final days of the 2008 campaign and in the opening ones of his administration, Obama and his top legal aides seemed to the...
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