July 12, 2005
Lewis H. Lapham, the Editor in Chief of one of America’s smartest, most engaging monthlies, thoroughly explicates in his July editorial the futility of blaming George W. Bush for everything. Mr. Bush is, of course, doing his level best to do what he’s been told to do –project for the country, and the world, the “powers of the American imagination [and] the strength of the American spirit.”
July 7, 2005
It’s quite something how exploding metal can ruin your day, isn’t it?
July 6, 2005
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Judith Miller left a Federal Courthouse today in handcuffs, bound for a stint in a minimum security institution for the crime of contempt of court. Weeks ago, she’d been ordered to testify before a Grand Jury investigating the Summer of ’03’s outing of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame by anonymous officials of the Bush administration, and was finally jailed for refusing to identify her confidential sources in a story she never even wrote about.
July 1, 2005
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor resigned today after 24 years of service adjudicating the Law of the Land for the United States Supreme Court. Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, she cast the deciding vote in 13 of 15 decisions handed down by 5-4 majorities during her term, and is seen by many to have been the crucial centerweight between the uber-reactionary Scalia/Thomas wing of the court, and the activist, secular liberalism of John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
June 28, 2005
These days, the President reminds me of nothing so much as one of those pre-historic wasps, trapped in a solid block of crystalline amber. Perhaps the image is more akin to a hapless sauropod, flailing about helplessly in what a five year-old would call “the hot lava,” at the dawn of time.
June 22, 2005
How does the man go on?
May 19, 2005
If you’ve ever followed the stock or commodity markets, or read the classic treatise Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, you know at significant turns in the cycles of events which characterize human existence, things get pretty wild.
Prices gyrate, structures crumble, rules and traditions are broken or ignored, and, often enough, people die.
I believe we may be approaching just such a turn in the cycles. It’s just too wild out there to believe things can keep going the way they are.
May 15, 2005
There’s a religious revolution going on in this country, all right.
March 23, 2005
Even his most ardent supporters would hardly place George W. Bush among History’s original thinkers.
March 12, 2005
George W. Bush’s Snake Oil & Medicine Show rolled into my hometown of Memphis, TN on Friday, where the affable, self-styled champion of the Wondrous and Amazing Effects of Freedom and Democracy did his best to scare the bejeezus out of a hand-picked crowd of True Believers.