I have had strongly-held opinions about Donald Trump’s candidacy for the Republican nomination for president, at least one of which turned out quite wrong.  My view was that he was not really a candidate and therefore did not need to be taken seriously because (1) he actually had no desire to be president, which would […]

Is there no level of hypocrisy to which Republican candidates for president — every one of them — will not stoop? I thought I had seen the depths of their duplicity in the 2012 campaign when they were hypothetically asked by a show of hands whether they would support a tax increase if it were […]

  American culture and society are in the process of becoming corrupted and perhaps unalterably undone by a combination of three increasingly pervasive phenomena: (1) untreated mental illness, (2) politics based predominantly on small, medium and egregious lies, and (3) the instantaneous video reality of seeing and hearing what used to be unshown, unheard, and […]

I have contended that in the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney’s chances were severely limited to a significant extent by the Republican debates held before and during the primaries. Being repeatedly on stage with a variety of ideological extremists (which is putting it politely) not only made Governor Romney look like the presumptive leader of […]

Ireland, a Catholic nation, although with a clearly waning commitment to church dogma, has become the first country to legalize same-sex marriage through a popular vote, and by a resounding margin. Perhaps even more notable, after the vote, the leader of the faction against gay marriage sent a message of congratulations to the advocates of marriage […]

A few weeks ago, Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, at the invitation of John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House, addressed the Congress of the United States and delivered a resounding insult to the president and people of this country. The insult to President Obama was exactly what Speaker Boehner intended. The insult […]

I recently read an essay by Frank Rich (in my opinion, a brilliant observer of America’s sociopolitical scene) about the highly lauded and much awarded film, 12 Years a Slave. Rich admits to being very much emotionally affected when he saw it, but on reflection believes that it accomplishes little if anything regarding today’s racial […]

About seven months ago, I wrote a blog entitled “Bush League” in which I criticized the Obama administration for a series of deceptions and management blunders, suggesting that if such had been the case when George W. Bush was president, I would have been howling for his head. As I lamented, “The current fiascos reach […]

I recently heard from a public school official that one of their teachers was being dismissed for having grabbed a student by the arm in an effort to get him off a desk on which he was standing and disrupting the classroom. The child was not hurt although not surprisingly, he claimed otherwise. The scene […]

I was going to write about why President Obama should appoint Janet Yellen, and not Lawrence Summers, as the next head of the Federal Reserve until I read the same point of view entitled “Why Janet Yellen, and Not Larry Summers, Should Lead the Fed,” by Joseph Stiglitz. Nothing I could write would anywhere near […]