General
Obama Redux
Franklin D. Roosevelt said the Presidency “is preeminently a place of moral leadership.” President Obama’s State of the Union met that standard. The President channeled FDR, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan all in his speech. He rose above the usual political theater than these speeches have become. He set out an optimistic vision of…
Read MoreWomb Police
Republicans are right: Our freedoms and liberties are at risk from an overly intrusive, overreaching government. Like the Republican-controlled government in North Carolina that requires doctors who perform an abortion after the 16th week of pregnancy to send an ultrasound to state officials. That’s kind of creepy, when you think about it. Are the DHHS…
Read MoreSaint Barbara
Barbara Buchanan deserved the Nobel Prize for Patience. For 20 years, she lived at the center of the F5 tornado that was Jim Hunt. The remarkable thing: I never once saw her lose her temper. From Hunt’s 1972 campaign for Lieutenant Governor, through four years in that office, through eight years in the Governor’s Office,…
Read MoreThe paradox of George Herbert Walker Bush
To read Jon Meacham’s new biography of Bush 41 (“Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush”) is to realize how much politics has changed in 20 years, to understand why Jeb Bush is going nowhere in the presidential race and to marvel at GHWB’s admirable character – and fundamental cluelessness. The…
Read MoreWho’s being weak here?
It damn sure isn’t President Obama, who is unafraid to show his grief, anger and determination to combat gun violence. No. It’s the cowardly Republican politicians who are so scared of the NRA they react hysterically over the smallest steps to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. The NRA…
Read MoreHateful New Year
We went from the season of peace and love to the season of war and hate in record time. In Oregon, a gang of gun-brandishing vigilantes seized control of public land and dared law enforcement to take it back. A frozen bird sanctuary, of all things. In Raleigh, a gang of paint-brandishing vandals defaced the…
Read MoreDog Zen
Mindfulness is big. People read books, search online and pay good money for seminars and personal instruction. I get free, daily Zen instruction from a true master: a six-year-old rescue dog named Ringo. Ringo practices walking mindfulness. He takes me along for lessons. He doesn’t go for a walk like you and I do, straight from…
Read MoreConnecting the Dots
It turns out President Obama’s case of the wobbles, when it comes to whipping ISIS, isn’t confined to putting ‘boots on the ground.’ There’s a story in The Hill telling how the Homeland Security Department got the wobbles too, stopping an investigation dead in its tracks to ‘connect the dots’ between outright terrorists and other…
Read MoreThis Little Problem
After what happened in San Bernardino you’d think, now, down in the bowels of the Immigration Department they’d be hard at work fixing the problems with granting visas. But, instead, they’re having a knock down drag-out fight over an odd bit of esoteric Orthodoxy: When it’s right and when it’s wrong to use social media…
Read MoreThe Drawbridge
It was a long dry trek across an arid desert, reading through newspaper after newspaper looking for one editorial with a kind word to say about Donald Trump denying Muslim’s visas. Trump, the greatest newspaper editors roared, has torn the Constitution to shreds. Trump has desecrated America’s finest virtues. Trump is lower than pond scum.…
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