Christi and I have firmly rejected the idea that Lexie is dead. We texted each other all through the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy on Thursday night with pithy comments about the stupidity of that many overeducated people sitting around a crashed airplane with five matches making four tiny fires that eventually all went out, leaving Mere with one match, which went pfft! when she struck it and died, just like Lexie did.
WASHINGTON — The recent news cycle has produced two narratives: One, Barack Obama is an evolutionary, 21st-century hero who supports equality for all. Two, Mitt Romney is a gay-bashing bully mired in the previous century, who also supports a war on women and, oh yeah, hates dogs.
WASHINGTON — None of us wants to be judged by the dumb stuff we did in high school — or in college, for that matter, whether they involve cruel “pranks” (Mitt Romney) or pretentious letters (Barack Obama).
WASHINGTON — Prius, which is Latin for “to go before” or “lead the way,” is the perfect name for the car whose owners are confident they are leading the way for the benighted.
Today, the story of the bare-chested crossword-puzzle solver. Barack Obama barely mentions his New York years in his autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
Residents of Denton should recognize and be grateful for our good fortune that Denton’s sub-surface strata include a significant volume of Barnett Shale containing entrapped natural gas.
The Obama re-election campaign recently unveiled a slogan for the fall campaign — its answer to Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the 21st century,” and other successful re-election pitches.
The chair clutched my derriere firmly and then let go as a hammer worked its way up and down my spine.
I don’t care about George Zimmerman’s MySpace page. Granted, it was gratifying to read recently in The Miami Herald about his crude animus toward Mexicans (“wanna be thugs”) and his reference to a former girlfriend as an “ex-hoe.”
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, in a recent debate with former Republican National Chairman Michael Steele, called the Republican Party the “grand wizard crowd.” Grand wizard is the title given to the leader of the Ku Klux Klan. It is truly misinformed to call Republicans the party of the Klan.
WASHINGTON — Economic austerity is a dangerous, self-defeating intellectual fad. Perhaps I should say that’s what it was, given recent election results in Europe. Perhaps I should also say good riddance.
Labor unions, like the United Nations, are all too often judged by what they are envisioned as being — not by what they actually are or what they actually do.
CHICAGO — In December 2010, after the DREAM Act fell five votes short of passage in the Senate, it was understood that the issue would be dead for a while, and that Hispanics would go to the polls in 2012 and punish those who voted against the legislation.
What sort of thing is a presidential campaign? Maybe a campaign is like a courtship. A candidate’s job is to woo the electorate, to win the people’s affection with charm, familiarity and compassion.
Like many of us who pontificate for a living, my column-writing colleague Jonah Goldberg apparently toils away in daily frustration that so many people fail to take his political advice.
WASHINGTON — Poor Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. Once again he’s been pilloried for fumbling a historic Supreme Court case. First shredded for his “train wreck” defense of Obamacare’s individual mandate, he is now blamed for the defenestration in oral argument of Obama’s challenge to the Arizona immigration law.
This is the kind of thing that happens in the age of YouTube. A blind Chinese dissident escapes from house arrest by climbing over a wall and somehow eludes cordons of minders.
WASHINGTON — The squabbling between political campaigns and the harrumphing of pundits were put in proper perspective at, of all places, the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner — the annual Prom on the Potomac where 2,000 or so media members and movie stars gather to honor the president and admire one another.
Throw book at EdwardsJohn Edwards allegedly misused campaign money to cover a tawdry affair while posing lovey-dovey with his dying wife for the cameras.
Washington is full of nerds. I know. I speak nerd, not fluently mind you, at least not anymore. But I certainly know more than a few phrases memorized from a Berlitz nerd-to-English phrase book. I can talk Dungeons & Dragons (both D&D and AD&D).
WASHINGTON — Maybe it’s a hangover — metaphorical, not literal — from the partying of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner weekend, but this is feeling like the most vacuous presidential campaign in memory.
Considering that on Monday I backed into a new Lexus and on Tuesday Kiefer took a whiz on my office surge protector, it wasn’t such a bad week, I guess.
Sometimes, people hide inside the Bible. That is, they use the Christian holy book as authority and excuse for biases that have nothing to do with God.
WASHINGTON — Republicans are waging the most concerted campaign to prevent or discourage citizens from exercising their legitimate voting rights since the Jim Crow days of poll taxes and literacy tests.
President Barack Obama and Wall Street occupiers, along with their allies in the mainstream media and on college campuses, have maintained an ongoing attack on high-income earners, people they call 1 percenters.
Who knew that what corrupt Russian officials care about, more than just about anything, is getting their assets — and themselves — out of their own country? They own homes in St. Tropez, fly to Miami for vacation and set up bank accounts in Switzerland.
As a young man, Peter Thiel competed to get into Stanford. Then he competed to get into Stanford Law School. Then he competed to become a clerk for a federal judge. Thiel won all those competitions. But then he competed to get a Supreme Court clerkship.
Those who saw mass migration from Mexico as a threat and those who did not all agreed on one thing: It was unstoppable without dramatic action by the federal authorities.
Whatever the ultimate outcome of the case against George Zimmerman for his shooting of Trayvon Martin, what has happened is enough to turn the stomach of anyone who believes in either truth or justice.
Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are? If you’ve been following his campaign from the beginning, that’s a question you have probably asked many times.
John Raese is feeling persecuted. Raese, a West Virginia businessman running for the Senate, declared in a recent speech that he doesn’t want the government telling him what to do “because I’m an American.” Specifically, he lamented that he is required to place a “huge sticker” on his buildings declaring them smoke-free environments.
The judge looked sternly over his bench at the woman standing before him.
CHICAGO — Are you the least bit surprised that simply irrigating the nation’s so-called “food deserts” with more fresh fruits and vegetables doesn’t result in healthier communities?
WASHINGTON — Either President Obama has wings of Kevlar — or he has the most incompetent scheduling staff in White House history.
The Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation does a yeoman’s job of keeping track of how much we’re paying in taxes and who’s paying what.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Maybe we gave up on John Edwards too soon. His hair still looks great, even though he now gets cuts for $12.95, not $400. And the man clearly has a gift for multitasking under pressure.
WASHINGTON — When Matt Damon talks toilets, people listen. By people, I mean me. In the tough-job-but-somebody’s-got-to-do-it category, I was invited to a dinner the other night with Damon. (Thanks to David Bradley of Atlantic Media for hosting, and to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg for arranging the event.)
There’s an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America’s colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it’s not clear how much actual benefit they are providing.
Supporters of the protests that followed the suspicious death of Trayvon Martin are raising a good question: What next?
This is an election year, which means all of us will spend the next few months carefully following the campaigns, finding out all we can about the candidates’ proposals and pondering what issues are most vital for the nation’s future.
WASHINGTON — Not all overheated political rhetoric is alike. Delusional right-wing crazy talk — the kind of ranting we’ve heard recently from washed-up rock star Ted Nugent and tea party-backed Rep. Allen West — is a special kind of poison that cannot be safely ignored.
CHICAGO — Little else brings me as much joy as learning a new word — especially if it perfectly captures the spirit of the moment.
WASHINGTON — Here we go again. At the beginning of his presidency, Barack Obama argued that the country’s spiraling debt was largely the result of exploding health care costs. That was true. He then said the cure for these exploding costs would be his health care reform. That was not true.
It’s difficult to be a good economist and simultaneously be perceived as compassionate.
Animal rescue once sent me a fabulous mutt. She was usually obedient and heartbreaking in eagerness to please. But I couldn’t get her into the basement.
Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently spoke out in defense of his successor. Attacks on Ben Bernanke by Republicans, he told The Financial Times, are “wholly inappropriate and destructive.” He’s right about that — which makes this one of the very few things the ex-maestro has gotten right in the past few years.
SAN DIEGO — In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, many Hispanics are talking about voting for the lesser of two evils. The hard part is figuring out the lesser evil.
