If America had philosopher kings, George Carlin would have been one.
Carlin looked at the same world all of us do, but saw it differently. He saw connections we didn’t, as in his famous comparison of football and baseball. He could boil down everyday life to an essence that eluded the rest of us, as when […]

As noted in earlier posts, some market research that I have done shows that a plurality of Americans expect things to change in about three months. No other country comes close to our level of impatience for things to happen. It has been three months since Super Tuesday and not much has changed. I’m bored. […]

If, if John McCain picks a running mate that is moderate and doesn’t come from the Religious Right, then he will be very tough to beat no matter who the candidate is. With the exception of Bush Lite, most presidents tend to rise to a higher calling once they get elected. They campaign one way but […]

The Clintons are smart, but they are running out of cards to play. They saw that the incendiary sentences from Jeremiah Wright were about patriotism, in the white sense, not about race, in the white sense. So they played the patriotism card, just as Rove played it against Vietnam vet and triple amputee, Max Clelland […]

It turns out that McBush has a church problem. The NYT in its magazine this Easter Sunday will out the fact that McCain sought the endorsement of Catholic-hater Hagee who said, among other things, that Katrina was god’s way of punishing New Orleans for its sinful ways. McCain has described this as Hagee coming to […]

I don’t have a link yet, but Obama just said that what his grandmother said was “typical of what white people say”. Wow. Why? Dude! Man! Say it ain’t so.

Lefty is concerned about ”everyone” being “seared” by the selected ranks of Obama’s pastor. It is true that these few sentences have been seen on YouTube over one million times. Now a bigger “searing” is underway: Barack’s speech has been seen by over 50 percent more people so far: 1.6 million and counting as of yesterday, the #1 […]

The pious will not inhert the earth or the White House. The Silent Saint on religion and politics, watching Obama twist in the wind, will now get her turn. A book characterized by Barbara Ehrenreich over at the Huffington Post as a “shocking expose” will be published in short order. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at […]

While Obama took the Nation to new heights yesterday in terms of what is possible, Clinton is busy today taking us to old lows, groveling for revotes in Michigan and grousing about Obama wanting to disenfranchise voters. Make that only Democratic voters, not Republican voters who voted in the Michigan primary: they will not be able […]

As a student of the Civil War, I’m forever finding parallels between those times and our own. You can’t stretch the parallels too far or they’ll snap . . . but sometimes, the similarities are undeniable. Take Lincoln’s First Inaugural, a speech in which he tried to make clear that he had no intention of […]