I have a question for my Republican friends. Yes, that sounds like the setup for a smackdown, but though the question is pointed, it is also in earnest. I’d seriously like to know: If Republican fiscal policies really are the key to prosperity, if the GOP formula of low taxes and little regulation really does […]

Sometimes you read a sentence and you think to yourself: only here, only us. Here’s one such sentence. “A 9-year-old girl from New Jersey accidentally shot and killed her instructor with an Uzi submachine gun while he stood to her left side, trying to guide her.” That’s from a New York Times account of the […]

You’ve probably never heard of Claudette Colvin. And yet, had history twisted in a slightly different direction, she might loom as large in American memory as Rosa Parks does now while Parks herself would be a little-remembered seamstress. Colvin, you see, did what Parks did, nine months before Parks did it. In March of 1955, […]

A riot can be many things. It can be an act of communal madness, reflecting the emotional imbecility of those who believe the best way to express joy at their ball team’s win is to overturn a car. It can be an act of opportunism, a chance, under cover of darkness, influence of chaos, suspension […]

“…but we tortured some folks.” — President Barack Obama, Aug.1, 2014 OK, in the first place: “tortured some folks?” Really? Was there not something annoyingly breezy in the president’s phrasing last week as he acknowledged the abuse of suspected terrorists in the wake of Sept. 11? Was there not something off-putting in the folksy familiarity […]

In a place haunted by ghosts, on a thoroughfare of the damned, standing upon ground once watered by blood, Breanna Mitchell lifted a camera to take her own picture. She smiled a sunshine smile. And the Internet exploded. The image the Alabama teenager captured of herself at Auschwitz, an earbud in one ear, has gone […]

It’s a revealing video. Not in the sense of physical nakedness. No, what is naked in that clip is a kind of political opportunism that has become all too common. Our scene is a roadside in Oracle, Ariz., where protesters have gathered. Word is, a busload of children from Central America is about to pass […]

So, Todd Akin is back and he’s talking rape again. You remember what happened last time. The would-be Missouri senator torpedoed his campaign two years ago after suggesting in a TV interview that if a woman is a victim of “legitimate rape,” she is unlikely to get pregnant because her body “has ways to try […]

Here we go again. Same stuff, different day. Deja vu all over again. A monthly New York newspaper, The WestView News, uses an objectionable headline (“The N—-r In The White House”) on a piece in its July edition, which argues that much of the shrill hatred toward President Obama is rooted in racism. Not surprisingly, […]