Welcome! This is an unapologetic, agenda-free zone. Just commentaries on current events that’ll move you to think, laugh, rage, and even cry.
Yesterday the U.S. Senate held an all day dog and pony show – in the guise of a committee hearing – on the role Goldman Sachs played in precipitating the great recession of 2008. But within minutes it became dramatically clear that this financial crisis was caused in large measure because the brainiacs on Wall… Read more.
Fourteen years before former President George W. Bush launched a war of dubious justification against Iraq, his daddy, former President George H. W. Bush, launched a war of equally dubious justification against Panama. Actually, baby Bush seemed hell-bent on a personal vendetta to get Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for allegedly plotting to assassinate his daddy. And… Read more.
Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona made quite a show on Friday of signing what is generally regarded as the most draconian anti-immigration state law in the United States. The law authorizes police officers to require anyone they reasonably suspect of being an illegal immigrant to produce documentation to prove his/her legal residency. Failure to do… Read more.
It might seem incomprehensible that one could take a college course on the 1960s civil rights movement and not recall anything about Dorothy Height. Yet this was my embarrassing state of black consciousness back in the early 1980s. Perhaps it was caused by the second-hand smoke I blithely inhaled during my college days. But the… Read more.
Six days ago, an Icelandic volcano with a name (Eyjafjallajoekull) nobody can pronounce erupted, spreading ash clouds all over Europe. This forced airport authorities to ground tens of thousands of flights that were scheduled to land on or depart from this continent, stranding millions of passengers literally all over the world. And just when they… Read more.
I was amused by a cartoon recently, which depicts the members of the Tea Party, America’s latest political movement, as mostly resentful white folks who have been ginned up with existential fear by right-wing demagogues. The cartoon shows one of them reacting to the instruction to fill out this year’s Census form with a blue… Read more.
In an event purportedly as historic as the first televised US presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon 50 years ago, the leaders of Britain’s three major parties – Labour’s Gordon Brown, the Conservative’s David Cameron, and the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg – engaged in the country’s first televised election debate in Manchester… Read more.
This is my message to all Americans who are still hiding cash from the IRS in tax havens down in the Caribbean. Because if the IRS can navigate its way through Switzerland’s labyrinthine secrecy laws to find tax cheats there, then it’s only a matter of time before they show up at offshore locations throughout… Read more.
The scope and irony of this tragedy cannot be overstated: On Saturday, all members of a Polish delegation – comprised of political, military, and religious leaders – were killed in a plane crash on their way to a memorial service in the Katyn forest of Russia, where Josef Stalin’s secret police executed thousands of Polish military… Read more.
