Welcome! This is an unapologetic, agenda-free zone. Just commentaries on current events that’ll move you to think, laugh, rage, and even cry.
You’re probably wondering why a “second chance.” After all, LeBron James led the Miami Heat to consecutive NBA Championships in 2012-13. Well, here is an excerpt from “LeBron Abandons Cleveland for Miami,” July 13, 2010, which explains why even he must have realized that none of those championships will really matter when he looks back… Read more.
Remarkably, U.S. politicians act as if Americans have a greater duty to govern, defend, and sustain Iraq than Iraqis themselves. Only this explains their reaction to thousands of Iraqi troops fleeing Ramadi to escape hundreds of ISIS fighters last week. For, instead of damning these Iraqi cowards, U.S. politicians blamed U.S. commanders for not being there, on the ground,… Read more.
This might seem a surreal joke, but Ireland has become the first nation in the world to legalize gay marriage in a national referendum. Ireland’s citizens have voted in a landslide to legalize gay marriage, electoral officials announced Saturday — a stunningly lopsided result that illustrates what Catholic leaders and rights activists alike called a… Read more.
Alas, Mohammed Morsi seems fated to become a martyr for the cause of democracy in the Middle East. He became Egypt’s first democratically elected president in June 2012. But army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi deposed him in July 2013 – in a coup that was, ironically, almost as popular as the student protests that… Read more.
During the mid-1990s, I was one of many worker bees at the D.C. headquarters of the Clinton-Gore Re-Election ’96 campaign. We all buzzed around trying to seem relevant to the political ambitions of the most powerful man in the world. Yet even I saw enough of the compromises and sacrifices (of self and others) Bill… Read more.
The media are lauding President Francois Hollande for announcing that France will finally right one of history’s greatest wrongs by forgiving what remains of Haiti’s “independence debt.” In an address at the opening of the memorial and cultural centre in Guadeloupe on Sunday, Hollande said Haiti’s debt of US$81.2 million will be cancelled… Haiti, which became the world’s… Read more.
A ship carrying hundreds of Rohingya Muslims sent out a distress call asking to be rescued Tuesday, saying they were abandoned by their captain without fuel and have been without food or water for three days… Most are trying to reach Malaysia… They have been prevented from disembarking, in some cases for two or more… Read more.
Women like Mary Roberts Rhinehart have been reporting from conflict zones since WWI (1914-1918). But it took women like Christiane Amanpour to finally shatter the glass ceiling among war correspondents during the Gulf War (1990-1991). Now the archives of print and TV news organizations are replete with reports by female war correspondents, including Marie Colvin,… Read more.
Putin unwittingly shows the only reason Russia retains any relevance on the world stage…. Having to resort to military force to win friends and influence neighbors makes Russia look more like a pathetic regional bully (akin to North Korea with more nukes) than a respected global power in league with the likes of China and the United… Read more.
The reason for the shock, of course, is that polls had Labour either winning or, at the very least, fighting the Conservatives down to the last seat. Truth be told, far too many politicians and reporters treat pollsters like soothsayers these days. And no pollster cultivates this treatment more than Nate Silver – whose FiveThirtyEight analytics attained… Read more.
