[ Posted Thursday, January 17th, 2013 – 17:45 UTC ]
We're going to spend today waxing nostalgic, just to warn everyone up front. Because four years ago I traveled to Washington D.C. to attend the Inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama's first term in office. Next Monday will be his second swearing-in ceremony (he will actually be officially sworn in on Sunday, as the Constitution dictates, but since it falls on a Sunday the public event will be held on Monday -- which just happens to be Martin Luther King Jr.'s federal holiday as well). On top of this symbology, exactly 150 Januaries ago American witnessed President Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. So it's going to be a meaningful event, one assumes, in all sorts of ways.
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[ Posted Tuesday, January 8th, 2013 – 18:53 UTC ]
President Barack Obama has it within his power to chart a new course for his administration on the Justice Department's continuing refusal to take into account the will of the voters in over one-third of the United States on medical marijuana. He could do so quite easily, by issuing a presidential pardon for Aaron Sandusky, who just received a 10-year prison sentence for running medical marijuana dispensaries in the state of California -- where such activities were legalized by the state's voters.
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[ Posted Friday, December 28th, 2012 – 18:02 UTC ]
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
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[ Posted Friday, December 21st, 2012 – 18:13 UTC ]
Welcome to the seventh annual homage (which sounds so much nicer than "blatant ripoff," don't you think?) to the television show The McLaughlin Group, since they have the most extensive year-end award category list of anyone around. Since "extensive" is my middle name (well, not really, although I do tend to wander off into the parenthetical wilderness at times, do I not?), such a long list fits right in here.
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[ Posted Wednesday, November 14th, 2012 – 17:19 UTC ]
In a way, I'm glad that David Petraeus's sex scandal is playing out across the pages and television screens of the mass media. Because one of the alternative ways it could have been handled is so much worse.
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[ Posted Friday, November 2nd, 2012 – 16:09 UTC ]
Every so often, I get an idea which I know would make me millions of dollars. Today, I had another one: develop and market a pill which, when taken, would put you to sleep until the morning after the election. The pill would be magically timed to work no matter when you took it, meaning a citizen in Texas or California might not want to take one until perhaps mid-October, but the folks in Iowa and New Hampshire might be expected to take one New Year's Eve -- thus avoiding not only the debates and punditary frenzy of the general election, but the entire primary season as well. It would be marketed under the name "The Rip Van Winkle Pill."
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[ Posted Friday, October 26th, 2012 – 16:01 UTC ]
No matter what your political affiliations, I think we can all agree we're getting a little burnt out on Election 2012. "When will it end?" we wonder -- and we don't even live in a state currently under siege in the continuing television ad war. We can only imagine what Ohioans, Floridians, and Virginians must be experiencing right now.
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[ Posted Friday, October 5th, 2012 – 17:47 UTC ]
The first presidential debate of the 2012 season happened this week, and (it pains us to say) the only person who called the outcome correctly was Chris Christie. Last Sunday, he predicted a "game changer" of a debate, and that we'd all wake up Thursday with a whole new race and a whole new opinion of Mitt Romney. While we rarely agree with Chris Christie about much of anything, we've got to at least hand it to him -- in the midst of the usual pre-debate expectations-lowering game, he went rogue and predicted a big win for his guy, and he turned out to be correct.
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[ Posted Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 – 20:59 UTC ]
There is a whole lot wrong with the way the media reports debates, on that we can all agree, I think. The overemphasis on who "won" and "lost," for starters. The inevitable boiling-down of ninety minutes into a nine-second soundbite from both candidates (which we'll see everyone agree on by tomorrow morning).
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[ Posted Monday, October 1st, 2012 – 15:56 UTC ]
This caricature began approximately the day Obama took office, and has been used scathingly by Republicans over the past four years. Obama was nothing more than a puppet, Republicans sneered, tied by the strings of his TelePrompTer, and unable to form a coherent thought or sentence on his own.
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