Politics | Politics
Sep.25.2012
“There’s no work for us,” Ali said, “because we’re old.” The sound of the Bulgarian words was familiar to my ears by now. My friend L. was translating. Ali and his wife C. were only in their fifties, but considered themselves old – and, to be honest, their hard lives had aged them...
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Sep.21.2012
No one thinks it’s real, the action up there on stage – except maybe small children at Hansel and Gretel or Peter Pan. Macbeth and Hamlet don’t really die, Blanche doesn’t actually go mad, Hedda doesn’t shoot herself, and Curly and Laurie don’t really live together happily ever after. ...
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Sep.20.2012
Hope you're a Phil Collins or Genesis fan and you hear "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight" playing. Most people vaguely know that song but are more familiar with "Invisible Touch," the only Genesis song to ever reach number one.
I would rather be writing tonight but plans are in place. One, I'm...
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Sep.20.2012
Ah, the power of the written word. Never forget it.
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Salman Rushdie remembers Havel in his latest book
New York, Sept 19 (CTK) - British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie remembers how former Czechoslovak and Czech President Vaclav Havel wanted to help...
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Sep.20.2012
SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK
This is a good time to make serious inquires and observations relating to American politics, with this very important election coming up. But I don’t work that way. So instead, I decided to interview...
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Sep.19.2012
“No matter how cynical you get, you can’t keep up.” (Lily Tomlin)
I have a friend who talks about “the default world.” He means the one in which we adjust to absurdity, tolerating behavior that we ought to rebuke, simply because in that diminished reality it has become normalized.
In the...
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Sep.18.2012
Ennui, more than rage. How many Muslims with open mouths does the world want to look at? What demons, what paranoia is it?
Why can't I get to see Terry Jones on a magic carpet burning a book and spreading its ashes on the 'secular' believers? Oh, we are not like that. That is Rick Samtorum, Pam...
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Sep.15.2012
Clint Eastwood as a mayor was interesting. I covered a few of his city council meetings for the Monterey County Herald back in the late `80s when the Carmel reporter, the excellent writer Alex Hulanicki, didn’t. In response to his appearance at the Republican National Convention, Eastwood was...
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Sep.14.2012
“As honest as a glass eye.” My father said this about a certain politician when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure he’d say it today, too. He had strong opinions about everything, especially politics.
Each week, he sat at our oilcloth-covered kitchen table with a shoebox in which he...
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Sep.14.2012
Food for thought (to go along with my 2010 post Psychology of Presidential Ambition):
"Overall, the study found, presidents tended to be more like psychopaths than the general population in their level of fearless dominance, but they didn't show a psychopathic excess of impulsive antisocial...
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