Over the weekend, I stumbled upon the fact that Netflix streams episodes of The Rockford Files, the TV show starring James Garner that ran from 1974 through 1980. That time period coincided with my first stint in the US while in graduate school and I recall the show fondly and so I spent several enjoyable hours watching episodes. [Read more…]
[Correction: For some reason I replaced the actual name Morris with Brown in places. I have made the correction.]
Phillip Morris is a local columnist for the Plain Dealer who usually writes fairly boring boilerplate local interest stories. I usually read just the first paragraph before moving on. But a couple of days ago my attention was grabbed by the headline to his column that said ‘Rachel Maddow and the gay tax’. [Read more…]
How do people even think of doing such things, let alone develop the skills to carry them out? [Read more…]
This is the question that the religious right is grappling with in the aftermath of an election in which the antichrist won. So what will religious conservatives do now? [Read more…]
One of the benefits of being a modern pundit is that there is no price to be paid whatsoever for being totally wrong. Let me be clear that there is nothing bad about being wrong. After all, when you are predicting any outcome that is not certain, there is always the possibility, however carefully you do your analysis, of the actual outcome being one that is not the most likely, one that lies in the tail of the probability distribution. [Read more…]
I was once getting my hair cut and listened to the conversation my barber was having with a friend seated nearby. They were recounting a terribly complicated story of something that seemingly happened to a common friend of theirs. Towards the end I said that I was sorry to hear about their friend’s terrible plight when they laughed and said that they had been discussing their favorite TV soap opera. But they were really invested in it and the way they talked about it was as if those characters were part of their lives. [Read more…]
In an earlier post, I discussed the serious problem that the GOP has with single women who voted by a whopping 67-31% for Obama. Mitt Romney’s suggestion that this was because of president Obama’s ‘gift’ of ‘free’ contraceptives was widely ridiculed but this idea that all single women care about is contraception and abortion is quite widespread. [Read more…]
Within the last half-century, it seems to have become a tradition in American politics for the losing party in a presidential election to distance itself from their candidate. But the vehemence with which Mitt Romney is being urged to leave the stage has been quite remarkable. [Read more…]
Jon Stewart looks at the whining by Bill O’Reilly and Bernie Goldberg following Mitt Romney’s defeat at how immigrants are destroying ‘traditional’ America. Stewart marvels at not only their lack of self-awareness but also their ignorance of history. [Read more…]