There is being an idealist, and then there is John Densmore. There is defining integrity, and then there is John Densmore. There is putting money, reputation and professional legacy where the mouth and the heart reside, and then there is John Densmore.

The legendary drummer's new book, The Doors...

Men are qualified for civil liberties in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites: in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity.
- Edmund Burke

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that...

Nation's Highest Court Faces Down Discrimination in Our Time

Congress decided to reflect and honor of collective moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality. - House Report on the passing of Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.

This week the Supreme Court hears arguments to overturn the...

With the commencement of the Men's NCAA Basketball Tournament, arguably the most watched American sporting event outside of the Super Bowl, it is time to mark the 30-year anniversary of one of the most impossible runs in sports history. The 1983 North Carolina Wolfpack created March Madness, coming from nowhere...

Saturday 3/2/13 -- 10:46 AM

Sick as a dog; strike that, no mammal could possibly endure this strange cocktail of searing throat pain and high fevers and continue to call itself canine. A dog would likely have already dragged its disease-ridden carcass out to the woods and buried itself by...

In Praise of a New Revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

"Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?" -- Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Great art has a boomerang effect that is hard to match in other disciplines of human endeavor....

We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and...

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
- Alan Watts

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much...

The Madness Method Explained

Now that things have gone underground in Washington, the wheels of our national fate are turning. A sign of progress is that the first body of this standoff has been tossed out. Susan Rice has fallen on the sword and will remove one jack-boot the president...

Public Flogging Off "The Cliff"

"That is the thing you want to remember if you work in either journalism or politics - or both, like I do -- and there is no way to duck it. You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and...

Second-Term Obama Comes Out Swinging

It's balls-out time for Joe Cool. Elections, as they say, have consequences. The last president to win a second term did so by a paltry sixty thousand votes in Ohio and began talking like Kubla Khan about "spending political capital." None of this is lost...

Election Day Boondoggle -- Freedoms at a Premium

Those of us unimpressed with this ongoing myth that the United States of America promotes the pure tenets of freedom are to say the least lukewarm on these referendums passed in four states (Colorado, Washington, Maryland and Maine) last Tuesday to legally...

Barack Obama Doubles Down On History

That was fun. Eighteen months of hard campaigning, billions of dollars spent, hundreds of speeches, rallies and whistle stops, trillions of words spewed from every avenue of punditry, and here we are: President Barack Obama, Republican Congress, Democratic Senate.

How did we get to...

Final Fever-Induced Thoughts From the Desk

If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can't acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to...

The Pandered Demographic Model Circa 2012

Somehow there are five to seven percent of people, maybe it's four percent, maybe less that are undecided about this year's presidential choices; of which there are only two. Now I can clearly see why there isn't a three-party system. This is apparently tough...

Obama's Long Island Resurrection

Here's what the 2012 campaign has taught us thus far: Frontrunners suck.

This time, for over 90 minutes at Hofstra University in Long Island, N.Y., it was Mitt Romney's turn to suck. His resurrection, thanks to the sucking by Barack Obama on Oct. 3...

A Baseball Philosophy into Romney's Mid-October Comeback

A little over a week ago while Mitt Romney was kicking Barack Obama all over the stage in Denver during the first of three presidential debates, the New York Yankees were beating up a depleted Triple-A team wearing Boston Red Sox uniforms and...

President Jacked by Desperate Romney Salvo

Apparently the past month of the Mitt Romney Campaign follies, which sunk him in nearly every poll imaginable, has given the Obama Campaign the idea that by merely showing up and not making a complete ass of its candidate will be enough to secure...

How to Tank a Campaign in Two Weeks

Since I left Colorado two weeks ago having just completed a column on the DNC Convention that vaulted the president's approval ratings over 50 percent for the first time in half a year and jacked his head-to-head polling near seven percent...

Okay, so now we have a 2012 campaign.

The VP pick is an important symbol for where the pre-convention narrative is going for a candidate, especially a challenger. For Barack Obama in 2008, Joe Biden was chosen to connect with the alienated white, working class voters lost in the epic...