We are in the season of graduations.

And the ubiquitous commencement address.

This year, Harvard has Oprah and Ohio State already had Obama.

The rest of the pack reads like a Who's Who among the rich, famous and otherwise accomplished.

There are actors and actresses (Julie Andrews at...

April 2013.

It started good enough.

With baseball.

Then it was all downhill.

The Boston Marathon bombing was book ended by two Senate votes on what now passes for gun control in this country -- a bill expanding background checks to gun shows and Internet sales so as to...

Should gay men and lesbian women be permitted to enter into state-sanctioned marriages?

This question -- which is now the subject of two Supreme Court cases, numerous state referenda, evolving state laws, and kitchen table conversations throughout the country -- is much easier to answer as a matter of policy...

When I was a kid, I went to church a lot.

I went to a Catholic parochial school in Brooklyn in the '60s. It was then called Our Lady Help of Christians. There were two classes, A and B, for each of eight grades. There were slightly more than 50...

So there I was sitting in my favorite bookstore in Pleasantville, NY on a cloudy, wintry afternoon this past Saturday.

When the chill breezes of right wing austerity hit me smack in the face.

I had just finished browsing and was gathering my four selections and making the trip to...

At various moments in history, our leaders define our moment.

And they do so in words that become unique to that moment.

In 1776, Jefferson embraced the Enlightenment ideal that "all men are created equal." What he meant, really, was that all educated, white men were created equal. Slaves...

About a generation ago, Gerald R. Ford arguably lost the the 1976 presidential election by refusing to let the federal government lend New York City any money to finance its ballooning debt. In the face of a near bankruptcy that would have sent the nation's then largest metropolis -- along...

One of the guns was a Bushmaster .223 rifle. The second was a Sig Sauer pistol. The third a Glock pistol.

All were semi-automatic. This means that, once a bullet was fired, the guns automatically reloaded and were set to be fired again. There was no need to re-cock or...

We are in one of those "in-between" periods.

Some of them are annoying.

Once February ends, I am generally in no mood for the "in like a lion, out like a lamb" daily dreariness of early March. I can understand why my co-religionists turned St. Patrick's Day on...

Others will and already are picking apart the election result and explaining why it happened.

The featured causes include significant increases in the number of Hispanic voters, the GOP's seriously declining share of that vote, the ubiquitous gender gap, extremism on the right, and -- perhaps owing to that...

It was supposed to be the week we all focused on those eight swing states -- New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Colorado and Nevada.

And then reality intervened.

The latest "storm of the century" hammered the tri-state New York region earlier this week and we are not remotely...

I am from New York.

But last week went to Virginia.

And was finally in a state where there actually is a presidential campaign.

Here in New York, safely blue, we are besieged with information from the under-ticket. No presidential candidate need apply. I know, for example, that...

I am a little late to the party this week. I could not really choose between baseball and the vice-presidential debate last Thursday. So I had half an eye on each.

These days, that is called multi-tasking.

A lot of folks are very proud of their ability to multi-task, and...

Both presidential candidates went to the University of Denver on Wednesday night. President Obama went there to debate Mitt Romney. Romney went there to debate...

Himself.

All the pundits pronounced Romney the so-called winner.

The liberals on MSNBC were apoplectic at the president. Ed Schultz repeatedly bemoaned the president's...

So Mitt Romney, then candidate and now nominee, went to one of those fundraising salons of the rich and richer this past April and told them that 47% of the country was dependent on government and would never vote for him.

I am actually being nice.

Here's the complete...

So I am now being told that we are in the era of "post-truth politics."

According to the pundits, this is an era where facts do not matter. Instead, media reporting takes the form of "he said, she said" dueling quotations. Every claim, however preposterous, is framed as the neutral...

About a hundred years ago, all was supposedly right in the world.

Well settled in the predictable conventions of the 19th century, no one, it seemed, even contemplated the possibility that the century-long post-Napoleonic order could or would be rent asunder. European stability, coupled with attendant increases in trade and...

A week ago the big news was whether the statue of Joe Paterno would come down at Penn State in the wake of the university's report that he and other higher ups had covered up Jerry Sandusky's child abuse. Then, last Friday, a gunman opened fire in a crowded theatre...

It was supposed to be historic and certainly was the most anticipated Supreme Court decision since Bush v. Gore. The result was also unexpected and therefore surprising

But in the end, if it lives up to all the hype, it will be for all the wrong reasons.

That's my take...

Who would have thunk it?

In this post-modern, post-Marxian, post-it seems everything world, ideology turns out to matter.

This was not supposed to be the case. For years now, politicians, academics, businessmen and women as well as -- it seems -- pretty much everyone else, have been telling us...