It is a singular experience to encounter a human being as authentically great as Janos Starker. A "force of nature" is one way to describe him. Acolytes and critics alike could agree with the persistent "fire and ice" moniker. (It tickled his magnificent sense of humor.) Simply to be in...

Little things mean so much, particularly when confronting a deep, personal loss. When his wife responded to our message of celebration on Frederick Ferré's 80th birthday with news of his death, we were shaken and immeasurably saddened. Now, I find myself anchoring my grief over the loss of this remarkable...

... and counting.

In August, 1996, we broadcast a program responding to the bombing at Centennial Park during the Atlanta Olympic Games. Blessedly, the bomber -- anti-gay and anti-abortion -- is now serving life sentences for that and other fatal bombings.

The program we...

Thirty years of gun-slinging mass murder American style -- crisply documented by Mother Jones -- had almost pushed me into mute hopelessness. But feelings of despair offer no answers, so I went looking for antidotes. I had found two, before the horrific gates of gun violence hell touched...

Should the unthinkable happen and Mitt Romney actually wins today or even if the Republicans are allowed to steal the election, consider the necessary alterations to that hoary standard, the Pledge of Allegiance. The pledge will be redirected from the Flag to the Corporation. "... With liberty and justice for...

... is a vote to complete the takeover of America by big corporations. Consider the old-fashioned American notion of Justice.

If Romney has any authority in the Republican Party, he should immediately put a halt to the blatant effort to disenfranchise large numbers of voters. If he tries and fails,...

... is a vote to complete the takeover of America by big corporations. Consider the place we call home: Earth. Consider also the storm called Sandy.

Mitt Romney says that corporations are people. That is legalistic, self-serving nonsense. The consequences of this nonsense are many and overwhelmingly bad. The most...

The First Amendment guarantees our right to embrace any religion we choose, no matter how peculiar. It also protects our right to talk about it along with almost anything else (truthfulness is optional). So why have we heard so little of substance about Mormonism when MItt Romney, a committed Mormon,...

... is a vote to complete the takeover of America by big corporations. Take the history of affordable, accessible health care in America.

When I want to step back and get a broad view of what's going on in the world of capitalism, I have the luxury of talking with...

Despite all his flip-flops, Mitt Romney is predictable. Let's start with that.

In the good ol' days we had "smoke and mirrors" as a source of illusion. Today we have Mitt Romney's "smoke and more smoke" as a source of delusion. Mr. Romney has repeatedly asserted that he...

Finally! The real Mitt Romney, not the glossy PR portrait, has emerged. His dark visual snarl -- aimed squarely at journalist Crowley who dared contradict him with facts -- impels me to do all that I can to deny this man the presidency. The look and manner is as familiar...

Romney/Ryan have piously wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of "bipartisanship." As with much of the bombast coming from their campaign, it is manifest nonsense.

Start with Paul Ryan: In August, BusinessWeek published an article succinctly titled "The Illusion of Paul Ryan's Bipartisanship." Their bottom line:

Democrats who...

Forgetting the past condemns us to repeating it. Denying also works.

Republicans refuse to remember George W. Bush, and I am haunted by memories of 1968. Both are lessons which are central to Election 2012. Even if you "weren't born yet" in 1968, you'll recognize it: Martin Luther King and...

If a child for whom I am responsible lies to me, and the lie is revealed for what it is, I hold myself responsible for reprimanding that youngster, creating consequences for her or his misbehavior, and for correcting the situation the lie created. That means lies of commission and omission...

The Oxford Dictionary defines plutocracy quite simply:

Let us now praise ... Willard Romney? Yes. In what he assumed to be private, Mr. Romney actually said something he believed. When Romney spilled the beans about Republican-think, he did voters a real service. The details remain opaque...

Foreign policy is clearly well outside candidate Romney's grasp. His principal claim to our votes is his economic prowess. He is standing on sand.

"All for one, and one for all"* has always felt iconic to me, like that other French gift to America, the Statue of Liberty. "One for...

Fundamentalists have three traits: rigidity, domination and exclusion.* Fundamentalist are not necessarily religious**. They may be economic fundamentalists or political fundamentalist or educational fundamentalist or business fundamentalists or, oddly, science fundamentalists. The list is as long as human perversity is great. Fundamentalists' rigidity and exclusiveness forecloses change, so...

"Nothing succeeds like offense." Whether offending or pretending to be offended, that is how the Republican Party has framed politics for the last three decades -- or six, if you include Joe McCarthy.

Vice President Biden is precisely on the money (painful pun that it is) when he says of...

America's role in the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman tragedy goes down as smoothly as any toxic cocktail: one part guns, one part race, one part stress, stir and duck. We've let ourselves become inured to guns, blind to how radically America's changing racial composition is threatening a very old caste system,...

Something big happened on Friday. "We Shall Overcome" spontaneously erupted with the announcement of ... a new union! SAG-AFTRA, one union, now stands where once there were a separate Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Actors (AFTRA). Memberships of both overwhelmingly voted to merge....