Right-wingers are screeching 'FLIP-FLOP!' while leftists are clutching their heads and preparing to vote for Ralph the Nadir. All because Obama is moving to the center. Makes you wonder when this country will grow up.

Sure, I'll miss the old Obama, too. But he's not running against Hillary now. (Will...

Last Memorial Day a sheriff and deputies in Orange County broke into a two million dollar home to find the very badly decomposed bodies of a family of five. They'd been dead for a long time.

This family had achieved the American ideal of security. They lived in a wealthy...

Now that Obama has triumphantly survived all the media-inspired attacks on him, maybe our media will be forced to recognize that the American people care more about real issues than about the trivial irrelevancies our media so love.

As if.

Our media...

That Junior and McClone equate communication with 'appeasement' is odd, given that so many prominent Republicans were all for appeasing Hitler in the late 1930s -- praising him for his anti-communism and joining Nazi sympathizer groups like America First and the German-American Bund. Could personal, psychological motives be at...

Junior's in Israel supporting right-wing Israelis who feel the only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian. Junior bolstered his chances of brokering a peace deal as his final legacy by saying it would be a mistake to talk to most Palestinians because they were evil.
Privately, Junior told Olmert...

It's useful to compare the way China handled its national disaster with the way the Burmese handled the cyclone, and the way our Republican administration handled Katrina.

The Chinese premier immediately sent 50,000 troops with every conceivable type of disaster relief equipment to the affected area, and headed them up...

'Security' is America's most addictive drug. The NRA, for example, says every citizen needs a gun for 'security' (increasing the odds he'll be mowed down by some other citizen who forgot to take his meds).

When I was a merchant seaman I 'never saw the good side of...

Regardless of Clinton's motives for offering Obama the vice-presidency, it expressed a reality that Obama has yet to face: Neither candidate can win in November without the supporters of the other. Obama's response was not only childish and arrogant, it was stupid. Yes, he's ahead by a few votes....

Americans are internationally famous for being fearful -- afraid of terrorists, afraid of communists, afraid of each other. When Europeans have terrorist attacks they apprehend the perpetrators and go about their business -- they don't flip out and give up their freedoms. Americans seem willing to chuck the Bill...

As recession looms, this might be a useful time to examine the psychopathology on which our economic system rests. We view becoming a billionaire, for example, as the pinnacle of success. But let's face it, anyone who needs a billion dollars to maintain his self-esteem is one sick puppy.

When people say something is good for 'the economy', what do they really mean? Who are they including in this boon? Not homeowners apparently -- we're told we shouldn't give too much help to those hurt by the sub-prime scam because it might hurt the economy. Nor does the economy...

Many Americans cling to a belief in comic book villains -- 'Bad Guys' who actually identify with 'Evil'. A few nuts may like to dramatize themselves this way, but the evil they actually manage to accomplish is peanuts compared to what people who think of themselves as 'Good Guys' achieve....

Some folks are downplaying the Persian Gulf confrontation--saying we shouldn't be afraid when our warships rule the seas. But it's naïve and unpatriotic not to see those rubber boats as a serious threat to national security. The sooner we take action against them, the sooner we'll be ably to...

Bush's arrogant isolationism surfaced again last week when he made a fool of himself prematurely endorsing Kenya's Mwai Kibaki. The European Union had refused to, citing electoral fraud, but Bush blundered ahead on his own, and then had to retract his endorsement a couple of days later.

Biology teaches us...

I was fascinated by the reaction of male film critics to The Golden Compass, an excellent fantasy film and an assault on religious authoritarianism. Could it be that most male film critics are religious bigots? This seemed unlikely. Yet there it was: female critics are almost unanimous in praising...

When I was young the Republican Party was for small government and balanced budgets. It was anti-bureaucracy, anti-war, and against government intruding into the private lives of its citizens. Today it seems to have reversed itself on every count. The Bush administration is the most profligate, wasteful, bloated, corrupt,...

We humans are always trying to reduce our vulnerability to fate. With dances we try to control the weather. With magic amulets and superstitious rituals we try to ward off accidents and influence the outcome of contests and games. Today the most common way we try to control fate is...

Now that fewer and fewer people are reading books and more and more people are writing them, the most lucrative activity in the literary world today is giving advice to wannabe writers on how to write, get an agent, and get published. The advice varies wildly from source to source,...

At his Let's-Accelerate-Global-Warming Conference Bush said efforts to limit emissions should not limit economic growth. In other words, the major cause of climate change should be left untouched.

Uninhibited growth is malignancy. We know that. We know that constant growth in any functioning system cannot be sustained indefinitely without the...

Republicans are fond of saying government bureaucracies should be run like businesses. For some reason they never apply this notion to the world's largest and most inefficient bureaucracy -- the U.S. Department of Defense. Yet if the Pentagon were run as some forward-looking corporations today it might be able to...