At first I was worried, when a friend wrote me that John McCain's VP choice Sarah Palin was a conservative anti-choice Christian, with a union-member husband, a son going to Iraq, and membership in the NRA. "A deeply cynical choice," I wrote back. "Sure," he agreed, but "she is going...

Ok. I'm 57 years old and cast my first vote in 1972--proudly, I will add--for George McGovern, but in the intervening 36 years I have rarely felt proud of my votes for Democrats, no matter how necessary they have been. There have been wonderful political moments: watching Geraldine Ferraro come...

My father spent more than a quarter century on active duty in the United States Navy, beginning in the last year of World War II, and ending in 1973. Proud of his service, fiercely loyal to the Navy and the country, most of his closest friends served in the military....

By now Alessandra Stanley's condescending, vicious attack on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on the front page of yesterday's New York Times--neither news nor fit to print--has become a scandal in its own right.

Why a television critic, of all people, gets to carry the heavy political water at the...

Many of you will be at Passover Seders tonight. Those of you that won't, well, chalk it up to bad planning. A Seder features good stories, classic family arguments, a rich liturgy, four cups of wine--required by the service!--and often terrific food. Next year get started early finding Jews with...

This is just too delicious. An alert reader sent in this tidbit. At Harvard Law School's 2005 Class Day, the speaker was . . . . . none other than New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who, according to the webpost, "warned graduating 3Ls [that's 3rd year law...

I've begun to agree with my sociologist friend and colleague Doug Eichar at the University of Hartford who told me the other day that he thought Hillary Clinton had "crossed the line" by first, implying that John McCain had better credentials to be President than did Barack Obama; and second,...

Like most New Yorkers, I've been watching the news over the past few days with a mixture of astonishment and, well, astonishment, as Eliot Spitzer has completed the Tri-State Trifecta of disgraced gubernatorial resignations. That's right -- you forgot about John Rowland, right? So here's a prediction: voters and pols...

So most of last night, as I watched the returns, I couldn't shake the feeling that I wanted my guy to just flat-out win, even though I knew there was something wrong with that. It took me till this morning to figure it out. (What can I say? I was...

Forty-eight years ago, on the playground of Crown Elementary School, in Coronado, California, I knew that Richard Nixon should be the next President of the United States, and campaigned vigorously for him among my classmates. He'd been Vice-President for eight years, for goodness' sake, and John F. Kennedy hadn't run...

Roger Clemens

Roger Clemens' performance in his news conference the other day offers yet more evidence about how removed he is from the world that most of us live in, and how little he understands about how fans think about baseball and the world.

He doesn't really understand that...

As I've written before, I don't think there's any reason to think that the Mitchell report snared most of professional baseball's juicers. Just on logical grounds, if a couple of accidental low-level distributors looking for a deal implicated so many players, think about what a real investigation -- with subpoena...

"So long as there might be potential cheaters in the game, we have to constantly update what we do to catch them. And that's exactly what I intend to do. We will not rest." -- Commissioner Bud Selig, as reported in today's New York Times

Forgive me. Why on...

Now that the report is out, it's abundantly obvious that PEDs were a pretty common and unremarkable part of professional baseball culture in the late nineties and early years of this century. After all, most of the report's information appears to come from just two sources, former Mets clubhouse attendant...

The long-awaited Mitchell report on steroid use among Major League baseball players will focus a tremendous amount of public attention on the "did he" or "didn't he" issue, which strikes me as exactly the wrong framework for understanding performance-enhancing drugs (let's call them PEDs) in baseball. There is...