In his state of the union address, remarking about the lack of collegiality in DC, the president said “I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.” It’s remarkable…
Cartoon: Hepcat’s diary
Hepcat: Okay, what’s goin’ down here? One cat’s got a hatchet, the other one’s stealing a bicycle. This will not end well. Seriously, what is the deal here? Are these guys working together? So what, they’ll cut down a tree and carry it off on the bicycle? Okay, that does not make any sense….
Running on empty: The liberalism of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and William de Blasio
President Obama wept while announcing his new executive actions that will supposedly protect Americans from guns, demonstrating that honest emotion is often the poorest of guides to both good politics and good policy, a lesson that today’s liberals are notably loath to learn. There was a time when liberals were smart about gun control. They…
House Speaker Paul Ryan: “I’m a Republican, not a legislator!”
Remember when newly minted House Speaker—and self-described policy wonk—Paul Ryan promised that “Our No. 1 goal for the next year is to put together a complete alternative to the left’s agenda”? Well, that was a whole month ago, and, you know, times change. Oh, they’ll have an agenda, definitely, like, you know, “progress” and “lower…
Thelonious Assault—“Skippy”
Thelonious Assault at Opus Concert Cafe in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on September 6, 2013. Peter Hart and Lynne Hart, saxophones; Anthony Catalfano, piano; Jim Fudge, bass; Jim Stroehle, drums. Posted by Richard Rauch
Does North Korea have a hydrogen bomb?
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past several years pooh-poohing the dire warnings that periodically emerge from the mouths of American big-shots regarding the peril posed by North Korea, so that state’s claim to have tested a hydrogen bomb doesn’t come as a pleasant surprise. If North Korea in fact doesn’t have a…
Jessica Jones: Phillip Marlowe gets a vagina, and additional superpowers
Hey, we Americans love our TV, don’t we? Sure we do! And why not? Because TV these days is great! Great, great, great! Well, some TV is, or was, pretty great, like Sex and the City and Monk, though I guess they weren’t really great great—not, you know, Don Giovanni great—but, still, great enough.1 I’ve…
Lorne Michaels is funny!
For the past 40 years, Lorne Michaels has been a veritable King of Komedy, helping American TV to grow up with the more than legendary first four seasons of Saturday Night Live back in the seventies and then returning to helm the show from the mid-eighties to the present. But in all that time, I’ve…
Hey, Alan Vanneman! The U.S. had TWO debates on foreign policy, while you weren’t listening!
Well, indeed we did. I recently complained, rather at length, at the failure of the U.S. political system to generate a meaningful discussion of U.S. foreign policy, noting that, for the past several decades, we’ve been allowed to choose between “idealistic” hawks like Hillary Clinton and, well, shotgun-wielding freaks. But just before the holidays, both…
New Pentagon Strategy: Don’t fight real wars, prepare for imaginary ones!
As I’ve said before, if you want to know what official Washington is thinking, read Wash Post columnist David Ignatius. In his latest and greatest, David fills us in on what the Pentagon is thinking. The good news is, the Pentagon wants to stay out of the Middle East: “This generation of military leaders has…