Martin Luther King always made it clear his mission was more than just passive resistance to evil. At the start of the Montgomery bus boycott, he told followers, “If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate him. We must use the weapon of love.” In the years that followed, with the emerging importance of television, Dr. King went beyond words and used the full power of body rhetoric, planning...

Watching him has always been a guilty pleasure, like taking your id out to the park for a backed-up dump of anger and hostility, but Bill Maher’s season premiere at the end of a traumatic week persuades one watcher to take a small step for Mankind’s civility by clicking off the remote forever. All that hyperbole now induces more guilt than pleasure in a time when point-scoring seems more beside the point than ever. One of the admirable public figures of our time, Elizabeth Warren, is...

Carrie Fisher defies genetics. How did this witty, wonderfully talented, albeit seriously troubled, woman emerge from the union of a lecherous moron and, to put it kindly, a bubbly but intellectually challenged Barbie doll? Fisher tries to explain in the scathingly revealing and very funny one-woman show, “Wishful Drinking” on HBO. If you don’t subscribe, manipulate a friend to invite you over when it’s on, as it often is this month. Her life arc goes from infancy during the...

Michelle Obama sat silently, a First Lady holding hands with an astronaut, two middle-aged people in the grip of grief and hope, as the President made his speech. Now she adds words of her own in an open letter to parents, citing “questions my daughters have asked…the same ones that many of your children will have” and urging them to talk about the goodness of the victims, especially nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, of whom the President said, “She was off to meet her...

Whatever Barack Obama tells us about the State of the Union on January 25th, he showed us its heart in Tucson last night. He came there to lead a nation in grieving, parse the meaning of a tragedy and, above all, give hope to a shocked and divided people. In doing so, he reminded those who truly listened of what they saw in him two years ago. Despite the crowd’s distracting need to cheer and applaud, the occasion was a solemn homage to those who died, a tribute to those who helped limit the...

During my teens and early twenties, I fired weapons at people, who were often shooting back. It was not a pleasant experience but, after V-E Day in Germany, when most of our food was being sold in British and French black markets, I was persuaded to go deer-hunting not so much for sport as out of hunger. In early morning, sighting a brown hide and preparing to fire, I realized I was about to bag a cow. That ended my hunting career, but I brought home as a souvenir a pistol I had taken from a German...

Verbal reactions should be almost as spent now as the bullets on the Safeway parking lot, but the fusillade of shooting mouths is heavier than ever. As families go about burying victims, their deaths are translated from horrendous personal loss to political posturing that denies them the humanity they deserve. Reading from Left to Right, start with mouthy Sheriff Clarence Dupnik who only hours afterward, instead of relaying facts, insisted on turning his grief into a screed against the “anger,...

Now comes insult added to social injury as the “news” starts to tell us every detail of the Tucson killer’s sick life and what led him to massacre innocent people and devastate a nation as well as so many families. In my lifetime of journalism spanning Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated JFK, to Mark David Chapman, who gunned down John Lennon, one of the sorriest dilemmas was how and how much to report on those monstrous figures who try to redeem their twisted obscurity with the...

Words matter. In Arizona, the space between fingers on a computer keyboard and a deadly weapon suddenly collapses, killing six, including a nine-year-old girl and leaving a Congresswoman in surgery with a bullet in her head. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords will hopefully recover, but how do Americans deal with the shock of waking up in Pakistan, where political assassination is an acceptable means of expression? The Arizona gunmen leaves a trail of social media ranting against the government, which in...

Skip the rice and orange blossoms, the New Year is starting out with deranged nuptial news. In the week that Elizabeth Edwards’ will was made public comes word that her widower will be marching down the aisle with Rielle Hunter, the horse killer’s daughter he impregnated during his wife’s terminal illness while still in the running for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination. No word on where they are registered for wedding gifts. Not to be outdone in grotesque marriage planning,...

The news keeps arranging itself to tell us things. In Washington, the House chamber presents a convivial scene, with members’ children and grandchildren looking on, as Nancy Pelosi, in a tangle of handshakes and air kisses, turns over a huge gavel to John Boehner and resists a likely impulse to crown him with it. In Pakistan, they transfer power differently. A “liberal” provincial governor is unseated by his bodyguard’s bullets for mildly criticizing the country’s blasphemy...

Convening of the new Congress brings back a long-age image, a Manhattan store called the Live-and-Let-Live Deli with a sign in the window: “Out of Business.” The proximate cause is literal–the White House’s backing off from a provision in health care reform that would allow doctors to include end-of-life discussions with Medicare patients. Whether this is in response to the “death panel” scare raised by Dr. Sarah Palin and other GOP advocates for the elderly, no...

As government-hating lawmakers begin work, their guiding philosophy will come from a deceased Hollywood scriptwriter whose credo of Selfishness Uber Alles was considered loony half a century ago. In the House, Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan takes over as chairman of the Budget Committee and Ron Paul will head the Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy as he prepares for another Presidential run next year. Sen. Mitch McConnell will be joined by Paul’s son Rand, another staunch...

The New York Times notes a milestone: This year Baby Boomers start turning 65, and for the next 19 years, about 10,000 a day “will cross that threshold.” This is the story of the man who helped shape them. In 1945, millions of Americans came back from World War II and began to beget. The next year, a pediatrician named Benjamin Spock wrote the child-rearing bible for those Boomers, a book that would reach more readers than any other in history except the Bible itself. “The Common Sense Book...

The party’s over, and all those sober gurus are picking on my date. Conservative Charles Krauthammer says she’s a half-term governor who “has no chance of winning a general election” next year. Next year? At the New York Times, statistical wonk Nate Silver revisits his “10 Reasons That Sarah Palin Could Win the Republican Nomination” and concludes with a wordy “maybe not.” “Ms. Palin’s numbers,” Silver grouches, “are problematic...

Advanced age has its privileges, one of them to fantasize publicly about asking out a married woman without fear of being beaten up for it. So with apologies to my loved ones (and Todd, of course), my dream date for New Year’s Eve is bubbly Sarah Palin. Imagine being greeted at the door, corsage in hand, with congratulations for dodging death panels and some snappy remark like “How’s that hopey changey thing working out for you?” We could start making the rounds of consolation...

Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Jon Stewart. In a 30-paragraph “news analysis,” the New York Times puts the Daily Show host into the journalism pantheon, omitting only Woodward and Bernstein. Well, yes but… As a comedian, satirist and, not incidentally, media critic, Stewart is a gifted figure, but lines are being blurred here in a way that tells much about our times and which, if he were not on holiday hiatus, Stewart himself might be the first to mock. The Times and its professorial...

At the turn of a millennium, the odometer of our lives clicked into years with more than one zero in them, setting off a decade of losses: Economy, in a meltdown with budget surpluses becoming record deficits. National security, two wars–one pointless, the other unending. Political life, in the dumpster. Social well-being, off the charts with fear, distrust, animus and anxiety for the future. All this can’t be entirely blamed on Presidents and politicians. We picked them, so they must...

Christmas always recalls Eric Sevareid, one of the 20th century’s best journalists and a writer with gifts far beyond reporting the news. I published an essay of his twice in different decades in different magazines. Herewith, excerpts: “Christmas offers us peace in one hand but in the other it carries a sword. The peace it offers is the love we felt in childhood and may still feel again if we have lived our lives as we were instructed in our early days. The sword is our conscience, glittering...

‘Twas the night before Christmas all through a House Not a Speaker was stirring, not even the souse; The Census was hung by the chimney with care, In the hopes that 2012 would soon be there; The Repubs were nestled all smug in their beds. Visions of Tea Party plums danced in their heads; And DeMint in his ‘kerchief and Coburn in his cap Tried to settle down for a long winter’s nap, When on the White House lawn rose such a clatter Obama sprang from bed to see what was the matter. Away...

Sanity has thrown a Hail-Mary pass to close out the year with a surprise upset in the lame-duck Congress, and the heroes are moderate Republicans who sat on the Washington bench all year during the Tea Party rout of all reason. From DADT repeal to the START treaty and a food-safety bill to medical care for 9/11 responders, barriers come down as traditional GOP lawmakers break through a year of gridlock to send a message to their party and its incoming zealots. Moderation has not been in the air,...

What would it be like to remember everything that happened to you in detail over the years? This science-fiction premise comes to life on 60 Minutes with people who have been laboratory-tested and diagnosed with “superior autobiographical memory.” This is no parlor trick, watching men and women instantly reach back 20, 30 years or more for a randomly chosen date and bring it back it in verifiable detail–day of the week, weather, news events, their own experiences and the feelings...

If truth is the first casualty of war, the GOP assault on Obama has produced what a Pulitzer-Prize-winning fact check site calls “The Lie of the Year“–that the President’s reform law is “a government takeover” of health care. The Oscar goes to Frank Luntz, who deserves permanent possession of the truth-twisting trophy. Whenever John Boehner or Mitch McConnell says “job-killing” about any Democratic proposal, you can be sure that Luntz is the ventriloquist...

As Congress inches toward allowing gay men and women to die openly for their country, the history of American bigotry comes back to an octogenarian who has lived through so much of it: *A father-in-law who went to medical school in Scotland because American universities had filled their Hebrew quotas. *My own experience in the 1950s as the first Jew to be hired by George W. Bush’s grandfather for his publishing empire. *The injuries and indignities heaped on “Negroes” until Martin...

With the death of Bob Feller at 92, another reminder of America’s glory days fades away. Not only was he one of the best pitchers in baseball history, Feller might just as well have been from another species compared to today’s multi-million-dollar, steroid-taking superstars who bounce from one team to another in search of ever more money and fame. Feller spent his entire career in Cleveland (pace LeBron), interrupted only by World War II, and lived in a suburb there for the rest of his...