Frank “The Fixer” Tagliano is a former New York mafiosi and restaurant owner who after testifying against his mob boss joins the witness protection program. Intrigued by Lillehammer after watching the 1994 Winter Olympics, he is relocated by the FBI to the picturesque town in northern Norway under the assumed name of Giovanni “Johnny” Henriksen. That is the outlandish premise of Lillyhammer, Netflix first original series. And while the series abounds with cliches, it is...

Save for some Republicans who remain blindered to larger realities, most people concluded long ago that the Iraq war was a fool’s mission that wasted thousands of American and many tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, bled resources from the war in Afghanistan, bankrupted the federal treasury, lowered the U.S.’s standing in the world, and accomplished none of its goals save for taking out Saddam Hussein, who while a very bad man posed no threat to the U.S. or the Middle East, let alone...

Sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing, and sometimes it’s politically difficult to do the right thing. ~ JOHN BOEHNER Will the House Republican leadership ever learn? Probably not. In a dizzying week of developments, House Speaker John Boehner again threatened to shut down the federal government by not agreeing to raise the debt ceiling (something that the great conservative god Ronald Reagan advocated and did himself several times), proposed three separate budgets for next year although...

The moral high ground is getting a vigorous workout in the wake of President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, but what exactly is the moral high ground? In ethical and political parlance, the moral high ground refers to having the status of being respected for being moral and adhering to and upholding universally recognized standards of justice and goodness. But alas, there are no commonly accepted universal standards in these divisive times and the result is not unlike a...

My Monday column originally was going to riff off of the words of former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell for Barack Obama “to man up” and endorse gay marriage, an issue which took on a new urgency with North Carolina this week becoming the 30th state to ban same-sex unions. Whether the president was heeding Rendell’s advice or not, his endorsement in a television interview today carried very little political risk and was years overdue. Hitting exactly the right note, Obama...

DUST JACKET AND FRONT BINDING OF TURING’S CATHEDRAL I inhale books like moviegoers inhale popcorn, and am fortunate enough to have the time to devour about one book a week. The following 10 reads are particularly noteworthy, in my view, most are available in used paperback editions for a song through Amazon for or can be ordered from your local library through Inter Library Loan. ANNALS OF THE FORMER WORLD (2000) is John McPhee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of traveling...

It is worth noting yet again as the first anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden passes that while Islamic-driven terrorism remains a serious problem, right-ring domestic terrorism is a more substantial one. And that the inability of the media and many other folks to connect the dots between one mass shooting and another — and then another and then another — renders us impotent to deal with the problem. The latest unrelated (cough, cough) incident occurred in Arizona when a sick...

Rupert Murdoch is filthy rich and has amassed enormous political power in Britain, the U.S. and Australia that would have made even Citizen Kane blush, but he has never attained and now never will attain the one thing he has most wanted — respect. In an extraordinarily damning report released today, a select Parliamentary committee concludes that Murdoch is “not a fit person” to run his huge international media empire. The report followed a months’ long investigation into...

It must be hard getting up every morning trying to decide who you’re going to be that day. ~ John F. Kennedy on Richard Nixon, 1960 With the primary season pandering finally behind them, the Republican Party in general and presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney in particular face an all but impossible balancing act: Being mindful of the interests of a party base that has evolved into a welter of angry Tea Partiers, self-righteous evangelicals and hard core right-wingers with nutty...

ROONEY MARA AS LISBETH SALANDERThe Magnificent Seven (1960), a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic samurai epic Seven Samurai, and King Kong (2005), Peter Jackson’s reverential remake of the original. To which can now be added the 2011 American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which hews to Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s posthumous runaway international bestseller — the first book in the so-called Millennium Trilogy — but improves on the 2009 Swedish film...

LILLY LEDBETTER & YOU KNOW WHO The 2012 presidential campaign, now underway with the withdrawal of Rick Santorum, promises to be a study in contrasts. All presidential campaigns are, of course, but the contrasts between presumptive Republican challenger Mitt Romney and President Obama are striking and nowhere more so than when it comes to populism, an ideology that I loosely define as contrasting the needs of the people against the entrenched elite in pushing for social change. ...

A semi-respectful period of time has passed since Rick Santorum cited the ongoing illness of Bella, his three-year-old daughter in bowing out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. With wishes for a long and happy life to Bella and with all due respect to the Santorum family, this is about as cowardly an end to a presidential campaign that I can recall. Bella has been chronically ill since birth and her hospitalizations for Trisoma 18, a sometimes fatal disease with side effects...

Although he stands a better chance of beating Barack Obama than his Republican clown car compatriots, Mitt Romney is in a key respect the perfect challenger for the president because he represents all that is wrong — and then some — about the distribution of wealth in America at a time when that has belatedly become a pungent social issue. Romney, who is worth $250 million give or take a few million, has been squirrely about being a card-carrying member of the 1 percent of the 1 percent...

The Driver in Chief tries a Chevy Volt on for size. Many automakers have been slow to embrace hybrids and for some who have the technology doesn’t seem to run a whole lot deeper than a badge with a green leaf on the trunk lid. A conspicuous exception has been Toyota, which introduced the fuel stingy Prius in the U.S. in 2001 and now offers hybrids throughout its Lexus lineup. There are many ways to skin the hybrid cat and Toyota’s approach has been through the ingenious Atkinson...

Your daughter is arrested for walking the family dog off its leash at a county park. She is taken into custody and before being jailed is strip searched. A guard instructs your daughter to disrobe. Her mouth, vagina and anus are then inspected for contraband while other guards leer at her and make jokes about how she trims her pubic hair. Your son is arrested while driving on a county highway for having an unpaid littering ticket. A guard instructs your son to disrobe. His mouth and anus...

Entire forests have been denuded in recent weeks as pundits speculate whether Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been bluffing about launching air strikes against Iran’s nascent nuclear program. If ever an important issue needed a time out this is it, and talks between Iran and the U.S. and five other major powers scheduled to begin next week could provide just that opportunity. Let’s get some stuff out of the way before we dive into the deep end of this superheated situation. ...

The Supreme Court spent over an hour and a half this morning acting like it was going to strike down the key feature of the Affordable Care Act, but a funny thing happened on the way to the noon recess: The justices made it apparent that they have no interest in going through the remainder of the entire 2,700 pages of the law to figure out what to keep and the net effect may have shored up support for the controversial individual mandate itself. This is the off-the-cuff analysis of Lynn Denniston...

There is much to like in the Republican budget plan rolled out by Representative Paul Ryan last week. That is if you are a millionaire, a Wall Street fat cat or and don’t have to worry about what happens if you become ill. But if you are like the many Americans who are struggling to make ends meet, wondering how they can afford to send their kids to college and whether the federal safety net will be there for them when they’re elderly, the plan is an unmitigated disaster. And like Ryan’s...

She is impossible to miss when she comes into the University of Delaware Library. At 6-foot-6 Elena Dell Donne is an imposing presence and by many lights the greatest women’s college basketball player in the U.S. today. She is also, thanks to her work ethic, the NCAA women’s basketball 2012 Academic All-America of the Year. Delle Donne, who carries a 3.6 grade-point average in early-childhood education at an academically demanding school, has led little Delaware to No. 8 in the NCAA national...

CHARLES WIWA Two human rights cases being argued before the Supreme Court today are tests of how U.S. law intersects with international law and unintentionally a test of the court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling declaring that corporations are individuals with the same fundamental rights as living-and-breathing individuals. In one of the cases, 12 Nigerian citizens who have been granted political asylum in the U.S. are suing Royal Dutch Shell Oil, which is accused of aiding and abetting the...