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Noted academic and Hillary Clinton supporter Stanley Fish is offering himself up for decapitation or whatever fate awaits he, Barack Obama and other folks who have had relationships with Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground member. This even though Obama was a youngster and Fish was off teaching at some high falutin’ university when Ayers was running wild in the streets. As the guilt-by-association variety of smear campaigns go, the vendetta against Obama over Ayers isn’t getting...

McCAIN TOURS NEW ORLEANS AND DECLARES IT SAFE What that the Democratic presidential slugfest was mercifully over and Barack Obama could turn his full attention to John McCain. Here is a Top 10 list of areas in which the presumptive Republican nominee is vulnerable: (10.) Hiding his assets behind his wife’s financial veil of secrecy. (9.) Continuing questions about his anger-management issues. (8.) His bumbling record on MIA-POW issues. (7.) His fawning relationship with the hateful Reverend John...

The more things change the more they stay the same, and that’s downright scary when it comes to Blackwater Worldwide. If you’re under the impression that this most right-wing of defense contractors has been laying low since its goons mowed down 17 Iraqis last September, you would be wrong. Despite the outcry, Condoleezza Rice’s State Department dutifully renewed Blackwater’s contract to guard diplomats in the war zone and the North Carolina-based company has been hard at work...

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AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN WARRIORS AND THEIR FAMILIES One of the ongoing tragedies of the Iraq war is Washington’s refusal to allow Iraqis who have actively helped the American effort into the U.S. in all but the smallest numbers, exposing them to possible persecution and death. The fate of many of the Hmong mountain people who fought against the communist-nationalist Pathet Lao in Laos at the behest of the CIA on one of the more obscure fronts in the Vietnam War was somewhat better. After...

CLINTON WITH RICHARD MELLON SCAIFE Hillary Clinton’s slutty embrace of Rush Limbaugh, who is hard at work goading his right-wing listeners into helping her defeat Barack Obama, borders on the pornographic in how she has yet again been willing to turn a cheap trick in a campaign that has determinedly put sleaze before substance. Limbaugh, for those of you who have spent the last few months in a cave, is the man behind Operation Chaos, an effort to get Republicans to vote for Hillary in Democratic...

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As a long suffering Internet Explorer user, I rejoiced at the introduction of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser in 2004 and it felt awfully good to give Microsoft the raspberry. Firefox has grown steadily in popularity and is now the browser of choice for nearly one in five web surfers. But familiarity can breed contempt, and while open-sourced Firefox was initially a delight to use compared to IE, it has developed an annoying habit of locking up when multiple windows are open. That habit has...

Like many guys, I don’t like to shop. The Dear Friend & Conscience, on the other hand, loves to shop and just the other day we went out to drop off an old wrought-iron lawn chair at a repair shop so that it could be spot welded and came home with three new bras and an omelet pan. Now the DF&C needed bras and I needed an omelet pan because the old one was beginning to look like a Superfund site. But my point is that what was an enjoyable hour or so for her was painful for me. Which...

Play an Ella ballad with a cat in the room, and the animal will invariably go up to the speaker, lie down and purr. – GEOFFREY FIDELMAN Like many teenagers, I went my own way when it came to the music my parents played, so I was not particularly moved by their fondness for Ella Fitzgerald and other jazz vocalists. But as I grew older and my musical horizons expanded, I kept bumping into Lady Ella, mostly as I devoured Duke Ellington albums, and it wasn’t too long before I was smitten...

Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly. — JOHN ASHCROFT With the drip drip of revelations that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the so-called War on Terror began not with commanders and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq but at the highest levels of the Bush administration, arguments that these insiders should and could be tried as war criminals have become more credible. Just not tried in the U.S., of course. As...

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One of the more maddening threads of the Democratic presidential campaign concerns Hillary Clinton’s feminist credentials: Has she done enough for women? Can successes such as her Pennsylvania primary win be considered victories for feminists? Is she in fact a feminist? And so on and so forth. I have hesitated riffing on this because along with writing about anything to do with Israel (which I will do at length as its 60th anniversary approaches) feminism is a third-rail in blogging, and all the...

Have you been convicted of armed robbery, arson or burglary and are having trouble making ends meet, let alone getting three square meals a day? Worry not, my fellow American, the United States Army and Marines want you. In yet another consequence of the Forever War, the Army and Marine Corps recruited significantly more felons into their ranks in 2007 than in 2006. The number of waivers issued to active-duty Army recruits with felony convictions jumped to 511 in 2007, from 249 in 2006, while Marine...

In this strangest of campaign seasons, Pennsylvania has stood out for how much and how little has changed in the most ferociously fought and one of the most expensive primary campaigns ever. And when the fat lady finally sang, it turned out to be pretty much meaningless except in one important respect. Hillary Clinton’s 9.38 percentage point win over Barack Obama is impressive any way you cut it except where it matters most: It merely forestalls the inevitability of Obama’s nomination....

President Bush now has the highest disapproval rating of any president in the 70-year history of the Gallup Poll, but that’s not the half of it. With only a 10 percent disapproval rating following the 9/11 attacks, there has been a 59 percentage point swing in the years since with Bush now clocking a 69 percent disapproval rating. The previous record of 67 percent was reached by Harry Truman in January 1952, when the United States was enmeshed in the Korean War. More here.

Pennsylvanians go to the polls today mindful that they may well be voting for the next president of the United States. My inclination was to give the whole thing a rest for the day, but that would be elitist, so herewith an excerpt from a chapter on the early — as in really early — history of Northeastern Pennsylvania from my forthcoming book. That once beautiful but largely spoiled swath of real estate will be my vantage point for today’s events and tonight’s recriminations....

Although most polls show Hillary Clinton leading Barack Obama among likely Democratic voters in tomorrow’s Pennsylvania primary, I will once again stick out my neck and join the most accurate poll of the campaign season and predict an Obama victory. This is because of two reasons: Clinton’s relentlessly negative campaigning has drowned out her message for many voters and the expected record voter turnout will skew heavily toward densely populated Philadelphia and suburbs where the Obama...

St. Joseph’s in Paterson would lose millions for charity care under Governor Corzine plan that would force some hospitals to close. There is no question that America’s health-care system is in crisis and that extends to all 50 states. But if you want to see where U.S. hospitals may find themselves sooner or later, consider the number of hospitals in New Jersey that have closed or are on life support and how Democratic politicians have put themselves in a straightjacket that is exacerbating...

Bluegrass traditionalists are still in shock over a 2007 album collaboration between bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs and free-wheeling pianist Bruce Hornsby. Pianos typically are not welcome additions to the acoustic guitars, mandolins, banjos, fiddles and upright basses of bluegrass bands, and I was inclined to agree until the Dear Friend & Conscience and I heard Hornsby and Skaggs in front of Skaggs’ marvelous six-piece Kentucky Thunder backup band last night at the F.M. Kirby Center...

Newsweek magazine’s latest national poll has Barack Obama ahead of Hillary Clinton by a whopping 19 points among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters. Mind blowing, no? Well, maybe not according to this analysis by Charles Franklin at pollster.com. HAT TIP TO BACK ALLEY MEDIA

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Our friend Neil is a member of Hillary Clinton’s core constituency: A 66-year-old blue-collar worker and Roman Catholic with a high school education from Buffalo, New York, a gritty Rust Belt city, who was a Navy medical corpsman. Neil voted for Clinton on Super Tuesday because he believed that she had the requisite experience and the “balls,” as bluntly put, to lead the U.S. out of the Bush Era swamp and restore its rightful place in the community of nations. He said that Barack...

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (TOP) AND GEORGE EDALGI Like many a lad, I drank in the Sherlock Holmes detective stories like so many bottles of soda pop without knowing anything about their creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. It didn’t really matter because Holmes and the world of 221B Baker Street seemed so lifelike that many readers believed that he really existed. In the years since, I have come across occasional references to Doyle in connection with his fascination with spiritualism, but only recently got...