In Egypt, pro-democracy protests led to the forced resignation of the president, who now faces criminal charges as the Army leads an interim government. In Syria, the president had long promised reforms but when they did not come brutally cracked down on demonstrators when they took to the streets. From the monolithic American view, Egypt and Syria would not appear to be especially different countries, although the outcomes of efforts to embrace democracy have been very much so. Meanwhile,...

This is because commenters — three in particular — hijacked the thread. They were unwilling to stick to the topic, preferring to have a food fight.

The monarchy is so extraordinarily useful. When Britain wins a battle she shouts, “God save the Queen;” when she loses, she votes down the prime minister. ~ WINSTON CHURCHILL One of the Founding Fathers’ greatest fears was that the young republic would devolve into a monarchy, and after all, it was a monarch from which the United States had liberated itself in 1776. This explains why there was so much attention paid to defining and limiting the powers of the presidency, but it...

For those of us who have written extensively about the so-called War on Terror and its demented bastard child, the Bush Torture Regime, the latest revelations about the detainees at Guantánamo Bay break little new ground but are a reminder that while things have gotten better under the Obama administration, the president has not broken completely with the past despite campaign promises to the contrary. Oh, and most Americans, let alone bloggers, don’t give a damn about any of this. ...

The greatest compliment anyone can pay me is to say I’m rresponsible, because by responsible they mean Negroes who are responsible to white authorities. ~ MALCOLM X There is a lingering fallacy among white people that there has to be a single African-American who can speak for all blacks. Were that true, Dr. Martin Luther King and W.E.B. Du Bois would qualify as the black spokespersons for the latter and earlier part of the 20th century, Booker T. Washington for the latter part of the 19th...

In yet another example of the Republican Party finding its ever diminishing willy in a wringer, a new poll reveals that anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave understands: Even though the Tea Party, the folks that have captured the GOP’s base if not its imagination, wants Big Government out of its members lives, its members don’t want Medicare and Medicaid out of theirs. The envelope, please: A new McClatchy-Marist poll finds that a whopping 70 percent of registered voters who...

I had the good fortune to work with some of the best photojournalists in the business – in both war and peace — over a four-decade career, and while I did not know Chris Hondros or Tim Hetherington, I mourn their passing. Hondros, 41, a Pulitzer Prize winner widely admired for his work for Getty Images in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fellow photojournalist Tim Hetherington, 40, were mortally wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade yesterday in Misurata, Libya, after filing photos of fighting...

With apologies to Forrest Gump’s mamma, presidential wannabes are like a box of chocolate. You never know what you’re gonna get. And to take the analogy out a bit further, it is likely that Hollywood’s most famous dummy knew more about the Constitution than some of the current Republican wannabes. Front and center is Donald Trump, about whom the only serious thing is that a fair number of people are supporting him. In case you missed it, Trump shot the moon yesterday in...

There were two literary sensations during my college years — J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I took to Tolkein like a fish to water, but even my work-in-progress intellect recoiled at Rand’s belief system, which she called Objectivism and I called deeply flawed. Fast forward 40 years and Rand is back in fashion. Or perhaps never fell completely out of fashion for people, typically conservatives, often libertarians and consistently...

Rumors, innuendo and inconclusive photographs do not a true story make, but the fact of the matter is that three years after the birth of Trig Paxson Van Palin, there is no proof that Sarah Palin is his biological mother. If you believe that the news media — or anyone else — has no business pursuing the question of whether John McCain’s 2008 running mate put over an enormous hoax on the American public because the whole idea is so . . . well, yucky, then you need read no further....

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. ~ Confederate Vice President ALEXANDER STEVENS As I wrote in my initial post of the year, there will be no bigger nor more regrettable anniversary in 2011 than the 150th anniversary of the onset of the American Civil War, a conflict that...

I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night. ~ “Heart of Darkness,” JOSEPH CONRAD It has been over two years since Republicans last “governed,” and that term should be used advisedly since the leadership styles of George Bush and Dick Cheney would hardly be recognizable to most of their executive branch forebears: A toxic combination of demagoguery,...

(Portions originally published upon Vonnegut’s death on April 12, 2008) The pang of sadness that I felt when I read that Kurt Vonnegut had left this mortal coil was a bit deeper than the mere fact that like a lot of folks of my generation I went head over heels over everything this counterculture idol wrote. As it is, I work in a rare book and manuscript library that includes the papers of Seymour Lawrence, Vonnegut’s longtime literary agent and friend. I have been able to read...

While I took a few swipes at President Obama and congressional Democrats last week as the grand game of Budgetary Chicken played itself out, it was the Republicans who came in for the most scorn for threatening to trigger a government shutdown over abortion, greenhouse gases and a new consumer protection bureau established in the wake of the financial collapse resulting in Bush Recession. In other words, grandstanding for the Tea Partiers and Christianists was more important than keeping the government...

If you can’t compromise then you can’t govern. ~ HENRY CLAY It’s time to cut to the chase. Forget about the talking points, slide shows, sound bites and photo opps. The Republican Party has unleashed a crime spree against Americans that is astonishing for its audacity and sheer meanspiritedness, and there is no end in sight. You can now add extortion to robbery and rape. Yes, extortion. This is because the looming government shutdown is not about fiscal policy, deficit reduction...

I had a long-running nightmare last night, and as I am sometimes wont to do, waking up, having a piddle and a drink of water merely postponed the grand finale — slaves being lashed by a master who was riding a massive white steed — which roared across the landscape of my mind as soon as I drifted back off. While I find much of Freudian psychology to be flapdoodle, the finale of my nightmare was no accident. My mind has been working overtime to try to put the multi-trillion dollar Paul...

HE COULDA BEEN A CONTENDER The tendency to emotionalize the ongoing Battle of the Budgets, which has shifted into high gear in anticipation of a government shutdown and the roll out of a Republican scheme to slash several trillion big ones from the federal budget, certainly gets in the way of rational discourse, whatever that may be. But I, for one, get pretty worked up when the GOP marches ever more relentlessly into the fiscal future with a master plan to further squeeze the disabled, the elderly,...

CHEZ BRISTOL You probably know that Bristol Palin, daughter of the former half-term governor of Alaska, made a mint speaking about teenage pregnancy prevention, an area in which she is of course utterly unqualified. Anyhow, Bristol raked in a cool $262,500 from jetting around the country for The Candies Foundation because she and Levi Johnston didn’t bother to use a condom, a consequence of which is now two-year-old son Tripp and a free pass from conservative Republicans who routinely...

Those heady days when hope and change were in the air seem like light years and not two years ago. And while President Obama has made good on sizeable chunks of his agenda, there has been little change and what hope there was has been further undermined by the decision this week to reverse field and order a military trial at Guantánamo Bay for 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. For someone who has followed closely the prosecution of the so-called War on Terror, the decision is shocking not merely...

It is by now beyond apparent that Republicans hate women. They believe women to be lying, deceitful and slutty drains on the economy because outside of a proper Christian marriage they have a proclivity for screwing and then demanding abortions on the federal or state dime. Oh, and they also don’t deserve decent health care. How else to account for the latest GOP-perpetrated outrage: A Democratic-led effort in Indiana to add a rider exempting women who are raped or victims of incest from a...

I feel as though I’m watching one of those controlled, slow-motion car crashes. Only instead of a dummy, inside there are 87 GOP House freshmen who have no idea — no idea at all — what’s about to happen to them. ~ PETER ROBINSON, National Review I have been trying to avoid overexposure to the sausage factory known as The Greatest Deliberative Body In The Universe, aka the U.S. Congress, and the story of the moment, which is the sorry job House Speaker John Boehner is doing....

WHERE DID EVERYONE GO? It was supposed to be a three-day love feast to savor the Tea Party’s mid-term election victories. But the Save America Convention at the Marriott-Waterside in Tampa earlier this month attracted only about 300 people, or about 12 Tea Partiers for each of the 25 speakers, who spoke glowingly of even greater future triumphs and laid out a few doomsday scenarios for good measure. Meanwhile, a Tea Party Patriots meeting last week at a public library in Monroe County in northeastern...

The American Dream is dead. The country that I have bled red, white and blue for is abandoning its youth, its elderly and its poor. It is imprisoning millions of its citizens for the most trivial of offenses. It is suffocating its middle class, turning its back on newcomers and giving corporations and fat-cat financiers obscene tax breaks. It is ignorant of its own history, core values and virtues, and many of us, if shown a copy of the Bill of Rights, would believe it to be a subversive document. It...

The disdain for ordinary working stiffs shown by Republican politicians in general and the new crop of Republican governors in particular seems boundless. And, of course, is shortsighted, which is why union-busting Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Chris Christie in New Jersey will serve single terms and then get the boot. * * * * * I have a sense of deja vu all over again in reading that Maine Governor Paul LePage, a Tea Party Republican, has ordered the removal of a 36-foot mural from the...

When a fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory at 29 Washington Place in Lower Manhattan on March 25, 1911, it took just 30 minutes to kill 146 young immigrant women who had been locked in to ensure that they stayed stooped over their machines and didn’t steal anything. People looking up from the street thought that the owners were tossing their best fabric out the windows to save it before realizing that garment workers were jumping, sometimes after sharing...