Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page gets the award for Best Analogy the Week in describing Donald Trump as being like a loudmouthed carnival clown who sits on a collapsible platform over a barrel of water and shouts insults at the passing crowd. Because that’s all that the guy is good for. Actually, the Republican presidential wannabe has had an issue even near and dearer to his double comb-over heart, and that is to bash China, which he has repeatedly said is “raping this country”...

We do not have time for this kind of silliness. ~ BARACK OBAMA America is slouching toward the end of what has to be the strangest — as well as saddest — week in memory. It was a week in which President Obama, responding to the short-form birthers who have nipped at his heals for three years, was compelled to belabor the obvious by producing his long-firm birth certificate, while the television news media, which has squandered its credibility in such a thoroughgoing fashion, broke into...

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...