Lana Peters, the only daughter and surviving child of Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest tyrant of the last century, has died impoverished and in obscurity 12 years into the new century in a nursing home in a quiet Wisconsin community. She was 86. The death of Peters, who was named Svetlana Stalina at birth, was like a barely audible echo from an explosion in a galaxy far, far away, in this case the rein of terror of her father, Soviet Premier Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, whose improbably defeat...

The end of another new year and there are another 30 or so books under this bibliophile’s belt, an inordinate number of them Scandinavian murder mysteries (I inhale them like popcorn) but a fair number of them heavy duty (like eating one’s way through a five-course meal). A year ago I published a list of my 30 most influential books, which I expand to 35 here (actually 36 because one new title bumps an old one from the list) with the latest additions noted with an asterisk. All of these...

With the exception of exotics like Ferraris and Maseratis, the U.S. has been a cold harbor for Italian cars. The last Alfa Romeos and Fiats were sold here over 30 years ago and neither brand, while popular elsewhere, was able to make inroads for obvious reasons: While Alfas were cute (think of Benjamim Braddock zipping around in his Spider in The Graduate), they were quirky and unreliable. Fiats weren’t even cute and there was no market for mini-cars, while the dealer networks for both...

xThe Vampire Elite Runs Our Lives. The corporatocracy has become more powerful than government. Congress is bought by special interests. The Supreme Court has ruled that Dow Chemical and Exxon Mobil have the same rights as people. It is for these reasons that it is time for a national referendum on what I call Proposition 29. Proposition 29 is simple in the extreme: “It is the will of the American people that the tyranny of the elites must be checked. Therefore, lobbyists and government...

As self-unaware as this may seem, I didn’t realized until hearing of his death that the journalist that I had modeled myself most closely after was the legendary New York Times op-ed columnist, who died on Friday of an apparent heart attack at his Vermont home. During the 25-year run of his column, “In the Nation,” Wicker never courted controversy but he never shied away from it. He was an iconoclast and his politics were liberal, but that did not prevent him from turning his...

This marvelous essay was published on November 27, 2008 by the late great blogger Jon Swift. This year as President Bush pardoned two turkeys, who surprisingly had nothing to do with the Savings and Loan scandals of the 1980s, he remarked that it was his “last Thanksgiving as President.” But it might be the last Thanksgiving any of us celebrate since there is a good chance that when Barack Obama takes over, he will abolish Thanksgiving along with other holidays liberals hate such as...

If you are of a certain age, the events of November 22, 1963 and the following days are deeply seared in your mind, but as yet another anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy comes and goes, those memories do not automatically our minds as they did in earlier years. Part of this, of course, is the passage of time, but it also is the fact that with the exception of Ronald Reagan, there has not been a serious attempt to take the life of a president in nearly half a century and most of...

The failure of the deficit reduction supercommittee — so fundamental that the panel could not even agree on what should be in play let alone why it failed — was foretold. It was a bi-partisan failure in every sense, although much of the blame goes to Republicans, five of six whom would not consider tax hikes for the wealthiest Americans and instead demanded tax cuts for them. In the end, the Democratic proposal to cut $2.2 trillion overall, including as much as $500 billion of savings...

The juxtaposition on The New York Times homepage of a shocking story that the Census Bureau has found that 51 million Americans have incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line and the latest frothings from Little Ricky Santorum was in all likelihood unintentional, but made a big point. Two, in fact. Point One is that the number of new near poor in the U.S. as the lingering effects of the Bush Recession is much worse than supposed. Point Two is that Santorum is a self-righteous...

It was November 29, 1981 and Hollywood star Natalie Wood had a few days off over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend from shooting Brainstorm. She and actor-husband Robert Wagner were doing what they often did on weekends, spending some time on their yacht Splendor, which was docked at Isthmus Cove on Catalina Island, drinking and drugging. Christopher Walken , who also was appeared in Brainstorm, was with them. The sci-fi film would be the diminutive actresses’ last. At some point a heated...

Jane Austen’s untimely end at the age of 41 has long been a cause for speculation among historians. Austen, the author of classics including Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, may have died of arsenic poisoning, according to a crime writer who has reviewed the last letters of the British novelist. The crucial clue lies in a line written by Austen a few months before her mysterious death in 1817. Describing weeks of illness she had recently experienced, Austen wrote:...

TACITUS ON A ROMAN COIN One of the more fascinating if perverse aspects of the Third Reich was what I’ll call, for want of a better word, Nazi esotericism. This was the quest to find the roots of the Aryan race and the beginnings of Germany in an effort to gird Hitler’s policies with historical and cultural underpinnings, never mind if they really existed, in order to “prove” the superiority of both the people and the nation. Perhaps the most fascinating book to date...

How desperate is Rick Perry as he tanks in the polls? Well, with the last seconds ticking down in the fourth quarter of his run for the Republican presidential nomination, he is airing a new television commercial that is a wall-to-wall distortion of the truth in claiming President Obama called Americans “lazy” and grew up a child of privilege. The ad begins with a clip of Obama stating, “We’ve been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades,” but the president’s...

I was going to wait until next week to write about the Newt Gingrich boomlet, but given the speed with which the keys to the Republican presidential clown car are being passed on that might be too late. As predictably as Gingrich then Donald Trump then Michele Bachmann then Rick Perry and now Herman Cain went and are going down, Gingrich is now neck and neck or slightly ahead of Mitt Romney in most polls despite being badly damaged goods. By this . . . er, logic, Trump should be primping for his...

With the Supreme Court having ruled that corporations like ConAgra, Coca-Cola and Del Monte have the same rights of people, it makes sense in a bass-ackwards sort of way that Congress has blocked proposed rule changes by the Agriculture Department that would have overhauled the nation’s school lunch program in an effort to add more fruits and greens to menus in the service of reducing childhood obesity. And so a slice of pizza still counts as a vegetable, menus will continue to be spud heavy...

With the exception of Japanese dominance in the Pacific at the outset of World War II, the U.S. has ruled the seven seas since Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet circumnavigated the globe in the first decade of the 20th century. But that is slowly but surely changing as China’s first aircraft carrier undergoes sea trials and it moves to assert territorial claims in contested waters near the Philippines and Vietnam. That is the reality behind President Obama’s visit to Darwin,...

The Paterno home near the Penn State campus. Eleven days after the arrest of former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, the hydra-headed scandal shows no sign of abating. In the last 48 hours, there have been these development: * Mike McQueary, the assistant football coach under fire for his reported lack of action in an alleged 2002 anal rape of a boy by Sandusky in the team’s locker room showers, said in an email to a former classmate that he stopped the assault and discussed...

Department of Homeland Security officers roust Occupy Wall Street protesters in Portland. Have the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other federal law enforcement agencies been helping the NYPD and other police forces to evict Occupy Wall Street protesters? That is very much the case according to a Justice Department official who spoke to a Minneapolis publication. The official said that the feds have been involved in nine other evictions over the past 10 days and stressed that while local...

If Barack Obama is as awful a president as the Republican presidential wannabes claim, then why is he leading all of them in the polls despite the fact that three out of every four voters believe that American is on the wrong track? That’s easy: People are starting to pay attention to what these candidates are saying and they don’t like what they’re hearing, which may account for the meteoric falls of Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and now Herman Cain. It wasn’t...

I’ve got all this stuff twirling around in my head. ~ HERMAN CAIN ON LIBYA Herman Cain has yet again made a compelling case that Americans would not want him to be the guy in the Oval office who picks up the red phone rings at 3 a.m., badly botching a series of questions on Libya and President Obama’s role in ousting Colonel Moammar el-Qaddafi. Speaking to the editorial board of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, he became badly flustered when asked to assess Obama’s policy toward Libya,...

ARCHBISHOP TIMOTHY DOLAN The tone deafness of the Roman Catholic Church in American is in full regalia as the church’s bishops this week rejoined the culture wars by recasting their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage as a struggle for “religious liberty” against a government and culture that are infringing on the church’s rights. Yes, as with the pedophile priest scandal, the church is casting itself as the victim. The move came as an increasing number of states...

The healing at Penn State in the wake of the firing of legendary football coach Joe Paterno and the university president is on hold. As 10 more alleged victims came forward with allegations that Jerry Sandusky molested them, the former defensive coordinator and accused pedophile went on the offensive and maintained he was innocent of the charges. In a phone interview with NBC‘s Bob Costas last night, Sandusky admitted that he “shouldn’t have showered with those kids” and...

Anyone hoping that the election of the first African-American president in 2008 would usher in a post-racial era, putting our sordid racial past behind us once and for all, is bound to be bitterly disappointed. I happen to have known better, but it still is jarring when you consider how race is playing such a large role in the comical, ugly and tragic scrum known as the sprint to the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but when the Republican Party...

As Herman Cain continues to do whatever he is doing, Rick Perry continues to self destruct, Mitt Romney continues to keep the wind at his back for the simple reason that he’s not like most of the other candidates, which is to say a slave to the Tea Party, Newt Gingrich is undergoing a back-from-the-dead metamorphosis. In other years, this would be unlikely. After all, Gingrich’s entire staff bailed on him earlier this year because he was more interested in jet setting with his third...

Penn State players head to their first practice under interim coach Tom Bradley Having given its legendary football and coach and long-serving president the heave-ho in the wake of a child sex abuse scandal that overnight turned Happy Valley into a very unhappy place, should the Penn State board of trustees have cancelled tomorrow’s game against Nebraska? And were their decisive actions of Wednesday evening enough? In my view they were enough for the short term. Cancelling the game would...