(PUBLISHED EACH YEAR ON THE DAY WE HONOR OUR VETERANS) I had the privilege of covering a good many big stories during a long newspaper career. The visit of a diminutive woman by the name of Phan Ti Kim Phuc to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., on Veterans Day 1996 would seem to pale in comparison to the Clinton impeachment circus or O.J. Simpson trials, to name two of the biggies, but it is one that I cherish. I had been tipped that Ms. Phuc would be making a surprise appearance...

Please forgive me for visiting yet again the clown car that the Republican Party has become, but I can’t help myself. Writing about these wackjobs is like shooting fish in a barrel, although I have to occasionally remind myself that this is not a political version of The Office but a bunch of . . . er, clowns who will stoop as low as it takes to try to deny our Islamofascist president an encore. I initially welcomed Herman Cain’s entry into the race for the GOP presidential nomination...

There have been 63 (not a typo) governments in Italy since World War II, an astonishing number unless you consider that governments to Italians are what potato chips are to Americans: Bags full of empty calories that bloat the tummy and ruin their appetite for more nourishing fare. But few Italian governments have been more hapless that that led by Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi, who regularly threatens to make good on his long-standing pledge to resign and is doing so again after eight...

Perry’s performance “was like watching a thoroughbred get euthanized on the track.” I have no idea how many independents or voters who have not decided whether Barack Obama deserves reelection are watching the Republican presidential debates. Party bigs must be hoping that the number is small because the slate of wannabes almost to the last man (you too, Michele) are proving time and again their fitness for high comedy and unfitness for high office. Last night’s rumble in...

In a few short hours last night, the board of trustees of Pennsylvania State University exorcised demons that had haunted a campus fondly known as Happy Valley for 13 long years. Legendary football coach Joe Paterno was fired outright despite his pleas to retire on his own terms after an extraordinary 62 seasons and more victories than any major college coach. University President Graham Spanier also was sacked. The hasty departures of Paterno and Spanier followed the arrest last Saturday of Jerry...

People on the fence about whether the Penn State University board of trustees overreacted in firing legendary head football coach Joe Paterno and university President Graham Spanier might pause long enough to familiarize themselves with the background of the case. It is not a pretty picture. In 1998, campus police and Centre County law enforcement authorities investigated an allegation that Jerry Sandusky, Paterno’s defensive coordinator, had engaged in inappropriate and possibly sexual conduct...

OLANA, A FIVE-YEAR-OLD DROWNING VICTIM, IS LAID TO REST By SUSAN WINTERS COOK I’m facing about 200 people I don’t know and wondering how I will be able to deliver my message without choking up. I am the only white person at this funeral. That is the norm for my husband and me because only a minority of whites will venture into rural African communities. Thus we are treated like royalty, given seats at the front of the gathering, and asked to speak a few words. Knowing this I have been...

Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno Legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno announced today that he plans to retire at the end of the football season, but that could be derailed when the university’s board of trustees, including Governor Tom Corbitt, meets on Friday in the wake of a sex abuse scandal that has implicated top school officials. Meanwhile, a newspaper reported that university President Graham Spanier may resign or be fired by the board of trustees, which has moved up a Friday...

Analysts trying to gauge the mood of voters heading into 2012 based on the results of contentious ballot issues in yesterday’s low turnout off-year elections should be forgiven if they awoke this morning with hangovers because from all appearances the Democrats defied expectations in beating back a Republican agenda that only one year ago had helped return control of the House of Representatives to the GOP. The biggest victory came in Ohio where a law that restricted the right of public...

President Ahmadinejad inspects an Irani nuclear facility With United Nations weapons inspectors expected to say that they have substantial new evidence that Iran is developing a nuclear device in a much-leaked forthcoming report, is there a middle ground for the U.S. and its allies between going to war and trying to keep diplomatic channels open? The war option is favored by the usual suspects including most Republican presidential candidates, the neocon brain trust that persuaded the Bush administration...

To say that Herman Cain has now completely made an ass of himself does a disservice to donkeys everywhere. With one of the four . . . uh, now five women who have accused Cain of sexual harassment providing a detailed and credible account of him groping her in a parked car in the context of him offering her a job, a second woman about to go public with a detailed account because she is angered that Cain remains very publicly in denial, and a third woman who now says that Cain came on to her after...

Jon Huntsman is increasingly taking on the role of a guy who has no chance of becoming the Republican presidential nominee but is going to speak his mind about the clown car that the party has become as his wisp of a campaign flickers and dies out. But Huntsman outdid himself today in praising Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart (attention TMV commenter Rudi), a stage shy and obscure-by-choice rocker and writer of experimental music with a powerful voice who played harmonica, sax and wind instruments. Said...

Many of rock ‘n’ roll’s legends get better with age. Guitar gods Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton are playing better than ever. Bonnie Raitt, too. Which bring us to vocalist-acoustic guitarist Jon Anderson and keyboard virtuoso Rick Wakeman, two members of the original Yes. Anderson and Wakeman aren’t Yes, of course, but like fine wine that has been down in the cellar for more years than you can remember, the blends of progressive, art and symphonic rock they play sound better...

The revelations that the storied Penn State football program harbored a serial child rapist for over 40 years and that presidential wannabe Herman Cain is almost certainly a serial groper and harasser of women would not appear to be connected, but they very much are. By all rights, the arrest of longtime Penn State defense coordinator Jerry Sandusky on rape charges and the university’s athletic director and a vice president who oversees the university police on charges that they covered...

India says it’s new C-17 aircraft are for defensive purposes only With the U.S. and most European countries lurching from economic crisis to economic crisis, India continues to hum along, its homegrown mix of democracy and capitalism driving a vibrant economy that is among the fastest growing anywhere, and many of its major corporations are striding ever more confidently into overseas markets. India, in short, is a super power in waiting, but its focus is substantially inward and it shows...

The latest tactic in the anti-abortion arsenal is advocating passage of so-called personhood measures, and it is likely that Mississippi will do so when it elects a new governor next Tuesday. The Mississippi measure defines a person as “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” While this sounds pretty straightforward, legal observers say it is anything but and that states might regret promulgating such measures because of all...

If you are a reporter or editor or perhaps even blogger who covers politics, you’ve been here before: An allegation is made against a politician that seems specious on its face and your well-attuned gut agrees that it is. But as the days pass and the target flails first at the news media and then his perceived enemies, your gut is not so sure. Then there are new allegations and your gut finally heaves and tells you that they are all true. That, in a four short days,is what has happened to...

The Occupy Wall Street protests entered a new and potentially violent phase this week as protesters shut down operations at Oakland’s busy port in the latest demonstrations against economic inequality and police brutality. A small splinter group wielding makeshift shields broke off and roamed through downtown streets spraying graffiti, burning garbage and breaking windows. They were confronted by police who fired tear gas and bean bag rounds. The protest by about 5,000 people fell far short...

It will require this kind of balancing act for the GOP to retake the White House Shortly after midnight exactly one year from this Sunday the first voters will go to the polls in two tiny New Hampshire towns to vote in a presidential election that will be singularly significant in defining the course of American politics in the years to come. Before the sun sets in Hawaii on November 6, 2012, 130 million or so people will have voted on whether to give Barack Obama a second term or return to the...

While the juxtaposition of headlines on The New York Times homepage today was unintentional, it probably elicited a few chuckle: As Last Bastion of Civility, the South Sees Manners Decline 4 Georgia Men Arrested in Terror Plot The men, all aged 65 and over, were part of a fringe militia group in what the Justice Department described as a plot to use guns, bombs and the toxin ricin to kill federal and state officials and spread terror. The men were recorded telling an F.B.I. informant that they...

Jon Corzine was lousy as governor of New Jersey and now it turns out he’s lousy as a Wall Street executive. Corzine’s MF Global (which a friend attuned to the financial markets calls MotherF***** Global because of all of its bad investments) filed for bankruptcy this week following massive losses tied to its investments in foreign debt and its failure to close the deal of being bought by a rival brokerage firm. The deal went belly up when federal regulators discovered that hundreds...

YES, THAT’S WHO YOU THINK IT IS I wrote the other day that support for the legalization of marijuana is higher than support for Barack Obama with nearly half of all adult Americans in favor of ending the criminal penalties for personal use that further overcrowd our prisons. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Shortly after taking office, the new president — himself a pot smoker as a teenager — asked that Americans tell him what was on their minds. Of the top 10 responses...

BENEDICT ARNOLD WOULD APPLAUD TODAY’S REPUBLICANS As loaded as the word traitor and all that it connotes is, I can now say without qualification but with considerable sadness that the never ending Republican obstructionism in Congress has reached traitorous levels. Recall that it was a healthy (pardon the term) majority of congressional Republicans who reached across the aisle in August to join Democrats in the formation of a highly unusual two-party, 12-member super committee to come up with...

Say what you will about Herman Cain, but he sure knows how to keep a negative story alive. When Politico broke a story on Sunday that the presumptive (and astonishing) frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination had been the target of sexual harassment allegations by two woman employees of the National Restaurant Association when he was the organization’s president, he not only failed to come clean, in all likelihood because of a Bill Clinton-like ego that refused to acknowledge...

And so November rears its chilly head — in northern climes, anyway — with Europe having avoided a financial meltdown for the time being and the U.S. showing tentative signs that the hangover from the Great Recession may at long last be easing. Bully for that, you might say, but I say bullspit. This is because banksters (which conveniently rhymes with gangsters) are at the heart of the economic malaise here and across the pond, but whether it is here or over there the solution is the...