In yet another sign of the deep dissatisfaction with the Republican presidential field, a group of wealthy New York area donors is leaning hard on Chris Christie to throw his hat into the ring. The New Jersey governor has repeatedly said he is not interested in seeking the nomination and would have until the end of October to join the race, but the pressure on him was ramped up this week with the rollout of a $1.5 million television ad campaign praising him. The New York Times reports that the donor...

AT THE MOUNTAIN HIDEAWAY — And so we bid a not so fond adieu to the hottest and wettest summer since record keeping began in the late 19th century. But don’t go blaming global warning, oh no! How hot and wet was it? Too hot or too wet on most weekends that for the first time since forever we did not make a single trek to the Delaware shore, making this the second strangest summer of my acquaintance. The strangest would be the summer of 1994 when my plans for a long trip to Colorado...

When historians look back at America over the three years following the historic 2008 presidential election among the patterns that will emerge is all of the once sacred cows that the Republican Party slayed at the altar of obstructionism. They have called the president unpatriotic, some have questioned whether he is even an American while some have not so subtly attacked him for the color of his skin. They have criticized the Federal Reserve for trying to bail out the economy. They...

Yeah, global financial markets are way down, the Pakistani intelligence service conspired with insurgents to attack the U.S. embassy in Kabul, and the Chicago Cubs will not be going to the World Series yet again. But the big news is that pieces of a disintegrating NASA satellite that once was the size of a bus are expected to enter the Earth’s atmosphere late Friday or early Saturday as a fiery meteor and some of the bigger chunks may actually hit the surface. Where nobody knows for sure,...

Young adults have long been the group most likely to be uninsured, but thanks to ObamaCare there are nearly a million fewer uninsured young adults since the 2010 law began allowing parents to cover them as dependents on family policies. Three new surveys released this week show that the gains have occurred despite the recession and the fact young adults are unemployed at nearly double the rate of older Americans. Under the Affordable Care Act, which has been roundly vilified by Republicans who have...

In the latest and perhaps most pungent sign that the inmates have taken over the GOP asylum, leading congressional Republicans are demanding that the Federal Reserve butt out and stop trying to fix the economy. The demand in a letter signed by Senators Mitch McConnell and John Kyl and Representatives John Boehner and Eric Cantor comes as the Fed concludes a two-day meeting during which efforts to lower long-term interest rates to loosen up credit and promote growth were discussed. “We have...

Political polls are snapshots in time and the results of poll 14 months before Election Day must be viewed in that context, but the new USA Today/Gallup poll of Republican presidential nomination preferences are bad news for everyone except Mitt Romney, but perhaps especially bad news for Rick Perry. Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich have, for all intents and purposes, tanked. This should mean that after two widely viewed presidential debates, Perry should be opening a lead...

The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, no ghost or scribe, to tell any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place had died. ~ CORMAC McCARTHY The horses weren’t much to look at in comparison to the immense steeds ridden by the royalty and cavalries of England, France and Germany. They were light colored and small, barely 14 hands high with concave Arabian faces and tapering muzzles. But they were smart and fast and...

I am fairly conversant in the history of presidential campaigning and cannot recall an era, let along a larger number of candidates, that believe that telling lie and after lie will get them elected. Exhibit A in this regard is Michele Bachmann, whose stock has most fortunately fallen as fast as Rick Perry’s has risen. Call them lies, obfuscations, fibs or whatever, but Bachmann is proved herself to be pathologically incapable of being honest, or at least doing us the courtesy of checking...

Nineteen died in a June drone attack on a suspected terrorist training camp in a Pakistani tribal district near the Afghan border The question is simple but provocative: How does the United States fight the war against terrorism using the rules of traditional warfare? The answer is complex and far from a settled thing. White House, State Department and Pentagon officials are debating the question anew as Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the tribal regions of Pakistan, which are the terrorist...

Thomas J. Capano, a once-prominent attorney convicted for the 1996 murder of 30-year-old Anne Marie Fahey, his lover and a secretary to then-Delaware Governor Thomas Carper, was found dead today in his cell at the state prison near Smyrna. He was 61. Capano, who was serving a life sentence, has been held in solitary confinement since his November 1997 arrest. Circumstances surrounding his death were not immediately known, but sources said that Capano appeared to have died of natural causes and a...

For once leading congressional Republicans have it right. Taking to the unquestioning Sunday morning talk shows, they decried the proposed minimum tax rate for millionaires rolled out today by President Obama as “class warfare” and an insidious way to portray the GOP as being indifferent to the many hardships being faced by ordinary Americans. Which, of course, is exactly what they are. The outpouring of bombast was not unexpected, but for the Republicans to portray themselves so accurately...

I met future Vice President Joseph R. Biden when I was 12 and on my way to junior high school and he was 17 and entering his senior year at a Catholic boy’s school. I was pretty much clueless and he a gangly kid with no apparent social skills and a stutter. We played beach volleyball together at the Delaware shore for a couple of summers and his folks and my folks became friends. Delaware, you see, is even smaller than it looks on a map. Biden went on to the University of Delaware, where he...

I could care less if Sarah Palin had a one-night stand with a basketball player when she was a sports broadcaster back in 1987. I could care less that the player was future Miami Heat star Glen Rice, who was playing for Michigan and was in Anchorage for a tournament. I could care less that 6-foot-7 Rice is an African-American. I could care less that Rice is said to have confirmed the tryst for Joe McGinniss for The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, his forthcoming book. ...

If you need a break from the serial hijinks and buffoonery of the American political scene, look no further than Italy. What’s going on there is hilarious if you overlook the fact that Prime Minister Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi could well destroy what is left of the economic stability of Europe, which makes our own economic difficulties discreto (not so bad). A couple of things have focused my attention on Italy — its incestuous relationship with semi-deposed Libyan strongman...

WikiLeaks document dumps over the last year or so on the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and State Department diplomatic cables, among others, begs an important question: Are we still capable of outrage? The past decade has been a carnival of disasters beginning with the 9/11 attacks and followed by the fool’s mission in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression with a slo-mo jobless recovery, a deeply fractured body politic roiled...

KENT SNYDER AND RON PAUL There was a special moment during the CNN/Tea Party presidential debate on Monday evening when moderator Wolf Blitzer threw out a red-meat hypothetical: What do the candidates think about the case of a young man who could afford health insurance but chose not to buy it and became gravely ill? Should the state pay his bills? “That’s what freedom is all about; taking your own risks,” replied Ron Paul. “This whole idea that you have to take...

This month marks the 45th anniversary of my debut as a writer — that is someone who got paid for writing — and I recall that my first byline was a story on a local Marine drowning while on combat maneuvers on Okinawa. I was paid 15 bucks for that article; that is 15 bucks for each Saturday that I toiled in the newsroom of my local rag writing mostly obituaries. As compared to the sweet 100 grand and six weeks of paid vacation that I negotiated my way to while covering the O.J. Simpson...

Perhaps I am going soft in my dotage, but I felt a twinge of sorrow for George Bush as he stood next to Barack Obama during the 9/11 anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero on Sunday morning. There was that familiar facial expression somewhere between a smirk and bewilderment, and a reminder that his greatest legacy will forever be launching the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time on the pretext that Saddam Hussein was behind the terrorist attacks. Yet I found that the anger I had long...

It should be made clear from the jump that the winnowing-out process to determine which Republican faces Barack Obama next year is working as intended even if at times it more resembles the making of sausage than democracy in action. After all, the 2008 Democratic field had no fewer than eight would-be worthies at the starting gate, including Christopher Dodd, Mike Gravel, Evan Bayh, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Vilsack and some guy by the name of Biden. While a few of these Democratic wannabes had...

September 11 is perhaps the third date in American history requiring no year, July 4 and December 7 being the others. It also is the only of the three that I lived through and like virtually everyone touched by the horrific events of that day, found my life changed forever. That is perhaps a rash statement for someone who was 75 miles from Ground Zero on that gloriously sunny morning and was blithely unaware that the earth had moved until I walked into the mountain retreat where I found my love...

Some 3,017 people died in New York, at the Pentagon and in a farm field in western Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, and save for the hijackers all were heroes in their own way. But Father Mychal Judge and Betty Ann Ong merit special mention. FATHER MYCHAL JUDGE New York Fire Department Chaplain Mychal Judge, or Father Mike, as everyone called the beloved Benedictine, was uptown at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, where he ministered to the wealthy and homeless alike, when the first plane...

Of the many lies told by Bush administration officials in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, few were larger than the assertion of Vice President Cheney — who history will show is probably the biggest and boldest liar to hold high office in the U.S. — that Air Force fighter jet pilots in hot pursuit of the hijacked airliners were poised to carry out an order from President Bush to shoot them down. In fact, no such order was readied and one was belatedly given by Cheney himself after...

SIMON LEGREE BEATS UNCLE TOM It is said that when Harriet Beecher Stowe was greeted by Abraham Lincoln at a White House reception in December 1862, the president looked down at the diminutive author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and said “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” Whether the statement is apocryphal or not hardly matters. The influence of the anti-slavery novel, the best selling book of the 19th century after the Bible, was immense and 200 years after Stowe’s...

Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere. ~ STEPHEN COLBERT Having stolen the 2000 presidential election courtesy of the Supreme Court, the Republican Party is gearing up to try to steal the 2012 election by suppressing the voters who helped elect Barack Obama in 2008. They are, not coincidentally, the traditional enemies of the party and include minorities, the elderly, immigrants, college students and ex-convicts who represented an historic number of first-time...