The First Lady turns 48 today. I know because an e-mail from the President last week reminded me with two links to a fund-raising site: “The decision to become part of this campaign was deeply personal for a lot of people, and Michelle and I are no exception… “This fall, Michelle and I will have been married 20 years. The next 10 months will be harder than any we’ve experienced together, and...

There was a time not long ago when free speech was guaranteed in America, and if someone had a problem with that the Supreme Court would weigh in with a reminder that the concept is a foundation on which our democracy is built. But a funny thing happened on the way to the second decade of the new millennium. According to a new study, the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts is hearing fewer free speech...

My Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” – Martin Luther King Jr. Doug Bursch blogs and tweets Fairlyspiritual.

When I read this letter for the many-eth time in my life, I see MLK’s spiritual discipline, the knowledge of how to go forward in four steps, the leadership, the clear demands, the efforts at negotiation, the spiritual self-examination so one doesnt go off half-cocked caught up in the yelling… and the non violent protest for clear cut goals. When I read Reverend King’s letter from Birmingham...

Five years ago, in another political world when Barack Obama was getting ready to run for president, I wrote this: West Side residents of Chicago now have a U.S. Senator who looks like them and it may be, in more ways than one, due to the man whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow. Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolence to the oppressed. “Our weapon is love,” he told them, and he used it with stunning...

With the primary season underway it is already time for people to speculate the winner in November. Of course this is hardly a new situation; pundits have been trying to predict the outcome of the elections for decades and usually with mixed results at best. In the early 1980′s, a political scientist named Allan Lichtman decided to try and figure out a way to predict the outcome of Presidential elections...

(PORTIONS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 2007) When I was first cutting my teeth in the newspaper business, my editors sent me out on “house ends,” visits to homes where I would interview families of interest because something very bad of interest had happened to them. It was the late 1960s and many of these house ends were the result of the death of a young man, usually an Army or Marine...

It can happen. Miraculous resurrection can sometimes emerge from unspeakable tragedy. On Sept. 11, 2001 Lauren Manning, senior vice president and partner at Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank which had several floors of offices in the World Trade Center, was on her way to work and getting ready to enter the elevator at the North Tower when the 9/11 terrorist attack punched the building — and a giant,...

WASHINGTON — This is what progress looks like for a president named Barack Hussein Obama. Not so long ago, many in conservative and Republican ranks were eager to paint him as an alien creature far removed from American life as most Americans understand it. A determined cadre insisted Obama was not even eligible to be president, claiming he was born outside the United States. Obama eventually put...

WASHINGTON — He would be an elder statesman now, a lion in winter, an American hero perhaps impatient with the fuss being made over his birthday. At 83, he’d likely still have his wits and his voice. Surely, if he were able, he would continue to preach, and to pray — and to dream. For the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., dreaming was not optional. It was a requirement of citizenship to...

Your news media at work: first, obtain the authentic photo of the actual story; THEN black out anything in the photo that would actually show anything; THEN slap your video logos and bumperstickers all over it. • You know what I’m talking about. • No army that ever marched didn’t have douchebags like these. You know these guys. And so do I. They were the dumbasses who put the frog on the...

The PBS series is becoming the “West Wing” and “Sopranos” of the century’s second decade, mirroring Americans’ longing for escape from the Obama and Tea Party era as surely as its predecessors reflected a desire for a more human society, high and low, during George W. Bush’s time. As second season ratings soar, what is “Downton Abbey” telling us about ourselves? In midlife, a dozen friends...

You may go see the Non Sequitur cartoon from Friday, 1/13/12 which the Plain Dealer did not run. I used it as a teaching moment with my 6th grader and he got why it could be objectionable right away. Whether or not it should have been published is of course a different matter. Here are the comments at my Facebook thread and many times more can be found at former Plain Dealer journalist Connie Schultz’s...

by Walter Brasch Tucked between the New Hampshire primary and Ground Hog Day, and directly competing against an NFL playoff game, is Saturday night’s annual Miss America pageant. Although the headquarters is still near Atlantic City, where it originated in 1921, the pageant—don’t call it a beauty contest—has been a part of the Las Vegas entertainment scene for eight years. Apparently, the Las Vegas motto...

About 18 months ago and in response to a piece, “Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service With Heroism,” which discussed the technical, logical and semantic reasons why our fighting men and women should not be collectively called “heroes,” I wrote a piece claiming “Our Military: Yes, They Are All Heroes.” I started the article as follows: I am one of those misguided, clueless...

A scandal is now unfolding involving a video that administration officials reportedly believe is indeed authentic — a video showing a small group of Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters. Why should that video be such a big deal? Because such an act would violate the traditional norms taught by military commanders about how the U.S. military should behave. And also because the video...

As Mitt Romney tries to seal the deal in the Palmetto state and keeps slipping in the polls there, memories come back of a culture clash when I was in basic training there during World War II. How much has changed in those seven decades? The country boys in my company were excited by anything exotic and, given their lives before induction, it took little to tickle them. One day they were chortling over a guy...

I have just watched When Mitt Romney Came to Town and it is, in a word, devastating. The 28-minute film from Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC, a series of interviews with ordinary folk whose lives were never the same after Romney’s Bain Capital bought and took down local companies, is a double condemnation — both of his private equity work and the business model he used to get filthy rich. The...

For some reason — some will say for good reason — election time in America does not seem to bring out the best in many Americans, including this one, when it comes to negative and gloomy opinion and commentary. Thus, when The Huffington Post announced the launch of a HuffPost Good News section “devoted to positive news, happy stories and uplifting opinion and commentary” and graciously invited...

Even as tension over the Strait of Hormuz escalates, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is touring Latin America as a way of showing Iran has friends in the U.S. ‘backyard.’ But this tongue-in-cheek welcome to the Iranian leader by columnist Luis A. Vivanco of Ecuador’s La Hora goes to show that not everyone is buying the story. For La Hora of Ecuador, Luis A. Vivanco starts out this...

That grinding sound you hear are the tectonic plates of Republican presidential politics shifting. In what direction and how far they shift may determine whether Mitt Romney has a chance of beating Barack Obama in November. That is if he can survive brutal attacks from some of his opponents. Although it was not noticeable, the shift began with the burst of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, first in New York...

Mitt Romney wouldn’t have caught Bin Laden. He would have bought Al Qaeda and fired him. ~ Commenters at DAILY KOS The clashes over class warfare that have bubbled to the surface as the Republican Party scrambles to anoint a challenger to President Obama is a healthy sign that addressing real issues is not completely dead, although the warfare happens to be for the wrong reasons. To find the right reasons,...

Just in time, our frayed nerves go back to the quiet and calm of “Downton Abbey” in World War I after a weekend of Republicans crying havoc over Barack Obama, pausing only in sniping at one another for restful outbursts of road rage, blaming the President for everything wrong in the 21st century world. Robotic Mitt Romney, as befits a frontrunner, leads the pack in letting “slip the dogs of war,” stabbing...

With a double-header debate this weekend, memories arise of the legendary Satchel Paige who, before baseball was integrated, was the greatest pitcher in America, often starting two games in a day and was considered by Joe DiMaggio et al the best they never had to face in the big leagues during his prime. Satchel pitched well into his sixties, famously saying, “Never look back, something might be gaining on...

The only people I have more contempt for than those who would send our young men and women to get shot at, get maimed and get killed in unnecessary wars, are those who support sending our young men and women to get shot at, get maimed and get killed in unnecessary wars while they themselves refused to, declined to serve, had “other priorities,” or had all kinds of excuses for not serving in those very same...