From the Left
/Politics
/ArcaMax
Backlash: America Cools on Crazy
The morning after the 1972 election in which Richard Nixon defeated liberal Democrat George McGovern by 23 points, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael wandered glumly around the magazine's Manhattan office. "I don't know how this could have happened," Kael muttered. "Not one person I know voted for him."
Polls continue to show President Joe ...Read more
Democrats Should Let MTG Be the Republicans' Problem
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's nasty remark about a fellow congresswoman's appearance was characteristically stupid. But the Georgia Republican is hoist on her own petard on such a regular basis, why would Democrats want to stop her?
You may have seen the video of the House Oversight Committing hearing in which MTG said to Jasmine Crockett, a ...Read more
States Dust Off Obscure Anti-Mask Laws To Target Pro-Palestine Protesters
Arcane laws banning people from wearing masks in public are now being used to target people who wear face coverings while peacefully protesting Israel's war in Gaza. That's a big problem.
In the 1940s and '50s, many U.S. states passed anti-mask laws as a response to the Ku Klux Klan, whose members often hid their identities as they terrorized...Read more
The Loathsomeness of Trump World
There is something important about Trump’s criminal trial in New York that’s not being openly talked about. I don’t mean we’re not getting the facts about what’s happening in Manhattan Superior Court. But something very big is being left out.
The trial has introduced us to a world of moral and ethical loathsomeness in which people use...Read more
The Prosecution Has Made Its Case
Did Donald Trump falsify business records to cover up his payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels?
Did he do it to hold onto women voters in the days leading up to the 2016 election?
Reading the daily press accounts of the New York trial leaves little doubt that the prosecution made its case.
Michael Cohen is a liar, convicted as one, but ...Read more
Age. Race. Sexual Orientation. Should Political Expression Be a Protected Class, Too?
Your boss can't fire you because of the color of your skin. He can't get rid of you because he doesn't like your religion. Federal law protects you against employment discrimination based on your sex, race, pregnancy status, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, genetic information or (if you are over 40) age.
Should...Read more
Don't Ask Alito to Recuse -- Tell Him to Resign
The conspiratorial antics of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, as exposed recently in the national media, have raised the gravest doubt about his bias in matters before the Supreme Court -- and provoked demands that he recuse himself from any case concerning former President Donald Trump, the 2020 presidential election or the Jan. 6 ...Read more
Graduates Need To Know That Life Is Bigger Than Your GPA
"Your success in high school does not determine your success in life." My high school English teacher Chuck Keller told me this, and it was exactly what teenage me needed to hear. Chuck was right, and I'm here to pass on this little nugget to young adults today.
It's graduation season, and society has a way of making kids think that their ...Read more
Diners and AI
Artificial Intelligence is a huge concern among people in my business because first of all, we think we're gonna lose our jobs, plus we think AI will produce mediocre writing, and we don't want to lose our jobs.
Also, it's creepy, although it's not nearly as creepy as some of the people I worked with and for during a 40-year stumble through ...Read more
This Era’s Protesters Could Stand to Ask a Few More Questions
One of the roles we old folks fall into is to wish we could painlessly and conveniently give young people the useful wisdom life has taught us so they won’t have to learn it the hard way.
Such are the thoughts that come to me as I witness the spread of militantly anti-Zionist protests across campuses similar to anti-war protests in the ...Read more
Live from New York! Trump Bootlickers on Parade
Let’s say you’re a producer for“ Saturday Night Live” and you want to put together a skit lampooning the parade of shameless sycophants showing up at Donald Trump’s trial. You couldn’t come up with a better – or worse – display of buffoonery than we saw this week.
To qualify as a true Trumper – or to make the list of potential...Read more
Trump the Dude? Not Quite
"Stormy Daniels Put Trump's Toxic Horniness on Full Display," read a Daily Beast headline. What has really been put on display is Donald Trump's desperate need to portray himself as a hunk with an awesome sex drive. He's done that his entire adult life. Now that he's an obese man of 77, the urgency to come off as a young buck has never been ...Read more
What Voters Don't Know ... Yet
The problem with early polls is just that. They are taken early, and they are a snapshot of what voters know and think at the time they are taken. Which may be wrong. Because most of the voters who decide elections -- the so-called swing voters -- pay about as much attention to politics as I do to baseball. Not spring training. Not even the ...Read more
A Rose Helps Quiet the Noise Inside
My father, Richard, 91, was missing his departed friends and folk, so I suggested planting a memory garden.
Close to his heart was Leon Rosenberg, his friend from Randall School to the University of Wisconsin and medical school. They knew each other from ages 10 to 89, when Leon died. They were born weeks apart: my father on Jan. 22, 1933, ...Read more
God Bless the Nurses. And Please Hurry!
Every religion prioritizes care for the needy. Christianity's Benedictine Rule, for example, puts care of the sick atop the moral order, "above and before every other duty."
Really -- even above the holy Wall Street mandate that medical and insurance conglomerates must squeeze every last penny of profits out of America's corporate-care system...Read more
Marjorie Taylor Greene Doesn’t Run the Government After All
Although I usually find legislative processes to be a good remedy for insomnia, I followed the attempt by the often entertaining — especially when she doesn’t intend to be — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to revive the Hastert rule until it crashed and burned.
House Speaker Mike Johnson easily blocked an ill-planned attempt by his GOP ...Read more
American Gold: At Age 100, Lieutenant Benjamin Inspires Still
If 100 can be said to be the new 70, Lieutenant Alfred D. Benjamin of the Army Air Corps' 384th Bomb Group has to be the expression's poster boy. Ramrod-straight and sharp as the proverbial tack, the Canton, Massachusetts, centenarian is as smart as the salute he gives as he finishes an interview about his service as a B-17 navigator flying 31...Read more
America Needs More Schools Like De La Salle Academy
Here we are in Times Square. Maniac lights flash across all horizons. Minnie Mouse and Spider-Man are making the rounds. Packed tour buses inch below the scary headlines orbiting the ABC News building.
And it's only 9:30 on a Monday morning.
But on West 43rd Street, about a block from the heart of chaos, the school day has started on an ...Read more
Clarence Page: DEI on campus and in corporations is due for a change
Reports of the death of DEI, the widely praised and reviled — take your pick — employment policies to improve diversity, equity and inclusion, have been greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain famously said of reports of his own death.
Still, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action in colleges and ...Read more
The Painful Reality of Being an Incarcerated Mother
Many of us celebrated Mother's Day over the weekend by remembering or being present with women who raised us, or with our families. But for the more than 190,000 women incarcerated in the United States this weekend, there was no celebration.
Close to 60% of these women serving prison sentences were the primary caregiver of their minor ...Read more
