I spent this morning thinking about things that evolve and about evolution in general. I know that when it comes to marriage equality and its barely-ready proponents to say one’s views are ‘evolving’ is to speak metaphorically – it’s not meant to be taken literally. What… Read full post »

A giraffe walks into a bar and says, "The highballs are on me."

That has nothing to do with the rest of this story but they say it's good to lead with a joke, which is what I'd like to think Ted Nugent was doing when he said of the President of… Read full post »

I read over the weekend that Bella Santorum, three-year-old daughter of Rick and Karen, is now a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. My Canadian friend and I were in Mexico at the time, which is slightly ironic because handguns are illegal in Canada, as they are in Mexico, and… Read full post »

I spent most of 2008 in the People’s Republic of China. I lived in Changsha, a city of some eight million souls in the middle of Hunan, a province just south of the Yangtze River, 500 miles or so inland from the Pacific. Changsha, though a densely populated metropolis, is a… Read full post »

On Monday The Huffington Post ran a story by Michael Calderone covering the White House Correspondents Association’s decision to deny veteran journalist Helen Thomas a table at its upcoming dinner at the Washington Hilton. In a comment on that story I said, “It’s hard to imagine any… Read full post »

If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because… Read full post »

So I’ve been hearing a lot lately about our porous tax codes and how they permit all manner of corporate skullduggery by way of which the wealthiest concerns slip and writhe around the letter of the law and end up paying a fraction of what we impecunious peons believe they should… Read full post »

UNITED NATIONS, NY -  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejadafragalistic took an uncommon step for foreign heads of state today when he endorsed Michele Bachmann’s candidacy for the U.S. presidency. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly (minus delegations from the U.S. and all ot… Read full post »

Where truth-telling is concerned, a presidential campaign season is an infertile field. One hadn't ought to expect facts to dominate any political discussion and one certainly oughtn't to expect facts, those rascals, to pop up in debates showcasing ideologues preening for their base. So when one hear… Read full post »

When I was a boy, if you maintained there'd someday be a memorial on the National Mall dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., you'd have won a lot of bets. The world's a better place now than it was then, in some ways at least. Nobody in my boyhood would have… Read full post »

DONNA, TEXAS – It seems more than 30 Mexican soldiers made themselves a wrong turn a few days ago and ended up in Texas, where the locals are none too fond of invading Mexicans. It was the sort of thing that happens, apparently, more often than the general public might realize.… Read full post »

This weekend, my neighborhood played host to San Diego LGBT Pride, the City of San Diego’s biggest annual public event. In years past the weekend-long shindig has attracted hundreds of thousands of locals and tourists, gay, straight and otherwise, to its festival in Balboa Park and its parade… Read full post »

What do you call a rabbit with no ears? Evidence

One day not so long ago it came to pass that a mommy bunny spawned a litter of kits that included one fairly extraordinary member, a baby lacking those distinctive, oversized features ordinarily associated with rabbits, by which I…

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Try to recall the first time you heard a Republican chanting about either this country’s “unfair tax burden” or its “over-regulation.” I can’t remember ever not hearing Republicans sing those lines. These two little elements are so interwoven and so recurrent they… Read full post »