Looks like we’re looking to downscale our troop involvement in Iraq.
Then again, maybe not. Wars and rumors of wars, right? Press coverage of the war on terrorism has rarely seemed to be on the mark to me. Reporters seem to want to blame that on bad communication. I blame it at least as much […]

I’ve lived through 46 Memorial Days, but this may be the first year that it seemed like a day we really needed. I had never quite been able to figure out why we had Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day. Maybe it is a little of us covering the same territory, but who cares? We don’t […]

Apparently, that rumbling of the earth I felt just a while ago was the terrestrial shockwave of us crowning our fifth “American Idol.”
Oh brother.
Not that I haven’t got my share of guilty pleasure TV viewing habits as well. Heck, maybe any TV viewing habit is a guilty pleasure. But there’s something wrong with the […]

For those in need of a pepper-upper, here are “DaVinci Code” reviews on the site “Rotten Tomatoes”. The reviews are a mix of professional and “just folks” and they average out at giving the movie a 23% rating. I’d love if they’d say things like “Too dismissive of 2000 years of Christian teaching and tradition” […]

If you’re in charge of France (don’t panic — this is just a rhetorical question) and you want to restore your nation to greatness, what would you do?

(a) Tell the French know-it-alls to stop pontificating to the world

(b) Tell the French slacker-class to pull up their socks and get to work

(c) Stop posturing around […]

… thanks, Tom. What a great guy.

This story by science-fiction writer, Dan Simmons, has been making a bit of a splash — for good reason. Long read, and a style I found a bit unwieldy at times, but worth the effort.
I tried to relax. “What do you want to talk about?” I said.
“The Century War,” said the Time Traveler.

I blinked […]

The idea that it is brave to stand up for gays in Hollywood, to stand up against Joe McCarthy in Hollywood (fifty years after his death), to say that rich white people are bad, that oil companies are evil — this is nonsense. All of these are mainstream ideas in Hollywood, always have been, always […]

Bill Cosby’s advice to New Orleans: Clean up your act.
“It’s painful, but we can’t cleanse ourselves unless we look at the wound,” Cosby told the rally of about 2,000 people in front of the city’s convention center.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you had the highest murder rate, unto each other. You were dealing drugs to each other. […]

You’ve probably gotten used to hearing movie industry types say, as George Clooney basically did with his “proud to be out of touch” Oscar speech, that they’re groundbreakers when it comes to hard-nosed social commentary. Their usual explanation for why movies like “Brokeback Mountain,” “Munich,” “Syriana,” and “Crash” don’t do well (the Narnia movie has […]