A house doesn't have to fall on my head to tell me a battle royal is brewing within the Catholic Church over the conservative hierarchy's heavy-handed efforts to clamp down on dissenting Catholic voices. Not when a prominent American nun comes "this close" to calling the present Church leadership a b… Read full post »

Only a right winger could say with a straight face that a passing acquaintance with a 1960s radical 30 years after the fact constitutes "paling around with terrorists" while posting information about billionaire backers of a presumptive presidential nominee is the functional equivalent of "politi… Read full post »

Well, the Masters of the Universe have screwed up again. Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan, the so called "good" bank, went out and squandered $2 billion of their depositor's federally-insured money, playing with the same stick of credit default swap dynamite that nearly blew up capitalism four years ago.

So… Read full post »

It turns out that for $50 and the time it takes to fill out an application you too can be a Pulitzer Prize Award nominee. Well, actually, you can't. All you really get for your 50 bucks is the right to call yourself a Pulitzer Prize "entrant."

But that hasn't… Read full post »

You may disagree with me on the issues but at least you know where I stand. In 2004, that was the essence of George W. Bush's campaign against the hapless, wind-surfing, flip-flopping John Kerry. Eight years later, the flip-flop is on the other foot.  

President Obama made… Read full post »

As Republicans are discovering to their despair, American bishops make poor political bedfellows. At just the moment Republicans seemed to be making progress putting this whole "War on Women" thing to rest the Catholic bishops, to whom Republicans have affixed themselves at the hip, go out and open u… Read full post »

Originally posted @ They Gave Us a Republic.....

The letters were direct and to the point:

Mrs. Schroeder,

I heard you on TV and if I were a policeman I would kill a lot more of these kids. Keep your kids at home then they do… Read full post »

Republicans are aghast that President Obama is stepping on them as he takes his well-earned victory lap on the one year anniversary of the daring raid he ordered that killed 9/11 villain Osama bin Laden. But 2012 marks an important anniversary for another milestone event in American foreign poli… Read full post »

There are lots and lots of Republicans being thrown under Scott Brown's campaign bus for US Senate.  

I've just come back from a luncheon where Brown was guest speaker and I am here to report that no one is running further or faster away from the Republican Party than… Read full post »

What would you call an outraged critic of the House Republican budget whose one-sided distribution of costs and benefits cleaves precisely along class lines, with 37% of all tax benefits going to those at the very top while 60% of the budget's burdens are borne by those at the bottom? Well,… Read full post »

Just 55 well-to-do white guys wrote the US Constitution during that Philadelphia summer of 1787. And to hear the conservatives of the current Roberts Court tell it, the Founding Father's "original intent" was for  small groups of wealthy white guys to rule America ever since.

As we anxiously wa… Read full post »

In August 1998, a 20-ton section of the port-side hull of RMS Titanic finally made landfall when it sailed into Boston Harbor on board the research vessel Abeille Supporter, more than 86 years after leaving Southampton, England for New York City.  Abeille Supporter had been part of a small flot… Read full post »

You want to talk about a war on stay-at-home moms? How about Republican economic policies that prevent women from ever becoming one.

I'm talking about policies, for instance, like the equal-pay-for-equal-work law that embattled Governor Scott Walker just shot down in Wisconsin, thus guaranteeing tha… Read full post »

Imagine an America in which Catholic nuns patrol the streets armed with rulers and issue citations like meddlesome meter maids to women whose hemlines rise provocatively more than two inches above the knee.

Preposterous? I would have thought so, too, until the controversy over women's access to birth… Read full post »

Forget ACORN. If you really want to know who's defrauding millions of Americans out of their right to vote it's Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. And they've got lots of ways to do it.

One of the most popular is obvious enough. In those states where Republicans control both… Read full post »

What's a right wing Supreme Court to do for an encore after hinting it might throw 50 million uninsured Americans back on the street because it thinks efforts to help them stay healthy are a dangerous overreach of government power? Why, affirm a dangerous overreach of government power, of course, by… Read full post »

According to a recent study by the University of California, 93% of income growth since the economic collapse of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest 1% of American households.  Just 20 years ago, the amount of national income growth earned by the top 1% was less than half… Read full post »

In the lobby of the place I once worked hung an excerpt from the speech Winston Churchill gave to the students at the Harrow School in October 1941:

"Never give in
Never, never, never, never
Never yield in any way
Great or small, large or petty..."

I sometimes think… Read full post »

What were you willing to give up for lent? His Eminence, Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago, wants it known that he was willing to give up the poor, the sick, the illiterate and millions more besides if that's what it took to show President Obama who was boss in the Catholic bis… Read full post »

By sheer coincidence, my nine-year-old begged me just the other day to buy him one of those iconic toys from my own childhood, the Etch-A-Sketch, which is manufactured by that equally quirky and iconic toymaker, Ohio Art.

And so, thanks to my son, I am now equipped to pile on… Read full post »

It's no coincidence a national election that had Sarah Palin at the top of a major party ticket produced something we've never seen before in American political history: nationwide protests by the vanquished party against the victorious just weeks after the winning side's champion took office.

Read full post »

Just as grandmasters know that controlling the center of the board is the key to winning chess, the primary objective in American politics has always been to get "freedom" on your side.

Convince the public that it's the other guy trying to impose his beliefs on you and you're nine-tenths… Read full post »

As Rush Limbaugh continues to shed corporate sponsors the way the Titanic shed lifeboats, Limbaugh's rear guard defenders have been busy trying to exculpate their hero by insisting his siege of invective against Sandra Fluke was no worse than the many sexist insults which liberals like Bill Maher hav… Read full post »

Whenever a conservative is the subject of national scorn -- as Rush Limbaugh is today for his leering Dirty Old Man attacks on a lone college student or former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was a few years ago for his cheerleading for Dixiecrat racism -- the  Right Wing Noise… Read full post »

Today, the most trenchant question one can ask about the Republican Party concerns whether the bigotries of its base make the once Grand Old Party unfit for democracy.  

But raise your hand if you knew that when the historic Civil Rights Act finally passed in 1964 a higher percentage… Read full post »