This is the Year of Living Embarrassingly. Just ask Charlie Sheen. From Bin Laden’s blue (and I don’t mean ray) movie collection to Arnold’s revelation that, despite immigrating to the US more than 40 years ago, he has maintained European mores regarding domestic retainers, the famous are wallowing in public scandal. Unlike IMF chief Dominique [...]

(Sung to the tune of Jimmy Dean’s “Big John”) Ev’ry day on the set you could see him arrive He stood six foot tall and weighed 285 Kinda broad in his jowls and as wide at the brow Everybody knew he favored the chow, Big Newt Literati said he charged too much to his card [...]

My penpal Sue was back in town and that means several things – good conversation, laughs, good food, and jazz or Broadway. This time Sue, her husband, and their daughters invited me to join them at the Jazz at Lincoln Center to see Chick Corea with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. [...]

Harmon Killebrew has died, and one item that strikes me in his obituary is how far he has slipped down baseball’s all-time homerun list: number 11. I don’t remember Killebrew’s actual playing days, as they were before my time, but my friends and I used to have a “Hall of Fame” statistics-based league we ran [...]

It’s no great surprise that commandos who killed Osama Bin Laden report the dead terrorist had a considerable stash of pornography at his compound. Recall that some of the September 11 hijackers spent one of their last nights receiving lap dances at the Pink Pony strip club. And lemon-sucking-faced Mohammed Atta evidenced in his last [...]

It would be tempting to call 82-year-old Noam Chomsky a senile old dolt, but the word “senile” connotes an age-related deterioration of one’s faculties. To deteriorate, however, a mind must have at one time shown superior cognitive abilities. Although in fairness Chomsky’s work in linguistics indicates a specialized if arcane brilliance, his political thinking has [...]

I was never really a fan of John (Cougar) Mellencamp, even when he first became popular and before he became way politically left. To me his music is bland and just not interesting–someone I will change the dial when it plays on the radio, without necessarily hating it. He used to be compared with Springsteen, [...]

During the eight years of the Bush presidency, Republicans welcomed the return of executive power…and then some. Democrats, on the other hand, were rueful and chafed each time President Bush would make a remark about how much easier it would be to govern in a dictatorship. True conservatives warned that the unfettered, unilateral executive would [...]

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Did he even matter anymore, and more importantly, where do we–the United States–go from here? That is. can we declare victory in the War on Terror, or is terrorism, like the poor, something we will now have with us always?

As events continue to head south for the Obama presidency, the dilettante-in-chief reveals more and more frequently that the bemused and ingratiating smile of the campaign–so much in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s frozen-faced seriousness–masked a petulant and angry egoist. Perhaps the first whiff of the Big 0′s ego problem occurred when he lamented all that [...]

As noted previously on this blog, it is necessary to give Thomas Friedman some credit for his ability to provide other writers with such ample lampoon-worthy content: never have so many owed so much to so little. In contrast to Waylon Jennings–who used to sing about something called the Wurlitzer Prize in his mournful hit [...]

In the 1979 film “The China Syndrome,” Jack Godell–played in a deservedly Oscar-nominated performance by Jack Lemmon–barricades himself inside a nuclear plant control room because company owners will not respond to his findings that the plant has bad pipes and will, in the event of a scram (emergency shut down) become unstable. The utility’s president, [...]

The 2010 census reveals a human migration that is worse in significant ways than the infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930s and Great Depression. Immortalized in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and songs like “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” by Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl encapsulated the overall trend of [...]

Have you ever seen this picture of Rachel Corrie burning a flag before? If not, you also probably don’t know who Corrie was. She was a 23-year-old woman who was crushed to death eight years ago by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to block its path. Afterward when the photo above came out and some [...]

A first-term American President lacking in foreign-policy experience commits American forces to a civil war on the coast of Africa on an ostensibly humanitarian UN-directed mission of uncertain aims with an esoteric and incomprehensible code name: We’ve been here before, Somalia, 1993. Then it was Operation Gothic Serpent, now it’s Operation Odyssey Dawn.

“This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” Barack Obama may be telling Nicolas Sarkozy as he reads the latest reports from Libya: Hundreds of rebels fled Ras Lanuf Wednesday morning as pro-Kadhafi soldiers used tanks and heavy artillery to seize the port city. Some of them called on France to bomb their opponents [...]