Thursday, September 6, 2012
“Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through; first from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do?” (Alan Jay Lerner, My Fair Lady)
I’m hearing a lot of Republicans, mostly younger ones who didn’t pay attention in civics class, flouting this passage from the United States Constitution these days:
“The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” (Article IV Section 4; italics mine)
Now, a lot of civically ignorant Tea Partiers have asserted this …
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Friday, July 8, 2011
Most historians agree that Marie Antoinette never actually said “let them eat cake” when informed that the people had no bread. It’s just one of a hundred phrases credited to individuals who never said them, like “Elementary, my dear Watson,” (which Sherlock Holmes never said, at least in any of the canonical Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle) or “Just the facts, ma’am,” which Jack Webb never said on Dragnet. But the lessons of the French Revolution of 1789 – a rebellion inspired by our own insurrection against King George III of England started three years earlier – still echo today.
Today America stands on the brink of a new French Revolution, as – let’s face it – America …
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Saturday, March 12, 2011
I woke yesterday morning to headlines that were nothing short of apocalyptic. The pictures coming out of Japan look like something out of a Roland Emmerich movie, and they were reporting that in a couple of hours the same was going to hit the West Coast. The tsunami apparently lost a good bit of its energy in its journey across the Pacific (a little short of 5,000 miles, according to Google Earth). While I am not a praying man, I am trying to send some good vibrations (probably a poor choice of words) to our suffering friends in Japan. At least we’ve both put that little bit of nastiness from 1941-1945 behind us.
Before I move on to …
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