May 2011

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 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 [...]

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 [...]