The only silver lining anywhere in all of this is that at least now whenever there’s an article about the Duggars and people pile on with the requisite (and entirely legitimate) derision and outrage, there isn’t some smug little prig chiming in sooner or later with some smarmy variation on, “It’s their choice, so shut…

As Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen once observed, “A million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

Here I must stand up in half-hearted defense of white men—at least the vast, teeming majority of them who are nearly as wretched and as dispossessed as the people they’ve been trained to hate, who have never run the world, who have never been rich and never will be, and who, on the whole, have no power at all beyond…

I wouldn’t bet on a US higher education being the smart choice for the kid four years from now.

At some point in a long life I read a book that included a description of the smells at an aristocratic London ball in the earliest years of the 20th century.

How the fuck do they do it? Easy. Since 1973, when —less than a year after the corrupt racist Republican thug Nixon routed McGovern in the presidential election leaving Democrats in panic and disarray—the US Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Roe v Wade, these bastards on the uber-right have had no real, serious,…

These people (cops) tend toward violence. They display a considerably higher rate of domestic abuse than the rest of us—nearly double the national rate. They spend a lot of quality down time beating up their significant others and their kids, frequently to the point of intervention and hospitalization.

You knew they would.

A friend of mine remembers being told by her mother at some point in early adolescence, “You’ll never be pretty. It’s important for someone who looks like you to keep yourself neat and tidy, and wear the right colors.”

Nearly 60 years ago a parochial school in Chicago, Our Lady of the Angels, burned to the ground. More than 90 children died in the blaze, along with three nuns. Dozens of others escaped with injuries ranging from minor bumps and bruises to major, devastating burns.

If Republicans are going to use their bizarre “zero-risk” principle on Syrian refugees, then we should probably demand that it be applied to anti-choice activists as well.

In my family, it was considered a “mixed marriage” when my Presbyterian grandfather married my Episcopalian grandmother, so they were definitely horrified in a delicate, WASPy, understated kind of a way, back in the 1930s, when their daughter, my mother, briefly and daringly dated an Italian-American (second…

I actually did that once. I have to admit I was on drugs at the time. Bathroom floor got really clean, too. The relevance here, I guess, is that I’d have to be on drugs before I’d go to a Trump rally. Really, really good drugs.

There’s nothing that says Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus, like having a fucking public tantrum over the religious neutrality of a goddamn cup.

And yet 9/11, the lies that got us into disastrous and destabilizing (although highly profitable for investors) wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, blatant war-profiteering by members of the Bush administration, Katrina, and the spectacular collapse of the global economy on Bush’s watch—all these (and more) are still not…

The kids who slimed that little boy on Facebook with all manner of really cheap and cruel racist “gags” were all relatively upscale 20-somethings (granted, they were from Georgia, but still...). So racism being generational in this sad country, something that will fade away as toxic old white folks drop off their…

Because any acknowledgment of any flaw, from our stark and heartbreaking racial reality to workers’ rights to environmental issues, creates an opening for left-leaning politicians (or even simply just sanity-leaning politicians) to propose solutions.

Oh my sweet Lord this dog is adorable.

Her audience consists of a lot of angry old men married to even angrier old women, plus a handful of tragic boys who aspire to be frat boys and jocks but fall short of the requisite qualifications. For these men, male identity is indeed a fragile and wounded thing, and their fantasy lives are filled to the brim with…

I just hope the Democrats aren’t stupid enough to waste so much glee on Trump that when the Republicans pick one of their subtler monsters, like the Kochs’ favorite Scott Walker, they have cried “wolf” so often that nobody notices a real wolf slavering and slinking into power.