"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
In the news
Institutionally, the military services have never forgotten the crippling constraints imposed upon the conduct of the air war in Vietnam: Target lists were reviewed at the White House in the informal atmosphere of the Tuesday lunch, attended principally by President Johnson, his press secretary, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the President’s special assistant for national […]
I am the Nancy Grace of celebrity plane wrecks. When I saw the first photos of actor Harrison Ford’s crashed airplane on the golf course in Santa Monica, I immediately zeroed in on the propeller. Probably only someone trained as an aircraft accident investigator would do that. I am such a someone, and that is what […]
The dogs had their teeth cleaned Tuesday. You who do not have dogs might not know what a big deal this is. Antibiotics and anesthesia, and in Maxie’s case more antibiotics after, because in addition to the cleaning she had to have a couple of rotten teeth extracted. The girls were just coming out of anesthesia when […]
After all, I’m not a scientist. Why are Republicans still fixated on President Obama’s otherness? Especially now, when Obama’s in the final year-and-a-half of his final term in office, soon to join the ranks of former presidents? You’d think after Obama decisively won his second election, and after it became clear the threat of impeachment […]
Many months ago I said I’d monitor news coverage of the trials of the 11 motorcyclists arrested after a videotaped beating of a motorist in New York City. I believed then, and believe now, that the motorist did something to start the fight, but unfortunately whatever happened to set things in motion was not videotaped. I hoped that once the […]
AWAG. No, it doesn’t stand for Atheist With a Gun. It stands for Asshole With a Gun.
I’ve been a devoted but critical fan of Jon Stewart. For all the laughs, I thought he pulled more punches than he landed, particularly when he’d exchange softball pleasantries with agents of evil like John Yoo and Mike Huckabee. I scratched my head over the “Rally to Restore Sanity” he and Stephen Colbert put on in Washington DC a couple of years […]
Within a few hours of Wednesday’s TransAsia Airways crash in Taiwan something slipped out about the plane losing power on both engines when in fact only one engine had failed, and I thought “Uh oh, they shut down the wrong engine.” Such a thing is not unknown, after all. Now, as more information is coming in, that’s increasingly […]