No surprise whatsoever here: Egypt’s president on Thursday issued constitutional amendments that placed him above judicial oversight and ordered the retrial of Hosni Mubarak for the killing of protesters in last year’s uprising. Mohammed Morsi also decreed immunity for the … Continue reading →
I’ve been thinking about this poem lately. It’s really a bleak work (and very modern, despite the year it was written, which was probably around 1851). The subject is the loss of faith. Not a personal loss of faith, but … Continue reading →
Remember back to when the fatwa on Salman Rushdie seemed a strange and unfathomable aberration? Never such innocence again.
Continue reading →Let me see if I’ve got this straight: A privately produced and amateurish anti-Islam film made by expat Coptic Christians in the US and distributed on YouTube is said to spark violent protests in Cairo. The US Embassy there apologies … Continue reading →
What are the odds of this? From Mia Farrow’s autobiography, What Falls Away: My mother [actress Maureen O’Sullivan], her father’s favorite, went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton. She hated it. They had to wear vests in … Continue reading →
Of all the things I saw at the convention, the most potentially powerful was the series of presentations about Romney’s good deeds. It was both curious and moving, and unprecedented (at least in my memory) for an introduction to a … Continue reading →
…whether this article, which I found at Drudge, is reporting the truth. If it is, however, that would be a very ominous sign in Egypt. On the other hand, ye olde blood libel is alive and well and living in … Continue reading →
I hadn’t thought of this before, but it’s an interesting point that Peter Shrag makes: For the first time in the 236-year history of the Republic, no one on either presidential ticket belongs to the once-prototypical American group, the White … Continue reading →
“Authentically nice politician”—is that a double oxymoron? Not according to Sven Wilson, whose article on the subject was brought to my attention by a reader. I’m in nearly complete agreement with what he says here: Romney has, as we all … Continue reading →
There’s been an email going around alleging that Muslims will be exempt from the Obamacare tax/mandate. It’s not true, at least at the moment, but it stands a remote possibility of becoming true. The facts are here and here, and … Continue reading →
In the ever-expanding interests of diversity in academia and elsewhere, we’ve hit a new high (that is, low): Touting a move to make its faculty more diverse, CUNY administrators have broken out Jews into a separate minority group: “White/Jewish.” CUNY … Continue reading →
When Obama was nominated and elected, one of the big deals was that he was the first African-American in that position. And that really was a big deal, given our racial history, and despite the fact that his black ancestry … Continue reading →