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On Gay Marriage, NY vs. NJ, and the Maplewood Bubble
Same-sex marriage is a basic civil rights issue, and the only acceptable outcome is full marriage equality. With every passing year America will bend further in that direction. Faster, please.
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Obama Swats the Gay Ping-Pong Ball
While I was at the Karen Armstrong lecture last night, President Barack “Marriage is between a man and a woman” Obama was walking back his position on one of the few issues where I have…
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Karen Armstrong Preaches Compassion in Morristown
I tried to bait the famous author into a partisan screed, but she was having none of it. “America is at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now our Nobel Peace Prize winning president is…
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Quick Take: VDH on Obama’s Afghanistan Speech
Victor Davis Hanson on last night’s presidential speech about Afghanistan: “We are on the hinge of history, unsure whether we swing to 1974 and give up, or swing back to 2006 and win.”
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You Go Girls! Saudi Women Risk Jail to Drive
But the 21st century’s most dangerous strain of barbarism has its center of gravity in a culture that produced 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers. A culture whose organizing figure consummated his “marriage” to…
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Lemme Get This Straight — BILL Clinton Thinks Weiner Should Resign?
Bill Clinton — he of the cigars and the perjury and the finger-wagging and the 14-month impeachment ordeal and the professed ignorance of the meaning of “is” — should leave it to his wife to…
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There Are a Billion Muslims — We Better Make Friends With Some of Them
America is at war with a global enemy motivated by Islam — but if Islam itself is the enemy, we’re all in trouble. Father Butler should be commended, not attacked, for working to build bridges…
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A Random Tweet That Caught My Eye
@iowahawkblog David Burge Did you know @RepWeiner uses the same brain when he’s in Congress? I don’t spend much time on Twitter — none, actually, although I flirted with it for a while — but…
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Strange Bedfellows: House GOP Leadership Has Obama’s Back in Libya Showdown With Kucinich
When Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama launched an air war against the Libyan regime without Congressional approval in March, he said he expected the action to last “days, not weeks.” In a post about…
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Sex Assault Charges Against IMF Head Reveal Hypocrisy on the Left
Even if the charges against DSK are never proved, the fact that the head of an intergovernmental agency that makes development loans to poor countries thinks it’s OK to stay in a $3,000 hotel suite…
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Playing Chicken With the Debt Ceiling
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says the government’s $14.3 trillion debt limit will be reached on August 2, which reminds me of a sure-fire gag line. Next time a pregnant woman tells you her baby is…
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Processing bin Laden’s Death in a Spiritual Context
The Rev. Bernard Poppe, my priest and friend, is more liberal than I am. (Ditto for 98% of his flock in the deep blue town of Maplewood, NJ.) So when Bernie started his sermon on…
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Props to the Prez for Getting bin Laden
Despite the risks, despite not being certain that bin Laden was even in the compound, Obama signed off on the mission. It could have ended badly, but it did not, and Obama deserves enormous credit…
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Teacher’s Beard Was A Reminder of Bin Laden in More Ways Than One
Looking like that, he would have been ill-advised to visit Pakistan.
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I Can’t Believe I’m Writing About Obama’s Birth Certificate
The predictability of the birthers’ reaction serves only to validate Obama’s refusal for two years to seek a waiver to permit the release of the long-form birth certificate.
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Why Libya But Not Syria? For That Matter, Why Iraq But Not Libya?
How do we justify allowing Assad to kill his own people after taking up arms against Gadhafi for doing the same thing? Syria — with its ties to Iran, its support for Hamas and Hezbollah,…
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Preparations for Easter at St. George’s
Much thanks to Maplewood Patch editor Mary Mann for taking the visual images from St. George’s Palm Sunday observance and turning it into a spritely and thorough announcement of the upcoming Easter services. Cranky political…
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The U.S. Debt Bubble Will Make Sub-Prime Mortgages Look Like a Picnic
Just how bad is the U.S. debt problem? Jim Manzi spells it out at The Corner: … we are sitting on the mother of all bubbles. Many, probably most, Americans anticipate a stream of consumption…
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In Search of A Thoughtful Liberal Economist
A Facebook friend said Dean Baker is “a fine, clear-thinking economist, [and] he’s also an uncannily good press critic.” Sounds great — I’ve been looking for a source for regular commentary from a left-leaning economist,…
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How to Tell When They Get Serious About Deficit Reduction
“The joke re the original $38.5 billion deal was that, in the time it took to negotiate it, we added as much again in new debt (we’re borrowing about $4 billion a day). … At…