his vorpal sword

Was the day that my first piece appeared in print. I have not been out of it since.

I won’t go into long details about the career since then. (I was particularly obtuse and didn’t fully commit to writing as a profession until the winter of 1975, but that’s another story.)

But my career begins sitting on the grass of the Brown-Lupton Student Center.

On the lower left, or the Northwest corner. There were none of those nasty chiggers that we non-native Texans only found out about the hard way. It was a lovely warm autumn afternoon in the sun. Continue reading →

It seems that the Great Powers have finally caught up with me. I even heard an Indian on NPR talking about India landing on the same spot where the Russians crashed yesterday.

I wrote these two connected posts on 14 NOVEMBER 2009 and  29 December 2005, respectively.

Playing Lunar Catch Up

14 NOVEMBER 2009 · 5:36 PM

Or is that “catsup”?

NASA found significant and meaningful amounts of water on the moon in the “bombing” of the South Pole a couple months back.

Navy: South Polar ice marked in blue

OK, the Huffington Post guy kind of got it: Continue reading →

Ex-federal judge and prominent conservative: ‘There is no Republican Party’
Shawna Mizelle / CNN —  J. Michael Luttig, a conservative retired federal judge and key adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence, declared on Wednesday that “there is no Republican Party” …

Last weekend, the fire curtain descended across American polity.

A safety curtain (or fire curtain in America) is a passive fire protection feature used in large proscenium theatres.   (Wikipedia)

The inhabitants of GOP-World were on one side, and the rest of us are on the other. There is no middle ground.

How we came to this sad state of affairs is a story in itself, and was the subject of this blog from 2006 until 2014, when I realized that there was no way to stop what was coming. That’s when I retired from day to day blogging: Continue reading →

Strange how we keep coming back around to the same weird places in history. This is from the Monday, July 6, 1863 edition of The Richmond Daily Dispatch — one of the most influential Southern papers of the Civil War.

Continue reading →

As I write this, it’s May 23, with perhaps a month less in the Supreme Court’s season.

The court has taken no interest in the massive corruption scandal brewing around it, but, worse, a HUGE number of cases remain unresolved.  26 cases have been resolved, but 36 cases remain. We have never seen anything like this.

And given SCOTUS’ penchant for destroying the fabric of American society, this has to be troubling.

May 25: SCOTUS Guts clean water protections. Continue reading →

We were both National Merit Scholars in the same year, along with Bill Gates. It’s our 50th high school reunion. We both graduated between the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes when Secretariat won the Triple Crown. I went into writing, you went into law. So, please take some advice from a contemporary:

This ain’t gonna get better. It’s going to metastasize.

Everyone but a partisan Republican knows that a Supreme Court Justice accepting a half-million dollar vacation from a party with issues before the court is wrong. Prima facie.

Quid pro quo doesn’t matter. It has the appearance of corruption and Caesar’s wife must be BEYOND reproach.

Continue reading →

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, famously said: “Accuse the other side of that which you yourself are guilty.”

Or, allegedly said. Various sites claim that this is a misattribution of

“The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing,” which Goebbels said at a 1934 Nuremberg rally.

All of which is to say, that even toxic and/or homicidal mendacity covers itself with more mendacity. Case in point, TownHall‘s Kurt Schlichter in his Goebbelseque essay (and multiple book plug),

Are We Looking At Another Civil War?
Kurt Schlichter / Townhall

Consider the logic of the left and it’s no wonder that many people are considering the unspeakable – whether America will devolve into actual violent conflict.  But I dare speak about it at length in my brand-new book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America …

The parallels to Goebbels’ questionable quote are so striking as to actually embrace “identical.” Continue reading →

This is going to be one of my shorter posts.

Why? Because if you’ve been paying attention to facts, you won’t need much in the way of evidence. If, however, you are inured to facts, and watch FOX News to upgrade and strengthen your prejudices, what on Earth are you doing here? [Shoo! Decent people don’t need to see you.]

Here’s the premise: Every decision made in the last term (and many of the prior terms) are what is termed in law as “the poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree.” Continue reading →

The day we’d dreaded was coming — was this one.  This was the day that in the ideology of ivory tower “conservatives” imaginary babies trumped actual women — whose lives were in peril in so many ways.

And, as noted in the dissent, there was NO COMPELLING reason to do it. The five right-wing ideologues did it because they COULD do it. (So much for the ‘limited decisions” that have characterized the modern era — if they ask for a stone, give them a quarry; if they ask for a fish, give them the ocean.)

Because each and every justice involved was hand-picked for this very reason. Continue reading →