Editor\'s Essays Articles

It is really quite clever.
Within hours, we may have an unofficial read on whether plastic bag manufacturers and their allies have gathered enough signatures to qualify for a ballot measure in November 2016 to defeat the pretty silly plastic bag ban. Six months from Thursday, the prohibition is to go into effective statewide, testimony to a lightweight Legislature and even less attentive governor. The good news for normal consumers is that …

What do Jews do on Christmas Day? Our once a year invasion of Chinatown got under way in late morning, as it has every year since we were married. This time, however, with the dramatic change in Diane’s health, we won’t do the window shopping that was richly embedded in our excursion schedule.

What would you do if, heaven forbid, you found yourself tucked into a foxhole beside the two most obsequious public figures in America, Sony pictures chief Amy Pascal and President Obama? Hands up, I presume.

First in a series. In the days since the Ferguson grand jury returned its verdict on hulking bad guy Mike Brown, aggrieved liberals have engaged so industriously in hand-wringing in their desperate search for a culprit not named Brown, they have not had time to cleanse their 10 digits. They contend that Mr. Brown is not at fault. Sure, he robbed a store. Sure, he terrorized a young cop 50 percent his size. But he is blameless. He grew up poor and black in a poor black community. Poverty, baby, is the villain’s name. How can the eternal American political circle that contends poverty directly causes crime be broken?

What has happened to the mayor? Is the philosophy on which she built her successful career in jeopardy? I am not sure why the mayor is trying so industriously to …

Twenty days after reeling Rolling Stone magazine broke the made-up story of the delusional girl at the University of Virginia who was raped by seven fictional men, it is hilarious to study the responses of liberals, female and male feminists. They believe. My God, do they believe. Without exception among prominent liberal personalities, they know the rape happened. Because. Well, because a girl with …

Yesterday’s grand jury decision in the death of Eric Garner of Staten Island is a world more intriguing than the yawningly phony Mike Brown kerfuffel. We watched the video repeatedly at home last evening. At a glance – not after consideration – it appeared Mr. Garner was bullied to his death, surrounded as he was by NYPD cops. At a glance, he engenders sympathy because the cops out-number him about 5-to-1, unlike the arrogant Mike Brown who played chicken with a cop.

Not long after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Marin Luther King, with his stinging reminders of America’s slavery legacy causing their stomachs to morph into year-old jelly, the most influential of media arbiters sank to their knees. With the agreeability of a chap about to take a seat in the nearest electric chair, they bowed their heads and slid into a sensitive – nay, forced — decision.

The quietest truth to slowly leak out of Ferguson this week is that the two-thirds black community was wired to explode, regardless of the grand jury decision. The nationwide protests were as meticulously, frantically planned as a Broadway show on life support. The “amazement” and “disappointment” that the entire left-wing choir chirped was as phony as their artificial sadness.

Surely the 95 percent of normal black people have been as disgusted this week as I at witnessing 200 gruesomely disfigured black kids, all school dropouts I would wager, romp about Ferguson as if their minders were on vacation. Drugs, booze and a lifetime lack of love at home have smushed their minds into mushroom salad.