Rabbits Against Magic addresses a current Sophomore-Dorm-At-2-AM plan with the only way this silly idea might be worthwhile. There seem to be a lot of SD@2 plans floating around on social media, and as much as I appreciate idealistic concepts, and as much as I favored lowering the voting age to 18, there are times […]
Matt Pritchett has a talent for reducing complexities to simple imagery. Journalistic neutrality is a polite fiction, but it works if you take it seriously, as we once did. Walter Cronkite is often held up as the model for broadcasters. When he took off his glasses in announcing the death of JFK, or when he […]
Patrick Chappatte calls the Trump election a wake-up call for Europe, which demands more analysis than a first reaction might suggest. I invoke Robert Burns in today’s headline, the full closing lines of To A Louse, On Seeing one on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church being “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To […]
Even Edison Lee (KFS), though far too young to vote, understands what’s at stake tomorrow. I remember the anticipation and sense of helplessness in 1968, when we were, as the song said, “old enough to kill, but not for voting.” Lowering the voting age to match the draft age made sense, though — technical point […]
How on earth did we get here? Robert Ariail notes the positive messages of past presidents, contrasting them with Trump’s declaration that we’ve become a “garbage can.” But how many times can you marvel over how, in the past, such-and-such an action would have ended a political career but those rules don’t apply to Donald […]
If we got nothing else out of the Vice-Presidential Debate, Non Sequitur (AMS) reminds us, it was JD Vance’s plaintive whine about the moderators not letting him derail things with outrageous whoppers. Still, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions: Lying is evil, but quietly tolerating lies greases the slope. Blatant dishonesty is […]
Morten Morland, who has been drawing covers for The Spectator magazine for the last 15 years, announced on Twitter that he was leaving the weekly magazine. On X/Twitter he wrote: It’s been a fabulous gig, working with great people. It’s been increasingly hard to fit the job in around my commitments for The Times, so […]
Austrian cartoonist Leopold Maurer (Cartoon Movement) provides an opening piece for today’s look at tonight’s debate. Note that he doesn’t predict that Trump will go off the rails. Rather, he depicts a perfectly calm, rational debate, but notes the underlying tensions that nearly every observer has also suggested. On the other hand, he shows the […]
Mannequin on the Moon (AMS) suggests a line that some major newspapers could adopt for the benefit of readers. I find it annoying when they list a headline on their opinion page that promises a challenging, interesting opinion, but doesn’t include the byline, so that you click on it and discover that, indeed, it’s from […]
I don’t know that voters have ever, as a whole, truly understood the issues being laid before them, but Gary Huck is right that it seems we’re in a period of militant, hostile ignorance we haven’t seen since the short-but-nasty rise of the Know-Nothings. It’s hard to know what to do about it, and not […]
Guy Parsons is being somewhat cynical here, but that’s not to say he’s wrong. There was a time, O Best Beloved, when people who loved the Earth recoiled from milk in plastic jugs, preferring to pick up the glass bottles that had to be brought back to the store. In fact, we were going to […]
There have been times when emigrating to Australia seemed like a good idea, but it doesn’t take a lot of reflection to recognize the futility. After all, Nevil Shute wrote On the Beach in 1957 and Stanley Kramer turned it into a movie in 1959 in which Australians waited for death to arrive in a […]
“Comic Strip of the Day” has posted every morning since February 6, 2010, and I’ve never done a “Best Of.” So offering a repeat after 5,263 fresh postings ought to seem significant. The best explanation of why I’m posting a rerun has to do with the rush to replace Joe Biden, and is explained in […]
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. — Winston Churchill Ann Telnaes declares wake-up time, and I like the substitution of an alarm clock for a sword, because we’re not sure of the outcome but it seems that the […]
In case you hadn’t heard, John Auchter reminds us that there is an election coming up, and he provides a summary of what is at stake. As Mose Allison explained, “All I want is plenty, but I will take more.” Maybe we should swap that out to replace “E Pluribus Unam,” given that we’re a […]