Ghulf Genes

By no means every four years but every now and ten, I can’t help but to ponder what politics might be like in the United States if we had a...

An interesting article in The American Conservative (Nov/Dec 2014), titled “‘Duck Dynasty’ vs Dante,” reminded me again that no really dec...

In the case of McCutchem et al vs Federal Election Commission , a case decided last Wednesday, the Supreme Court, voting 5-4, decided that ...

It strikes me as quite implausible to imagine that people delayed an hour or more because a bridge is closed would reason as follows:  “Thi...

News comes this morning that the House and Senate negotiators have agreed on a budget that will be good enough until September 2015. So we ...

What was the last crisis all about—and when was it exactly? Quickly now, spit it out. When was the last Winterstorm Warning? Give me the da...

If we take a large number of actions and classify them as arbitrary and as rational, and let us say that the rational exceed 50 percent, the...

Might it be that as we age time compresses, as it were? What for the young seems ages ago is for the old but yesterday. This observation is...

An early trip to Kroger this morning (no milk, no pudding), the lovely weather, and something in the air—was it an absence of tension?—made ...

We are not, like Britain, a parliamentary democracy. There a national election decides the party that will really take power, and its leade...

An automated call came yesterday from Clint Eastwood. Brigitte alertly grasped the evident intent. She put the phone down on an empty chair ...

Watching the political campaigns evolve, it occurred to me that the striving for a simple message is very good in politics—whereas striving...

One knows, of course, that war will be the product of the political intercourse of governments and peoples; but one is accustomed to think t...

The endless electioneering battle reminded me that I have no memories of elections taking place in my childhood in Hungary. To be sure, I ar...

My attempt is to give a suitable name to a contradictory tendency. It is contradictory to aim for Virtuous Vice, Dirty Cleanliness, Clear M...

Kaleidoscopes produce their beautiful images by causing bits of colored glass to move about in a restricted field. The source of their movem...

My grasp of democratic politics is virtually nil, and of such politics in Greece and Italy even weaker. But from a kind of child’s perspecti...

The nation’s editorial, headline, and slogan-forming powers overnight created a new name for what began as the Wall Street Protest. That nam...

The female courted is the party’s hard core constituency, that is to say the female “in heat.” The candidates engage in ritual combat, its r...

Since 1790 U.S. presidents gave a State of the Union report—and no response from any opposition followed. For much of our history, these rep...