Steve

This week Jane Mayer interviewed CIA Chief Leon Panetta in The New Yorker.  The mainstream press highlighted Panetta’s comment about Cheney’s dire predictions: “I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue,” he told me. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if … Read more

Bob Barr on Troy Davis.  A death penalty supporter, ex-Congressman Barr lives to regret a bill he co-wrote that blocks appeals and gets down to the killing. Under this law courts are refusing to hear witnesses who now recant their testimony.  In this recent Times column he mourns the foolish application of this bill in … Read more

The last days we and the world have been trying to digest the Obama Cairo Speech. Here’s my two and a half cents. I think it’s been so hard for people to make out what happened because he did so many things they’d never in their lives seen before.  Primarily, I think, it was the … Read more

. The tragic assassination of Dr. George Tiller in a Wichita, Kansas church on Sunday has caused much soul-searching and the open discussion about how we speak to each other in this country.  No one has articulated this better than Frank Schaeffer, author of “Crazy for God”. A former member of the Christian Right and … Read more