Year: 2014

It seems as if, everywhere you turn these days, there are studies claiming to show that America has lost its upward mobility for people born in the lower socioeconomic levels. But there is a sharp difference between upward “mobility,” defined as an opportunity to rise, and mobility defined as actually having risen. That distinction is […]

I don’t have to explain to anyone how television is much more risqué, with some programs being downright lewd, than it was decades ago. But I want to tell you about something that can change the course of values in television and movies. Once upon a time, about as edgy as it got was Barbara […]

Any freedom-loving person would be outraged at the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to inject itself into monitoring the practices of print and broadcast media organizations, but the outrage came almost exclusively from conservatives, which is highly instructive. But liberals and conservatives are on such different planets that they don’t even agree that this […]

It is a happy conceit in the climate change community that true believers are sophisticated, fact-based practitioners of science and that skeptics essentially are a bunch of superstitious nitwits who refuse to respect the — all bow — climate change consensus. If that were true, you would expect the science-loving know-it-alls to welcome opportunities to […]

On March 31, 2011, the opening day of baseball at Dodger Stadium, four San Francisco Giants fans, all paramedics, were there to cheer on their team.   As they left the stadium, in the parking lot, one of them, Bryan Stow, was attacked by a Dodger fan, who hit him so suddenly and with such […]

Though you wouldn’t necessarily know it based on news coverage, the United States in the reign of President Barack Obama is enduring the most prolonged period of slow growth and high unemployment since World War II. The president asserts that he saved us from another Great Depression, which, like his claim that the stimulus would […]

After much criticism from conservative quarters, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has decided, at least for now, to withdraw plans for its proposed study of how media organizations gather and report news. The expressed goal of the survey was to determine if the “critical information needs” of the public are being met. In making the […]

Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said that all politics is local. And it mostly was, in his time: He was first elected to the Massachusetts legislature’s lower house in 1936 and became its speaker in 1949, and was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1952 and became its speaker in 1977. […]