(Source: Pete Souza) I am not against excellence. I just think it’s over-rated as an aspiration. In fact, I think aspiration itself may be over-rated. When I see excellence—when I’m competent to recognize it (and in many fields, like science and opera, I am not)—it is thrilling and heartening, as a friend once said, to […]

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(Illustration: Edel Rodriguez) July 23 was the kind of day journalists who work for the brash New York tabloids—and their increasingly tough internet and cable TV competitors—live for. Disgraced-congressman-turned-mayoral-frontrunner Anthony Weiner had called a late-afternoon news conference at a vacant office in Chelsea and confirmed reports that he had continued to send lewd photos of […]

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(Sheldon Adelson | Cource: Wikipedia) Fifty years ago, Americans lived in a society that had been growing—and had become—much more equal. In 1963, of every $100 in personal income, less than $10 went to the nation’s richest 1 percent. Americans today live in a land much more unequal. The nation’s top 1 percent are taking […]

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Whatever your preference in the New York mayoralty, you’ve been treated in the past 24 hours to a textbook takedown of Bill De Blasio by the paper of record. Whether as suspected the Times, like the Washington Post, is sold soon for peanuts won’t matter in the upcoming Democratic primary, as the newspaper weighed in […]

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(Source: Jeff Malet, maletphoto.com) If there is a story that is not news but a distraction, it is the “Oh, Canada” revelation that Ted Cruz is a citizen of Canadian as well as a citizen of the United States. Unsurprisingly, Cruz has renounced his Canadian citizenship. If there is any news value in this story, […]

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