On democracy as entertainment, plus serious things.
THE VACCINES are federal but the vaccinations are local. I was wondering how the two levels of government were meshing as I began to roll across the San Luis Valley to the community center in Saguache to get the first of my covid jabs, as the Brits call them. (We call them shots, but that …
IN PLACE of what print journalists refer to as President Trump’s lies, cable commenters have a less formal term. Trevor Noah of the Comedy Channel and Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo of CNN just say “bullshit.” If that sums up Trump’s usual performances, then press briefings and most interviews are bull sessions, with consequences I …
By LARRY JOSEPH CALLOWAY (C) The Wine Cave War that livened up the Democrat presidential debate a week before Christmas 2019 was timely because it was the season of giving, and the issue was gifts by wealthy people to political campaigns. News photos of the cool underground tasting room with its stone arches, crystal chandelier …
By LARRY JOSEPH CALLOWAY (C) Samantha Power’s new book, “The Education of an Idealist,” is an engaging personal memoir telling how she was formed by Ireland, acculturated by America and educated by a dangerous world. It begins with her love of her pub-dwelling father in Dublin and ends with her professional friendship with …
Christine Blasey Ford, a research psychologist, was a stranger in that strange land, the United States Senate, and so her impromptu response to the two most definitive questions by the Democrats was strange. When Sen. Feinstein asked how she was sure her sexual assailant was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Ford responded: “In the same way …
By LARRY JOSEPH CALLOWAY In late August of the saddest summer, speeding through the emptiness of Colorado’s South Park on the way to Denver to see “The Book of Mormon” and to attend my high school class reunion, I lightened up by writing. Not texting – that’s unlawful – but writing, which is OK if …
By Larry Joseph Calloway The networks were so unprepared for Donald Trump’s win that my election night switching caught only one panelist who could speak with authority for the key voters euphemistically called “white – no college degree.” He was J. D. Vance, the black-haired concise-speaking author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” an immediately personal story of …
The subdivider land rush on Western ranches in the 1970’s, stopped after a few years by environmentalists, left behind conglomerates of lot owners governed under covenants written by the subdividers. The rule of law — and influence of lawyers — elsewhere does not often apply to these non-profit corporations any more than democracy applies to …
Finally, some media attention to the thin legal basis for the NSA surveillance of telephone and e-mail communications. Stories today about the decision of U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon that the program is unconstitutional report his dismissive comments on Smith v. Maryland. The 34-year-old Supreme Court opinion says you don’t have an “expectation of …
In search of my Appalachian gene, lite. To baby-boomer outsiders, “Deliverance” was a scary movie, but then so was “The Milagro Beanfield War.”
