Category: Charlatans and Shills

During my law-enforcement career I responded to a lot—and I really do mean a surprising number—of fights, stabbings, and at least one shooting, at quinceanera celebrations. You can imagine the scene: tables overturned, chairs flying, lots of shrieking and weeping and terrified children hiding behind the DJ table. The big question, after all of the ...

Our American obsession with celebrity is as interesting as it is potentially dangerous. It’s also hard to dislodge, as war correspondent George Weller discovered when he defied McArthur’s ban on travel to Nagasaki after the Army Air Corps detonated Fat Man, a 21 kiloton nuclear weapon, over the city. Nearly 1000 allied POW’s were living ...

If there was ever a time to examine the wisdom and efficacy of attempting to govern 320 million people as a single entity, maybe now is it. The GOP’s tax bill came in at 479 pages. It’s a safe bet that not one single professional representative—on either side of the aisle–has read the bill in ...

The first True Bill in the big collusion extravaganza has finally been handed down. Early Monday morning, in a showbiz fail, Paul Manafort, former chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign, made a strangely unattended perp-walk with his lawyer into the FBI’s Washington D.C. field office. Manafort, who was clearly the first chair in a sloppy money-laundering ...

Trigger Warning: I am about to make light, where making light is due, of some of the more sensitive topics currently sucking up so much of our collective bandwidth. But before you remember, suddenly, that time I called you “sweetheart”, or brushed your bosom, or inappropriately sang the old schoolyard chanty “Chinese, Japanese, Dirty Knees, ...

A few days ago I happened to be in the grocery store, buying some stuff to nibble on during the American League Championship Series, when I noticed a young man—I’m in a post-season mood so I’m going to call him Billy Martin–re-stocking the older fruits and vegetables. He was doing a tidy, efficient, job of ...

In the wake of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s spectacular mid-air explosion, the unholy relationship between Hollywood money and obsequious political ambition has never been more transparent. Sure, a few months ago we were all treated to the infamous “Grab’em by the pussy” bus tape, which was a window into President Trump’s narcissism, but Weinstein & ...

The biggest problem with the NFL isn’t the mostly meaningless and entirely self-congratulatory fad of anthem protests. The biggest problem with the NFL is that the product is becoming unwatchable. A football game lasts, on average, about 3.5 hours. A prime time game between two teams with anything on the line can last even longer. ...

We like to eat out. We don’t think of ourselves as, say, Truman Capote and Joanne Carson dining at La Côte Basque, but we do enjoy the occasional easy weekend brunch in town, where we often bump into people we know, and value, and spend a few minutes catching up. And really, that’s all we ...