Unca Darrell

AUGUST 30 / "Ups and downs," the Houston Chronicle's . . .

. . . Saturday editorial page's odds 'n' ends column, operates as a relief valve of sorts. Pressure builds all week as the opinionators try -- and they are trying -- to dampen the snottiness that has marked their work of recent years. But on Saturdays, the adult leaves the room and the staff's inner jerk lunges for the keyboard, producing, for instance, this:

AUGUST 27 / Friends are hawking two tickets to . . .

. . . Paul McCartney's October 2 Lubbock concert, expected to be a big Buddy Holly lovefest.

Interested? Email me at . . . 

AUGUST 25 / Unca D gets grief from time to time about . . .

. . . using old-fashioned, politically incorrect words such as "civilization" and "barbarism." 

"Civilization" is still out of good odor these days, but "barbarism" and "barbarian" . . .  

AUGUST 22 / Roger Simon on the real problem in Ferguson

THE GREAT SOCIETY. There, I've said it. The Great Society, which I voted for and supported from the bottom of my heart, is the villain behind Ferguson. Ferguson is the Great Society writ large because the Great Society . . .

AUGUST 21 / How lonely the Houston Chronicle . . .

. . . finds itself on the Perry indictment. Our local newspaper, which hates Rick Perry the way MSNBC hates Fox News, is all in. String'im up! 

Note to reader: This blog post busted out of the corral before I had finished working it. Check back later. I'll finish it when I can. DDH 

But other progressive and liberal newspapers -- USA Today, the Washington Post, even the New York Times -- and honest liberals all across the fruited plain are . . . 

AUGUST 20 / The honest liberals at the Washington Post admit we're going broke

[THE] CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET Office (CBO) [has] rained on this bipartisan parade [celebrating recent good news about the federal budget]. In its latest long-term budget projection, the country's arbiter of all things fiscal warned that . . .

AUGUST 19 / "Foreign Policy" flirts with declinism

MANY FOREIGN POLICY experts seem to believe that retaining American primacy is largely a matter of will -- of how America chooses to exert its power abroad. Even President Obama, more often accused of being a prophet of decline than a booster of America's future, recently asserted that the United States "has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world." The question, he continued, is "not whether America will lead, but how we will lead.

But . . .

 

AUGUST 16 / "The Tempest" (1611) is believe to be . . .

. . . the last play Shakespeare wrote alone. I've always heard that it contained verses that sounded a lot like the author's farewell to the theater, his valedictory. After seeing it for the first time last week, I'm sold. Speaking through the voice of Prospero, Mr. Shakespeare, it seems to me, says . . .

AUGUST 15 / Joseph Epstein on Ferguson, Missouri

The lead item on much television news since the weekend has been the shooting in Ferguson, Mo. . . . of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer. On display was what has now become the fairly standard response in these matters: . . .

AUGUST 14 / UPDATED: As I write, President Barack Hussein Obama's . . .

. . . job approval is below 41 percent at Real Clear Politics, Unca D's polling authority of choice -- flawed perhaps, but consistent, and a good source for smoothing out the bumps and seeing trends. 

Below 41 percent is not very good, of course, but that the real story of the president's job-approval rollercoaster is . . .