And darn good, too:

“More than anything, I like essays. Books of essays don’t sell very well – that’s what I’m told – but I buy them. I feel most things said in books nowadays could have been said better in a few thousand words. I’ve always been a magazine junkie for that reason.

Favorite essay collections: John Simon’s The Sheep from the Goats, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Victorian Minds, Anthony Daniels’ several collections, and I do love E. P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory, Marxist though Thompson was.”

Source: Anecdotal Evidence

Nikki Haley, won’t you please shut up, says the irrepressible C.

Is this hitting below the belt?

Spotlight, in which director Tom McCarthy recounts how the Boston Globe blew the lid off a simmering sex-abuse scandal in the Boston archdiocese, is a paradoxical product.

The film pays tribute to dogged investigative reporters, while itself blithely ignoring the standards to which those journalists adhered. Somehow it works.

Treating a historical episode as a drama, Spotlight successfully conveys the essence of the story: the frustrations and triumphs of the reporters, the enduring agony of abuse victims, and the flavor of life in a city dominated by disaffected Irish Catholics.

Source: Spotlight on the Vulnerable | Philip Lawler | First Things

This is refreshing, Pope Francis allowing problems with being one’s brother’s keeper.

Pope Francis warned Monday that the recent influx of migrants risked overwhelming European values and traditions, but said he was confident the continent could successfully integrate the newcomers.

Is the bloom off the rose of his getting down with the bad-smelling?

Gonna wash those Hillary emails right outa our hair.

If you haven’t been focused on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, it’s important to get up to speed on one of the nation’s most important scandals.

Source: Michigan’s Snyder facing nation’s most serious scandal | MSNBC

NFL has multiplied rules (and penalty flags), ditto U.S. as to rules and penalties.

This is what we can expect from the federal government as the legislature delegates more and more of its rulemaking to federal agencies and their all-too-human experts. Federal agencies enact 3,000 rules each year. Congress voted on 318 bills in 2015 and passed just 115 laws. The more rules we have, the more the people on the sidelines will mistake themselves as the main actors in the daily drama of American life.

Source: We Are All Bengals Now

Why not? And bon voyage.

While most of his policies and signature pieces of legislation have had dismal results, Obama has certainly redefined the office of the president. In many ways, his term could be identified as the Kardashian presidency — famous for being famous, but lacking entirely in substance.

Thus spoke Dan Hevia in LifeZette. Read the whole thing.

A case of making one’s point in a supposedly straight news story:

As an editor the word “only” is usually a red flag for me. It’s an easy way for a reporter to slip in his or her own opinion about whether a number is so high as to merit concern or so low as to not be worth fretting about. A fine example is this

The reporter just knows what’s going on but is not a columnist, so . . .

It has to do with how we are to view Islamic terrorism.

. . . the president persists in lumping the jihadis together with the nut cases and criminals in the other shootings.  His reason couldn’t be more obvious.  He cannot stand to acknowledge the Islamic basis of terrorism.

This is another case where he will do anything in his power to equalize it with other criminal or insane acts, make it banal. It cannot be the work — organized or not — of a highly evolved and specific seventh century ideology.

Even in the midst of proposing his morally narcissistic gun control regulations he cannot resist trying to transform jihadism into a simple common crime, sort of like a biker gang rumbling at a truck stop and subject, as John Kerry would have it, to local law enforcement.

It’s at best a blind spot, but that’s enough. It bespeaks his stilted imagination. He does not have a limber mind. Rather, his is parochial. Really a narrow-minded dude.

On the other hand, pay attention to this final tough analysis by the writer of this piece, Roger L. Simon:

This is not accidental.  Equating Fort Hood (once risibly called “workplace violence” — imagine the pressure put on the Pentagon for that) and San Bernardino with these other mass killings is a deliberate attempt to obscure an uncomfortable reality or, as Al Gore terms it, an inconvenient truth.

In an election year, the president seeks to convince the public, and himself, I wouldn’t be surprised, that nothing exceptional went on in Ft. Hood and San Bernardino.  It was just gun violence perpetrated by angry “folks.”

Everything is under control, if only we had a few more background checks.  But this is a man who denies the Islamic State is Islamic.   At least he’s consistent.  As Big Bird would have it, “All of these things are just like each other.”

Narrow-minded with focus, a devilish one from standpoint of national security.