Film: Inside Llewyn Davis

Let me say right off that I  enjoyed this film, with one strong reservation. The Coen brothers know how to present their quirky charmers, and how to make us care what happens to them. Oscar Isaac plays a young folk singer in Greenwich Village, 1961, and the milieu is so perfectly rendered that I felt I could walk through […]

Read More

Obamacare: The Second War

We hardly expect to see obscenities in the Gray Lady, much less on the front page, but there it was, almost shimmering in its power: “redistribution”. Esteemed commentator John Harwood took up the challenge by describing how the Obama administration sidled around the dreaded word when selling the ACA to the public in 2010, and […]

Read More

The Model Apartment

Although Ben Brantley called this a “neglected masterwork”, by Don Margulies, it is seriously flawed, even if never less than interesting. This story of an elderly couple, Holocaust survivors, who retire to Florida but find that they cannot escape the legacy of that horrific experience, especially in how it affected their adult, mentally disturbed daughter, […]

Read More

Their Goal: President Empty

   This latest shootdown in the Senate seems to consolidate – at least in my own mind – a certain dynamic with regard to this administration that goes beyond the cover story.  Granted, any new  regulation of firearms has uncertain prospects. But everything I’ve heard about the latest campaign was different. There seemed to be a […]

Read More

Kill This Powergrab Project

   This past Sunday, (9/24/12) Robert Pear reported this in the NYTimes: the Obama administration is planning a pilot project to distribute questionnaires in hospitals and doctors’ offices for patients to report “medical mistakes”.  These would then be sent to research centers for analysis and, when sufficiently transformed into pure data, forwarded to the White […]

Read More