First of all, Colman McCarthy is funny. Every time he gets on the phone with me, he always asks, “Hey Jim, how are those orange trees doing in your backyard?” Colman is a philosopher: “Warmaking doesn’t stop warmaking. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago.” Colman is a passionate pacifist who believes in fighting fire with… water. “Since...

You’re sitting in the front row of a sold out conference for self-help guru Tony Robbins, and here it comes, Ba-Bam!: “Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.” According to publisher Simon and Schuster, minister and author Norman Vincent Peale’s best selling book, The Power of Positive Thinking stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for...

It’s hard to believe that the 2012 presidential campaign is at an end… almost. What will “likely voters” do without all those hard-hitting, rhetoric-flailing, endless campaign ads? According toOpenSecrets.org, the total spent by both campaigns is reported to be almost $2 billion, and that doesn’t include money spent by PACs and Super PACs. After all the negative campaigning, what we...

This image along with Governor Chris Christie’s words of praise for President Obama’s actions concerning disaster-struck New Jersey have been played and replayed in video and news outlets for the last three days “The president has been all over this and he deserves great credit,” Christie said. “I’ve been on the phone with him, like I said, yesterday, personally, three...

One day a fool and a statesman were featured on a television broadcast. While the fool had been featured on many, manybroadcasts over the last year, the statesman – ever mindful of thinking before speaking – chose to stay out of the spotlight. The fool carefully primed the media pump by telling many,many people – especially Fox News’s FOX & Friends – about a...

Who knew the legendary star of screen and Republican conventions was into the great ethical conundrums of the universe! In the years that Dr. Sara Anson Vaux taught religion at Northwestern University, never once did she consider that underneath Clint Eastwood’s gruff veneer was… a gruffer layer, but… underneath that was the heart of “…an ethicist, a theologian even.” Vaux recently published a...

For months the Democrats have painted Mitt Romney as out-of-touch, elite, and uncaring about the middle class. In conversations, I’ve defended him against many of those generalizations. While that was before his Libya statements, I kept thinking, he’ll bounce back. All that went out of the window with a video we shall now euphemistically call The 47% speech: . “There are 47...

I like Peggy Noonan, have for some time. As a former speechwriter to President Reagan, she’s not only smart but takes the necessary time to inform herself before writing her column that appears weekly in the Wall Street Journal . However, in her latest piece (The Age of Would-Be Princips, Sept. 15) about the killing of four Americans in Libya...

Martha Payne is amazing! On her first day in school, the Scottish nine-year-old pictured and posted a review of her school lunch online. Below a photo of a small pizza, cupcake, some sweet corn and a single, reconstituted potato croquette, Payne wrote, “I’m a growing kid and I need to concentrate all afternoon and I can’t do it on 1...

We interrupt our special Fourth of July commentary for this TMZ Exclusive: Jim Lichtman, ‘Renowned’ Ethics Specialist, is Lost! Lichtman was last seen giving Mel Gibson advice outside an L.A. eatery (as captured by this grainy cell-phone photo) around June 14th. Sources close to the writer confirmed that in spite of his work with the “ethically challenged,” Lichtman was reported to...