Michael Sean Winters

In the summer s box office smash The Dark Knight the Joker played by Heath Ledger does not run around Gotham spreading evil per se He spreads chaos And then watches good people choose evil in the midst of the chaos Yesterday for a variety of reasons the discussion of what government shou

Who knew that John McCain was his own stuntman What else to call his decision to suspend his campaign and fly back to Washington to help solve the economic crisis Was McCain earnest about the importance of being back in the Senate or was he merely confused about the word order of the Oscar Wilde

I remember a conversation I had with a Washington sage in December of 2000 shortly after the Supreme Court stopped the counting of votes in Florida awarding the presidency to George W Bush The country will be fine It will be like the 1840s and 1850s my friend said No one remembers the pres

Barack Obama rsquo s convention speech was the last time he had the undivided attention of the American people to make a sustained argument for his candidacy The debates will be critical as everyone agrees But in the meantime he can frame the race by delivering four soundbites that hit on key is

It is a good thing for democracy that more states are in play this year Too often the debates the television ads the Get-Out-The-Vote organizations ignore large parts of the country because they are considered indelibly red or blue A Republican could in theory try to contest Rhode Island or

Yesterday rsquo s front page story in the New York Times headlined the abortion issue and its decisive role for many Catholic voters The pages of this blog which is less than a fortnight old have already shown the wide variety of opinions on that issue and I suspect there will be further debate a

John McCain and the Republicans have two problems when they address the meltdown on Wall Street and both of those problems will now be with them through the end of the campaign Fortunately for them the Democrats have an uncanny ability to lose an election that should be a walk in the park The

The campaign took a sudden turn back to reality yesterday For weeks we were treated to discussions of who was and was not a celebrity lipstick on pigs bridges to nowhere and the such Yesterday with the Lehman Brothers rsquo bankruptcy bargain basement sale of Merrill Lynch and the collapse

The Sunday morning news shows ndash NBC rsquo s Meet the Press ABC rsquo s This Week amp c ndash are not actually watched by that many people But their power comes from two distinct sources First they interview people who actually make news Second they are watched by local news affiliat

In July I had the occasion to visit Galveston Texas a city filled with exquisitely beautiful historic churches The co-cathedral of St Mary and Sacred Heart church were my favorites and both are sitting in water this morning after the ravages of Hurricane Ike The cathedral is a small gothic bui