“Is the Pope Catholic?” is something people often used to ask when they wanted to reject someone else’s ridiculous rhetorical question. Today, though, the Pope’s identity as a Catholic may not be so absolute. Pope Francis hasn’t been in the mainstream press much lately, but he caused quite a stir in early February of […]
Bruce Robinson: How to stop school shooters
Ever since the Parkland school shooting on Valentine’s Day, media pundits and politicians of all stripes have spewed forth an avalanche of disparate explanations for and radical solutions to this most recent manifestation of what CNN has listed as the 34 “deadliest mass shootings in United States history since 1949.” The explanations have ranged from […]
Bruce Robinson: Identity politics and the end of meaning
It has been more than a year since Madonna proclaimed at the first Women’s March in Washington, D.C. that “Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House. But I know that won’t change anything.” Her rant that day may not have changed anything, but it certainly spread like wildfire on […]
Bruce Robinson: Has anybody read “Adios, America”?
It’s likely many Americans would answer “no” to this question, despite the fact that the author of “Adios, America,” Ann Coulter, has published more than 10 books on the New York Times best-seller list, including such attention-grabbing titles as “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama” (September 2012) and “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The […]
Bruce Robinson: The president knows how to ‘Git-R-Done!’
Almost immediately after Donald Trump won the presidential election last year, “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe posted these comments on his Facebook page: “The people did not want a politician. The people wanted to be seen. Donald Trump convinced those people that he could see them. Hillary Clinton did not.…the world is full of very […]
Bruce Robinson: Don’t get mad, just get even
It was April 1997, and I had just finished producing the corporate newsletter for a small but highly successful company named Livingston Enterprises, located in Pleasanton. Livingston then was manufacturing a compact data network router called “The Portmaster” that had become a hot product for Internet Service Providers worldwide. Suddenly an unfamiliar woman in her […]
Bruce Robinson: Straining the swamp
“Draining the swamp” has become the slogan du jour for just about anybody who wants to fix what’s been happening in our nation’s capital. It’s a catchy metaphor, but taken literally such a swamp-draining would not only be prohibitively costly to the taxpayer but would eliminate virtually every bureaucrat in the federal government. If we […]
Bruce Robinson: Whose hate speech?
Let’s begin with the understanding that there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. That has been settled law since the founders first signed the Constitution of the United States in 1787. Yet, on college campuses all across the United States, the First Amendment rights of commencement speakers have been repeatedly violated by […]
Bruce Robinson: The DeVos flap– insight or oversight?
On the same day President Trump picked Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) head, Randi Weingarten, condemned Mrs. DeVos as “the most ideological, anti-public-education nominee put forward since President Carter created a Cabinet-level Department of Education.” Right away, National Education Association (NEA) President Lily Eskelsen Garcia added her ire to […]
Bruce Robinson: Ella’s story
(This article was originally published in the Contra Costa Times on Dec. 4, 1999) It has been 36 years since Dr. Martin Luther King captured the hearts and minds of America with his “I have a dream” speech. Judging by the angry response to the passage of Proposition 209 in California not long ago, it […]