Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made headlines recently when he mocked a disabled journalist. Major media reported it as politically incorrect entertainment, just as though it was another “Saturday Night Live (SNL)” episode. Like, Serge Kovaleski, I am a disabled journalist. I, too, have covered presidents and presidential candidates, but unlike Kovaleski, my disability is invisible. But every so often it rears its unpleasant self. I don’t leave home without my tiny purse dog, a toy poodle, trained to alert me to a very difficult and troubling disability. Like Kovaleski, I cannot leave home to cover a story without my disability. If I could, I certainly would.

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Hollywood actor Jon Voight, an outspoken supporter of Israel, didn’t mince words at this year’s annual Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) Justice Louis D. Brandeis Award dinner November 22nd. He spoke of how he believes “Israel is in a very difficult situation, especially now that Barack Obama has turned his back on Netanyahu.”

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has decided that Medicaid money, intended for clinical services and medications for the poor, now can help the chronically homeless to find and maintain permanent housing.

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At a time when the liberal left is consumed with placating the sensibilities of minorities and creating “safe places” on campus to insure that words will never harm them, I wonder if our president and other pundits are considering the sensibilities of 9/11 and Boston Marathon survivors and the grieving families of those who were murdered.  How devastating it must be to have lived through those domestic Jihadist attacks, suffered permanent physical and mental impairment and then have to listen to our president proclaim that there is no need to fear the influx of 10,000 Muslim immigrants, or to read the Times’ daily vilification of people with the opposite point of view.  At the same that the newspaper reports the bombing of the Mali hotel due to security lapses, its columnists excoriate those who question the efficacy of our national security to safeguard us from terrorist interlopers.  Fear is the appropriate reaction for people who have experienced firsthand or suffered the consequences second-hand of the stated aims of Islamic Jihad.  Too many of us have felt sick just seeing the images of executioners lopping off the heads of innocent people, raping and kidnapping scores of women and militarizing African children - forcing them to do unspeakable things including cannibalism.  It’s impossible to pretend after this year’s double catastrophe in Paris that we can walk the streets of NYC, a prime stated target for repeat attack, completely confident that our excellent police and anti-terror squads can be omniscient and omnipotent.  It just isn’t feasible in an open society where we don’t have security screening in our public museums, city transportation hubs, multiplex theaters or most of the myriad places where people congregate.  A day after the Paris attack, I saw a New Yorker with a backpack large enough for a weeklong camping trip enter a movie theater, sit down and casually place that baggage on the floor beside her.

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Todd Haynes, the director of “Carol,” is a lover of pulp fiction.  Past credits include Mildred Pierce and Far From Heaven, two weepy period films about women in familial straits and “Carol,” adapted from an autobiographical novel by Patricia Highsmith, follows in this tradition.  Not having read the novel, I can only comment on the plot and characters as presented in this film version set in the 50’s in New York.

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By the end of the new film “Trumbo,” there is the feeling that restitution has been made to the blacklisted writer whose career was relegated to writing scripts signed by noms de plume, or more appropriately, noms de guerre.  Trumbo’s name appears triumphantly as the screenwriter of “Spartacus” and “Exodus” and Hollywood and the world know that it is his craftsmanship that won the two previous Oscars for “Roman Holiday” and “The Brave Bull.”  Though we see the toll that the blacklist has taken on the lives of many people in the industry, we also see that the “evil forces” of HUAC and the anti-communist witch-hunters of the private sector have been defeated and freedom of speech and the sanctity of individual rights have triumphed.

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In what may be President Barack Obama’s most poorly timed proclamation, he asserted on ABC that ISIS has been contained, just hours before the deadly Islamist jihadists’ attacks on Paris. He said (about 1:10 into the video):

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In what may be President Barack Obama’s most poorly timed proclamation, he asserted on ABC that ISIS has been contained, just hours before the deadly Islamist jihadists’ attacks on Paris. He said (about 1:10 into the video):

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This week marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most consequential battles in American history. Most Americans have probably never heard of the Ia Drang Valley, the site of the first major encounter between the regular armies of the United States and North Vietnam. Yet that forgotten battle at Ia Drang in mid-November 1965 probably changed world politics more than any other military engagement since World War II.

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Don’t look now, but while you’re recovering from this week’s Republican presidential debate, the Democrats will assault us with another night of their debate kabuki theater this weekend.

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There’s a lot of confusion about the announcement by the White House late last week about the upcoming deployment of U.S. special operations forces to Syria, especially after President Obama repeatedly promised — going back to 2013 — no “boots on the ground.”

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Mullahs and political leaders of the Islamic world call for Death to Jews any way that perpetrators can facilitate - by gun, knife, car or can opener.  We have seen the affirmative reaction to these calls with the treacherous stabbings and mowing down of innocent Israeli civilians as well as Jews throughout Europe and right here in New York.  Iran burns the Israeli flag and vows the destruction of the state.  Jewish students are besieged by anti-Semitic demonstrations at universities and colleges across America and Canada.  Earlier this week, Moshe Halbertal, a renowned Israeli professor who teaches at NYU Law School and is credited with having developed the ethics code for the IDF, was prevented from delivering a lecture to the U. of Minnesota Law School.  This protest that lasted more than a half hour, was organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that is increasingly active on campus and feeds into the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement as well.  As recently reported, most faculty members at our elite universities are politically liberal and provocatively anti-Israel.  These are some of the issues facing young Jewish students and adults.

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If you loathe Obamacare, you’re going to hate what the Democrats have planned next. Their imminent assault on health care will go far beyond the quasi-socialized medicine of Obamacare.

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Dedicated to the cause of destroying the boundaries that nature has created, the NYT finally jumped the shark in its lead j’accuse editorial of Nov 5th (In Houston, Hate Trumped Fairness,NYT)  Those of who still believe that men and women belong in separate but equal public bathrooms are guilty now of the future suicide of a transgender teenager who won’t be able to pee in the designated toilet of the opposite sex.  Think about the excrutiating mental anguish for such a person.  I can relate to it, along with most other women who wait in long lines outside the ladies’ room in a theater looking longingly at the men’s room as it remains respectfully under-used.

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An adolescent high-school student with all the biological parts of a male and none of the biological parts of a female  declares himself to be a girl, is called by his female name at school, is allowed to play on the girls’ athletic team and to change inside the girls’ locker room with the small proviso that this be done behind a curtain.  This apparently is not sufficiently sensitive to the boy/girl’s needs -  I can’t use a pronoun without knowing this person’s preference for that loaded word as pronouns are war zones at the moment.  Despite the wholesale capitulation of the school to all the aforementioned demands of this student, the Office for Civil Rights of the Dept of Education has insisted that standing behind a curtain or showering separately is outright discrimination and a challenge to this student’s identity.  Unless the Illinois school removes the curtain and allows total access to the girls’ facilities, it stands in danger of losing all of its Title IX funding.

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On first glance it may seem surprising but now that Yogi Berra has died, it must be acknowledged: he was one of the great Americans of the 20th Century.

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