"What Trump did, as the possessor of five deferments, was to denigrate an American immigrant family, the head of whom had spoken out against Trump at the Democratic National Convention in July."

"The time is 1940 when the affable Hoosier didn't even take part in the presidential primaries but nevertheless became the party's upstart candidate and gave Franklin Roosevelt a good run for his money before succumbing to the all-knowing smile of his patrician opponent, in an era in our history when a patrician candidate was taken as a matter of course, in contrast to today when coarseness seems to have phagocyted everything."

"Barack Obama has an elegance of speech which takes us back to FDR and JFK. But unlike LBJ, who was rather repugnant to Eastern Seaboard eyes and ears, he doesn't know how to move in the distinctly American legislative arena."

"He organized a referendum that didn't have to be held; its unexpected outcome has toppled him out of power; and he is responsible for a downturn of British credibility on the world scene. One is left with the question: how could one man have so screwed up the future of his country?"

"For years economists have urged on the French a greater flexibility in labor market legislation, which in shorthand means making it easier to hire and fire workers and thus get the economy going....The French authorities proceeded to ram the new law through the Assembly under the threat of a vote of no-confidence in the government...The French Left retaliated by launching a strike by garbagemen..."

"If the U.S. had flooded the sky over Syria with aircraft at the time, one wonders whether Putin would later have intervened in Syria with such massiveness."

Created as a state only in 1830, largely at the instigation of the British, who wanted it as a buffer against possible further French imperialism, it could be argued that the country could have been divided along linguistic lines, between France and the Netherlands.

"Although he later backtracked (or tried to), Donald Trump's statement that only women should be punished for having an abortion may finally have jolted the American people into a perception that we could have a possible wacko president in the offing....Whoever would make such an absurd and unfeeling statement about women might well have something wrong with himself."

"...[D]epend on a serious candidate, Hillary Clinton, to defeat him at the polling booth in November; and in the meantime contemplate the degradation of our public discourse and reflect on what have we have become as a people, to be on the brink of nominating as president a person such as this, from one of our two major political parties."

"On February 28, a courageous film, 'Spotlight', surprisingly won the Academy Award's Oscar as the best film of 2015 — courageous because of the power of the Catholic Church in its ultimately futile attempt to hide the pederasty of 97 (count 'em) priests in the Boston diocese. The Church's attempt was in vain thanks to a phalanx of reporters and editors at the Boston Globe."