Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
It is spring glorious spring (da do ron ron ron da do ron ron) and our gallant president has rallied his fractious forces against wacko demagoguery, the crocuses are up, and birds are returning from the South, preferring to raise their children here in Minnesota where we pull our pants on one leg at a […]
Read MoreThe mind glazes over at the sight of the words so let’s just refer to it as hrothgar reform and congratulate the president and Mrs. Pelosi for pushing it through Congress, a rational reform that the stonewall opposition depicted as a flock of hooded vampires rising from the steaming swamps of Stalinism. That strategy fell […]
Read MoreThe snow is melting in the woods of North Carolina and the kudzu is greening up. This ravenous pea-like vine was introduced to prevent soil erosion and now it is devouring the South, which goes to show you that some solutions are worse than the problem. Likewise, the judge in Yolo County, Calif., near Sacramento, […]
Read MoreWe have a good guy in the White House, a smart man of judicious temperament and profound ideals, a man with a sweet private life, a man of dignity and good humor, whose enemies, waving their hairy arms and legs, woofing, yelling absurdities, only make him look taller. Washington, being a company town, feasts on […]
Read MoreEver since that night in June when we filed onto the football field in our mortarboards and gowns and the distinguished speaker (what was his name?) informed us that we were entering a time of rapid and unparalleled change, we’ve been waiting and hoping, but here we are, all grown up, and the same soupy […]
Read MoreIf you wake up in the morning with the blues because people treat you mean, you could sing a song about it, or you could shop around for an enormous conspiracy that has denied you your constitutional right to liberty and happiness — and how about Central Standard Time? What gives the feds the right […]
Read MoreIt is a large moment for Democrats, learning to stick with a good man through a rough period when the people who crave disillusionment have become disillusioned. It’s like a winter vacation in the Caribbean when it rains buckets and you eat some bad shellfish and a shrieky teenager says you’ve ruined her life forever. […]
Read MoreThere they all were on the Sunday-morning chatfests, droning on about the anger of the American people as shown by the election in Massachusetts of a pickup truck to the U.S. Senate — ever ready, as pundits are, to take one good story and extrude it into a national trend portentous with meaning. One could […]
Read MoreThe tea partiers are enjoying their day in the sun, but coffee is the beverage preferred by most Americans, and we don’t have time to gang up and holler and wave our arms — we prefer to sit quietly with coffee in hand and read a reliable newspaper and try to figure out what’s going […]
Read MoreI went to church in San Francisco on Sunday, the big stone church on Nob Hill, whose name is an old slang term for a rich person, where a gaggle of railroad tycoons built their palaces high above the squalid tenements of the poor back in the Gilded Age, and there with considerable pomp we […]
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