The most revealing moment in Edward “Ted” Kennedy’s political life came on Nov. 4, 1979, just three days before he would officially launch his presidential challenge to a sitting president of his own party, Jimmy Carter. In a televised interview, CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd asked the already stout Massachusetts senator a “giveaway” question, a […]
For her birthday I bought the brunette a cat door. I realize that on the list of great romantic gifts — the one with “surprise getaway to Tahiti” and “romantic cruise down the Seine” near the top — this entry ranks somewhere down near “cordless electric drill.” But if you’d spent months having to get […]
There are thrift shops in town with signs up, seeking to buy Michael Jackson LPs and other “related material.” They do this because people have been coming in since the “King of Pop’s” untimely demise, asking to BUY Michael Jackson stuff. I understand.
In a free market, we’re so familiar with how prices are set — how manufacturers decide how much of a thing to make and what they can afford to pay for labor and raw materials — that we rarely even think about it. Set salaries too high and charge too little for the product, go […]
Traveling the television talk-show circuit this weekend, Barack Obama’s aides and advisers tested the waters for likely public response should the new president completely gut his campaign pledge to middle-class Americans that “You will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.” Mr. Obama has already signed tax hikes on alcohol and cigarettes, […]
Our hummingbird has returned. She’s a black-chinned, I believe, not the world’s most colorful model. But she has a distinctive habit of hovering down to look us right in the face, one at a time, as we sit out in the back yard to watch the sunset. “Checking in,” we call it. Perhaps she, too, […]
Imagine a foreign army occupies the state of Indiana. Its commanders are concerned that local Hoosiers don’t like the foreigners in their midst, a dislike which they display practically every night by setting off murderous roadside bombs every time an army patrol goes by. And because the local people are at odds with the occupation […]