Liberal Portions The last time I saw Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale was in the Class Six liquor store across the street from our hacienda-style house in Coronado . It must have been nine years ago, in 1996, or maybe early 1997, just before we left the village. The house we lived in was a […]

Best Tan I had a bunch of stuff to do yesterday, and only got to part of it. I pounded on some job applications in the morning, and some stuff for the radio until after lunch. The sun was out, and the humidity was low, and finally I couldn’t take it any more. I was […]

Lighten Up I was in the office yesterday, the day before a long weekend. For the life of me I could not quite figure out why. No one else appeared to be going to work. The commute was a breeze, and the garage had plenty of parking spaces. Only Andy was in. Mike the Lobbyist […]

Something Cooking It is the morning of the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, and my first without historian Shelby Foote to interpret it for me. He might have told me that if General Longstreet had pressed a little harder on the Union left on the second day, or if there had been a few more […]

The big clouds were to the West, and there was only the echo of thunder. But lightning lit the sky to the West in regular and flashes and the rain came down, drenching the Far Hills of New Jersey. I wondered what they were far from. New York? I knew about the Short Hills, and […]

Empires John Walton, a billionaire son of the Wal-Mart empire, died in a plane crash in Wyoming yesterday. He was worth $18.2 billion dollars, they say, and was flying an ultra-light airplane out of the airport at Jackson Hole , Wyoming . I can understand the appeal of flying a little plane above the great […]

They say this morning that suicide car bombers are neither depressed nor distressed. I imagine that could be true, though I have a hard time wrapping my gray matter around it. I saw one of those internet stories over the weekend that claimed some of the bombers were found with their hands shackled to the […]

Early Education Everything I needed to know was not taught to me in kindergarten. I defy the nauseating chicken-soup books that say this is all simple. It is not. It sounds good, on the surface. Play fair. Don’t hit people. It oozes politeness and the memory of what white glue tasted like. There were two […]

Foreign and Domestic The 9/11 Commission is crashing around town again, refusing to let the matter lie. They are no longer under the charter of the Congress, or the President, and they are acting in their own right, under the moral authority of The Dead. They are an inconvenience to the way things work around […]

Aspirin There are some smart Bad Guys. That should come as no surprise, though that is not the popular image of the terrorist. We tend to think of the fundamentalist fanatic, focused, to be sure, but not very bright. That is not useful shorthand, though it is convenient. One of the baddest of the Bad […]