Etc.

A friend was telling me that the fire fighters in her town rushed into a blaze there and helped an elderly resident to safety. It was so routine an event that it didn’t even make the papers. The firefighters probably got to congratulate one another and that would be the extent of the reward.
The chief [...]

Mister President

The president laughed.
I was working in Washington in the harsh Vietnam and Watergate days and had gone to an event at the press club, or someplace. The president was there and at one point during the dinner, he was near a microphone which had been left on. He laughed. His was a great booming bark [...]

Sad

The heart hurts.

No-Show Job

Suppose I found a bank or an insurance company with standards low enough to hire me.
Then suppose that, taking that company’s faith and paycheck, I proceeded to spend all my time working to get a job at another bank or insurance company. I was never at my desk. I was AWOL more than I was [...]

Got Me A New Dawg

Hah!
Caught her.
Katie Couric, who is neat, has pulled off one of the oldest chestnuts in the game. She’s working her dog.
On her blog – all the real class has blogs, Katie & me – she tells about naming her new dog. Cecilia, which is a lot of moniker for a dog, but it’s a cute [...]

Declaring Victory

Republican Sen. George D. Aiken famously recommended that we just declare victory and come home as the simplest way out of Vietnam quagmire. The Iraq quagmire may not invite such a solution but it’s worth a try.
There is precedent for it, of course. All the Barstool Rambos who want the Iraq war to go on [...]

Blue Surge

By the logic of sending more troops to Iraq to get less troops in Iraq, by the thinking of enduring more casualties in a losing cause to stop enduring casualties in a losing cause we might:
Pour chemicals into even more rivers and befoul the air even more deeply to stop pollution.
Put more drugs on the [...]

‘Provocative’

The secretary of defense leaving office after a catastrophic, failed tenure which left tens of thousands dead, a military in shambles, American policy in ruins and things so horridly and bloodily worse than when he started, has the audacity to lecture the rest of us.
“Today, it should be clear that not only is weakness provocative,” [...]

Prayer

Is there anyone in the land more prayed-over than Sen. Tim Johnson?
If a guy’s health can be affected by the wishes of so many people, he’d either be dancing a jig – or the opposite – so heavy has been the focus on his condition.
Fascinating business, politics. Look at what it does to us, one [...]

Arts Project

I am an artist, I said to the traffic cop. I still got the ticket.
Actually I am not an artist and wouldn’t try to pass myself off as one, except for the license being an artist issues. License for getting away with things.
Tenor Roberto Alagna stormed off the stage at La Scala the other evening [...]