By Patrick Reddy / SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
Updated: 05/04/08 6:47 AM
“People have been tryingto stake a claim to the legacyof President John F. Kennedy eversince that day in Dallas more than44 years ago. Everyone can pipedown now. It’s all over.” — Neeley Tucker in the Washington Post on “Barack Obama, Camelot’s New Knight.”
By Curt Smith
- SPECIAL TO THE NEWS Updated: 05/04/08 6:47 AM
While Democrats duel, the unofficial Republican nominee considers a vice president. John McCain should start by asking what he needs. The admiral’s son fits two legs of his own party’s three-legged stool: foreign policy (zinging terrorism) and economic (scoring spending). Alas, he is out to sea with social and cultural conservatives, the one group without which national Republicans once routinely lost, and will surely lose again.
For years, the cry of the politically alienated in the United States was that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between political parties or candidates. This year, that lack of separation among the candidates for president has been the good news on at least one major issue.
Let’s see, now. You spend every day up to your elbows in children who are in your care from right after the school day ends until well into the evening. Because they are children they are, among many other things, hungry.
Excerpts from reader commentary on News staffers’ online blog postings last week.Online comments come from registered users, but — unlike reviewed and verifiedEverybody’s Column letters — can be posted under pen names.
On the weekend of the Kentucky Derby, it seems appropriate to say a few words about the horse and the writer. The one has occupied the other through the ages.
We all have heroes — as individuals, as a community. Some of our heroes risk their lives, others sacrifice time or contribute skills. All deeply care for others, and give something of themselves to help make others' lives better.
By Walter Simpson
- SPECIAL TO THE NEWS Updated: 04/20/08 6:59 AM
When Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply, he sought an alternative to the materialistic lifestyle of his time. Reacting to what he saw as the soul-crushing heaviness of the life of a successful farmer, who he described as struggling to push all his possessions down the road of life, Thoreau said he would prefer to be born in an open pasture and be suckled by a wolf.
Al-Qaida, the Mahdi Army, the Iranian Quds Force or whoever it is that the U.S. Army is supposed to be fighting these days doesn’t have to defeat anyone in the battlefield or even on the Arab street.
It is not at all unusual to find a hospital full of people in denial. There is bad news to be handed out in the finest health care facility, and not all of it is readily accepted.
Excerpts from reader commentary on News staffers’ online blog postings last week. Online comments come from registered users, but — unlike reviewed and verified Everybody’s Column letters — can be posted under pen names.
The gnomes at Merriam-Webster define “serendipity” as “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.” A recent serendipitous moment sent your host on a quest for the expletive “gawdelpus!” He came home with “gavroche” and “gavelock.” These things are not easily explained.
By Kevin Gaughan / SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
Updated: 04/14/08 3:44 PM
The film clip from “It’s A Wonderful Life” had no sound. You could see Jimmy Stewart urging building and loan depositors not to panic during the bank run. But you couldn’t hear him say, “You’re thinking about this thing all wrong.”
By David W. Kreutzer
- MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE Updated: 04/13/08 6:29 AM
During the summer, television networks don’t seem to discriminate in airing reruns. The miserable shows get re-aired along with the good ones. Washington seems to have the same mind-set when it comes to policy reruns. Failed policies are as likely to be reinstituted as successful ones. Case in point: petroleum regulation and the “windfall profits” tax. Congress demands testimony from oil executives and threatens additional taxes and price regulations whenever petroleum prices rise. It’s an old tradition — and one based on economic ignorance.
