Today’s Wall Street Journal had a very clear front page headline (click on photos to enlarge them). The essentials are easily read: “Medicare”; “under the age of 55”; “cut government spending”…. The aim, of course, is not at all to “cut spending”. Rather, it is to cut government control of that spending, so as to […]
In the previous days post, I related the apparently close professional relationship between a lobbyist and a legislator. The post brought a couple of angry responses via personal e-mail. In not terribly delicate terms, one demanded to know the name of the lobbyist; the other described the behavior of the two parties to the conversation […]
Followup to this post is here. Recently I was at a reception at a major Minnesota agency which for its entire history has been at minimum a quasi-public agency, funded in substantial part by state and federal government. It has an outstanding reputation and a large staff and impressive Board of Directors and a very […]
On check-in at my hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, I asked if the August Wilson Center (AWC) was somewhere in the neighborhood. That was an easy question: it was three short blocks away. I walked there, and found the back side of it was visible from my 15th floor room (the orange traffic signs are alongside […]
A brief trip to Chicago in early March was to attend the burial of my Uncle Art. As it happened, my hotel was in the “village” of Westchester (pop. app 17,000), a middle class suburb where my Uncle and family had lived for over 20 years till his first wife died and he remarried and […]
Today I was at the local copy place, making a photo copy of my mother’s first contract as a teacher. Busch Esther 1929 contra001. At the next copier, a young woman was making large numbers of copies on colored paper. A somewhat older woman, though much younger than I, was with her. We struck up […]
As I write, in the background is Wolf Blitzer and Company at CNN already endlessly analyzing the actions in Libya today. A retired General is talking. Of course, everyone is a war expert. War is always interesting, and a launching platform for all points of view. Peace is boring, or so it seems. How do […]
Today’s newspaper brought news that Garrison Keillor might, just might, retire in 2013, leaving Prairie Home Companion (PHC) in the hands of someone else. Precisely when Garrison will no longer be part of the picture is an unknown, probably including to himself. But as someone a couple of years senior to Keillor in age, I […]
Note from Dick Bernard: This Essay seems particularly appropriate to present at the anniversary of the bombing of Iraq March 19, 2003, and our seeming continued reverence for War as a solution for human problems. Our wonderful friend, Annelee Woodstrom, grew up in Nazi Germany. She was 7 when Hitler came to power in 1933, […]
Sunday afternoon, enroute to other things, I found a cartoon I had saved for some reason back in March of 2002. (Click on photo to enlarge.) About the same time I found the cartoon, came a CBS “60 Minutes” segment on a New York City experimental school that pays $125,000 a year. You can see […]