Columns, pieces and posts
There are a million variables in a live, three-hour television show, a million things that can go wrong that producers can’t control. Will the lines go down, will the prompter break, will the actors hit their marks, read their lines, show up sober? One of the few things you can control is the production packages […]
The president’s sequester strategy is like Howard Beale in “Network”: “Woe is us. . . . And woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble!” It is always cliffs, ceilings and looming catastrophes with Barack Obama. It is always government by freakout. That’s what’s happening now with the daily sequester warnings. Seven hundred thousand […]
It is disquieting, the resignation of the pope. “We are in uncharted territory,” said a historian of the church. An old pope is leaving but staying within the walls of the Vatican, and a new one, younger and less known, will come before Easter. In a week’s conversation with faithful and believing Catholics, I detected […]
What a bombshell. “Pope Resigns” is probably not a headline you ever thought you’d see. When I first heard, in a phone call at about 6:30 this morning, I literally had to shake my head to get the words understood. The announcement seemed jarring, out of the natural order of things: Popes don’t resign, God […]
So many people this week mentioned Dodge’s great Super Bowl spot, “So God Made a Farmer,” from a 1978 speech by the late Paul Harvey. Here are some reasons it was great: • Because it spoke respectfully and even reverently of others. We don’t do that so much anymore. We’re afraid of looking corny or […]
I’m reading Mitch Daniels’s book “Aiming Higher: Words That Changed a State.” It’s a collection of his speeches as Indiana governor, and in the introduction he talks about the writing of them: “The most perceptive statement I ever read about the task of writing was, ‘Writing is easy. I just sit down and write what […]
Do you hear the sound of an ice floe cracking? I think I did the past 10 days. In that time these things happened: Gov. Bobby Jindal went before the Republican National Committee to call the GOP “the stupid party.” Newly re-elected RNC chairman Reince Priebus admitted the party got smoked on vote technology, will […]
Two lessons on how conservatives and Republicans might approach the future, and a look at the meaning of Barack Obama. Lesson one: Golf star Phil Mickelson this week complained about taxes—”I happen to be in that zone that has been targeted both federally and by the state”—and suggested he may leave California. Before anyone could […]
Presidential inaugurations are rare and notable events, coming only once every four years since April 30, 1789, when George Washington raised his right hand and took the oath on the second-floor balcony of New York’s Federal Hall. It’s a big day with all its pomp and ceremony, and among its purposes is this: to encourage […]
I’ve been thinking about Jack Lew’s famous signature, which looks like the squiggles on the top of a Hostess cupcake. A series of O’s is an odd way to write the words Jack and Lew, and I actually hope some good-natured senator asks him about it, good-naturedly, at the end of his confirmation hearings. Maybe […]