Category Archives: Civil Liberty

A Few Crumbs

6/16/2011 – 2:23 pm

I was helping the teenager prepare for her English final last week, reviewing with her Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night,” which she read this semester. (I’d never read the book, a gap in my own education.)
I came across this passage:
“Dozens of starving men fought each other to death for a few crumbs (thrown [...]

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Acting Like a Patriot

6/9/2011 – 9:48 am

The tenth of July 1995 was the tenth anniversary of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior by the French government. The RW had been protesting French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. Fernando Pereira was killed. In 1995, the French were again testing nukes in the Pacific and Greenpeace had been holding [...]

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Crazy Like a Fox

6/2/2011 – 8:22 am

I admit having a morbid fascination with electoral politics, the way some people feel about slasher movies. Even so, the Sarah Palin bus tour is too gruesome and I must avert my eyes.
Democrats are said to be happy with the antics of the former half-term governor of Alaska. The hype around Ms. Palin [...]

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Never Had an Eden

5/26/2011 – 10:21 am

Years ago, when I was a young reporter, an equally young colleague wrote a column endorsing a candidate in a Congressional race. That was against the rules; only the newspaper’s editorial board made endorsements and would not do so for some weeks. My colleague wasn’t fired, just banned from covering the rest of [...]

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Don’t Know Much About History

5/19/2011 – 2:37 pm

For my birthday, Adrienne presented me with a copy of John Thorn’s excellent book “Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game”.
Among the things I’ve learned:
- The rule allowing a batter to run if a catcher drops a third strike is one of baseball’s oldest (1845), pre-dating [...]

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Thousands and Ten Thousands

5/5/2011 – 2:08 pm

I have a friend who came back from serving in Vietnam 40 years ago. Shortly thereafter, his father, who owned a liquor store, was shot and killed during a robbery. The killer was African American. My friend’s family is white.
“I used that for a long time,” he told me. “I’d say, [...]

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Stop Making Sense

4/28/2011 – 10:55 am

Yesterdays’ Wall Street Journal carried an op-ed attacking Barack Obama for a draft executive order which would require businesses contracting with the federal government to disclose their owners’ political contributions over $5,000.
One of the authors is John Yoo, who famously wrote memos authorizing torture for the Bush administration. So, on one hand, Mr. Yoo [...]

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