Category Archives: Commentary

Thanks/No, Thanks

11/23/2006 – 9:49 am

It’s time to bow our heads and give thanks for the good things we’ve received in 2006 and in anticipation of good things to come in 2007. Gratitude is an underused muscle in my psychological anatomy, but I’ve come to understand there is no blessing without burden and (gratefully) the same holds true in reverse. […]

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Breathing Easier

11/16/2006 – 1:43 pm

Nothing brings back the past as powerfully as the scents we inhale. This is not a new idea; Marcel Proust hammered it home in seven volumes. Walking along a darkening street in the late afternoon with the aroma of dry leaves in the cold air adjusts my metaphysical clock as surely as “falling back” to […]

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Cut and Rumsfeld

11/9/2006 – 10:06 am

First and most important – thank you. Thank you to all the citizens who voted Tuesday to begin to take our country back from those who would turn America into a totalitarian state. I not only had the pleasure of voting at the electric company in my Burlington neighborhood in the morning but later watched […]

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The Other Condition

11/2/2006 – 9:44 am

We now know a Congressional bill’s name often has little to do with its content. Often, there’s an inverse relationship between a bill’s name and its intended effect. The Patriot Act and the Help America Vote Act are two recent examples. Fraudulent as those bills were, at least their passage attracted some attention and well-read […]

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The Luxury of Vietnam

10/26/2006 – 8:42 am

“Iraqi Prime Minister Lambastes U.S.,” read the headline in Wednesday afternoon’s online edition of the Washington Post. Nouri al-Maliki was “lashing out” at U.S. policymakers for suggesting they might be working on a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Mr. Maliki said such timetables were the product of stateside Republican electioneering and had nothing to […]

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The Lies We Tell Ourselves

10/19/2006 – 11:15 am

The seventh and deciding game of the National League Championship Series is tonight. It’s hard for me not to be a baseball fan at this time of year, but my enthusiasm throughout the summer is not as sharp as it once was and the reason is steroids. Baseball players (and other athletes) have been using […]

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Still Falling

10/12/2006 – 12:48 pm

I began writing these commentaries 10 years and one week ago. These were originally audio files posted at soapbox.org and after five years morphed into what you see today, but that’s another story. I wasn’t going to note the passing of the decade, as I generally find anniversary journalism unedifying, but I started reading through […]

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