Two or three times a week, I commute from my house in Burlington to the state capital Montpelier, 40 miles away. It takes about an hour each way and the hours I spend commuting are among the most relaxing I spend all week. I ride the bus. I know, I know, I’m not supposed to […]
In 1995, I was among a number of Greenpeace activists arrested in a non-violent protest at the French ambassador’s residence in Washington, DC. We’d embarrassed the Secret Service, so when we got to jail, they gave us the treatment. We were strip-searched, placed in handcuffs with restraining belts and leg shackles. We were rousted from […]
George W. Bush recently told Bob Woodward that history’s judgement of his presidency doesn’t matter to him, because he’ll be dead. If he’s right, history can commence judgement of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, but Mr. Bush is wrong, at least in Mr. Reagan’s case. He may be dead, but it’s too soon to draw a complete […]
Sometime between now and the June 30th deadline for handing over “full sovereignty” to the new Iraqi government, some American representative will have to walk into the Iraqi desert and count the grains of sand, to make sure they’re all handed over. The unlucky bureaucrat assigned to this task can use neither supercomputer nor statistical […]
Ads for the New York State lottery, beamed across Lake Champlain, feature groups of people singing, “If I had a million dollars, I would buy you a house.” The idea, of course, is to convince several million people to buy a lottery ticket. The odds of winning a million-dollar lottery are something on the order […]
The two questions that most urgently need answers in the Iraq torture scandal are: How far up and for how long? How far up the chain of command did authorization of torture go and how long has this been sanctioned practice? The trickle of testimony on this subject has become a stream; next week it […]
Cloth Can Be Very Important
When I was in high school, Mr. Chadwick the gym teacher once sentenced me to 50 push-ups saying, “I never heard President Ford use that word.” I don’t know if Mr. Chadwick is still teaching, but if he is, he’ll have to look beyond the highest level of the executive branch for examples oratory decorum. […]