News

Blue Orange?

(Cross posted from Epic Journey) Orange County, birthplace of Richard Nixon, may be on the cusp of political upheaval. In the Orange County Register, Dena Bunis reports: Orange County Democrats have become so emboldened by how well President Barack Obama did here on...

Jonathan Aitken To Revisit RN

One thing that becomes apparent if one's followed the world of books for a while is that when the anniversary of a famed personality's birth (or sometimes death) comes up, there are likely to be one or more volumes to mark the occasion. In the world of literature,...

The Freeman Fracas

When President Obama, during his period of transition, announced that he was appointing onetime Nixon White House aide Leon Panetta to head the CIA, the former Clinton chief of staff's appointment, after a few initial stirrings of dissatisfaction, sailed through the...

The Chance That Ted Missed

Eleanor Clift, in a Newsweek article on Sen. Ted Kennedy's effort to get a comprehensive health-insurance program through Congress, reminds readers that he once had a chance to help reach that goal but let it slip through his hands in the name of political...

A President’s Proud Legacy

On NPR's weekly comedy ---at least they claim it's comedy--- news-based quiz show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the final segment is a round robin of the panelists making humorous predictions about the future. Today's edition featured WaPo's Roxanne Roberts making this...

Lessons From Lyndon’s Successful Failure

When Lyndon Johnson was a boy growing up near the Pedernales River in the Texas hill country his parents would regularly play a record on their Victrola. But it wasn’t music. It was William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, who was known for his charismatic oratory...

Watchmen: Five Checkers

Although I haven't yet seen Watchmen (and almost certainly won't until it's on DVD and works its way up my Netflix queue), I unhesitatingly confer the ultimate accolade of 5 Checkers on the film simply on the basis of its basic premise: The events unfold in 1985 when,...