Our counterparts over at the Corner seem to have gone all sniffy over how the John Edwards “love child” story is “tabloid trash,” even if true. This strikes me as the logical contrapositive ot Dan Rather’s assertion that “the story…

Quin, I’m a day late here, but my compliments on your thorough dissection of Romney’s negatives as McCain’s vp. I have seen and heard Romney up close here in Massachusetts for a number of years, so let me add some…

I have been writing a weekly column for a number of years now, and yet I can still be surprised by the kind of written reactions I get. These letters fall into two broad categories, the public and the private….

I don’t know which cable news yakker started making a fuss over what he (or she) called a “terrorist fist bump” exchanged by Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, but he (or she) unknowingly started a fuss that reveals the…

This past week, I made a three-day trip to Los Angeles. I stayed at my mother’s place and had six hours of appointments and tests with the kidney transplant team at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in West Hollywood. Cedars-Sinai kidney doc Stanley…

Fourth of July weekend, here’s as good a time as any to review what the American idea really means. And how far we have fallen away from that idea. Conveniently, we find a news hook: The Supreme Court’s recent 5-4…

When I took my first summer vacation home from college, there was an airline strike of some kind — pilots, flight attendants, something. “We’ll drive,” my mother said. We packed my stuff and my grandmother into Mom’s 1963 powder blue…

In 1952, at a family gathering at my grandparents’ house in Arlington, South Dakota, my Aunt Letty teased me about a button I was wearing. “I Like Ike,” the button proclaimed. Letty asked me, “Are you a Republican or a…

A long time ago, I leased the first and only new car I have ever had, a Mazda RX-7. I was involved with a certain woman. The first time she and I got into the car in the morning, I…

Hey, Shawn, I watched “Mississippi Burning” on my DVR a few nights back. Good movie, well made, but way, way black ‘n’ white in its moral orientations: FBI good, rednecks bad. You remember when Bill Clinton said he remembered black…