I tried to make notes on the State of the Union speech but I have to say the President hit me with so many initiatives I couldn't keep up. We had "I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative. . . I announce the American Competitiveness Initiative. . . I urge you...

The surprise in the Palestinian election is that anyone is surprised. Apparently the returns were a real shocker in Washington and Davos, Switzerland, where hundreds of the world's richest and most powerful were meeting for their annual ego rubs.

Washington had put money into the Palestinian Bantustans before the election...

The long range predictions of political and social meteorologists at this weather station are gloomy. Bear in mind that there is more money, attention and sex allure for weather persons when storms are forecast than when sunny days are promised, so readers may want to discount the following dark forebodings....

This Thanksgiving I give thanks to the 30 million turkeys with pop-up thermometers in their breasts who will make 30 million families happy, assuming they can afford the cranberry sauce and other trimmings.

This Thanksgiving I give thanks to Mark Copsy of Chicago, Illinois, and his 30 pound, frozen Norbest...

Many Iraqis, at least those not on the rack, must have derived a certain comfort at the news that their Ministry of Interior police have been snatching people off streets and out of beds. It has to give them a sense of continuity, of contact with the Baath Party past....

Senator John McCain, who might be the next President except the Republicans will never nominate him, wants to pass a law against the use of torture by all American government employees, Army, Navy, CIA or Department of Agriculture. So far so good.

Vice President Dick Cheney, whom the Republicans would...

Give it up for Dover, PA. On election day Dover threw out all the Republican members of its school board. The eight repudiated board members had made themselves nationally infamous for requiring the teaching of intelligent design in the schools.

At the same time in Kansas a state board...

With polls showing the President suffering from a serious case of the droops in the integrity department, the White House moved quickly to restore its choir boy image. Everybody who works there will have to take an ethics course. “No exceptions,” we are given to understand. Whether that includes Mr....

The reason you are paying so much for gasoline now is because you paid too little then.

Ignoring the conservation measures which have never been put in place thanks to our hedonic population, prices are high and will remain high because the energy industry has neither the equipment nor...

The merry pealing of bells in holy roller churches throughout our countryside greeted news that Samuel A. Alito, Jr. has been appointed to the Supreme Court. The reign of, if not the righteous, the elders who will make crooked ways straight had begun.

Alito, bringer of pain and tragedy...

The picture of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in the back seat of his government supplied limousine has been a stock shot lately. One or more of his multifarious White House positions entitles him to the perk.

One of his jobs, but apparently not the one which merits the limo, is...

They took the money and ran. And now what? That’s Exxon Mobil’s problem. Over the course of the last three months the corporation has been making about $75 thousand a minute.

That is not a typo. According to the Wall Street Journal, a publication to be relied on in...

The global economy on the march!

News has reached us that five doctors in Durban, South Africa, have been accused of performing more than 100 illegal kidney transplants. The donors are Brazilians and the recipients are well-to-do, ailing but deserving Israelis.

Two of the five are doctors at the Nelson...

Before her time on the Supreme Court bench is over, some may decide that Harriet Miers was a blessing in disguise, albeit very well disguised. Harriet's worst could turn out for the best.

Assume there is truth to the backdoor whispering about how the woman is a Christian family values...

These past few days the story which has convulsed journalism has centered around Judy Miller, the reporter who first gained fame helping the Bush administration pump up support for the Iraq war. Later she would go to jail for refusing to testify in front of a grand jury for reasons...

Did Judy Miller commit perjury? Did her lawyers fail to explain to her that “I forget” can be perjury as much as any other lie?

The woman went to jail because, she says, she would not reveal the name of the person who told her that Valerie Plame, wife of...

Judy Miller, the New York Times reporter and acrobatic careerist, calls herself or did call herself in her salad days “Ms. Run Amok.” She was referring to her power to put anything she cared to on the front page of the world’s most influential publication.

These days she is calling...

Not every bayou in America is under six feet of water. Bayou Management, a Connecticut hedge fund, is as dry as the African Sahel. The money is gone, hundreds of millions, apparently stolen and lost in panicky trading.

In A Devil’s Dictionary of Business,” this writer has explained that “a...

Anybody in the industries depending on a continued housing boom/bubble will tell you even a rumor about cutting home owner tax benefits might turn a slow slide into a crash.

Yet the members of the President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform are whispering among themselves about cuts just as the...

The Republicans disguised as the Food and Drug Administration have once again put Plan B in a filing cabinet but they cannot remember which one. Plan B, in case you can’t remember, is the emergency, day-after contraceptive a woman may take if she lets the pleasure principle trump the family...