It's been about 30 years since Joe DiMaggio did his Mr. Coffee commercial.

I always thought it was rather sweet and touching, the way DiMaggio offered a ''fi' dolla rebate,'' and how, when you think of it, Joltin' Joe really and truly is also the stuff you put in...

Considering all the hoopla we make over Thanksgiving, I'd be willing to bet that most Americans believe the Pilgrims were the first non-native American settlers in North America.

Set aside the putative Norse landfall, and the certainty of the Spanish in Florida and on the Pacific Coast. It's the Anglo-American...

Time's a-wastin'.

Next May, Norman Corwin celebrates his hundredth birthday.

The nation should celebrate with him.

The genius poet of radio, the Mozart of the spoken word, Corwin has won almost all the plaudits his craft can offer -- Peabody awards, an Emmy, an Academy Award nomination, and a...

Someone told me that one line of defense trotted out for South Carolina Republican congressman Joe Wilson's ill-bred, uncouth and untrue shout of ''You lie!'' at President Obama is that that sort of thing is done all the time in Britain's House of Commons.

Would Rep. Wilson, the small-y yahoo...

I turned on my television over the weekend and realized that the Sci Fi channel had vanished.

The same shows were there, but the name wasn't.

In its place is something called the Syfy channel.

Whose dumbed-down, look-down-the-nose idea was this, anyway?

Do the network honchos think this is...

What's left?

What else can California do to yank itself back from the brink, before it hits bottom and finds itself looking up to that perennial last-on-the-list state, Mississippi?

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's telling Californians our wallets are empty, our credit's no good. More billions have to be sliced out...

It's only one disgusting degree removed from animal cruelty and torture itself -- someone getting away with claiming First Amendment protections for making a living by selling videos of animal cruelty and torture.

The Supreme Court will hear the case of a man appealing his conviction for selling videos of...

The dollar is not going to be giving up the ghost as the world's currency any time soon. Too many billions of them are ferreted away in boxes in gardens and into mattress ticking and under armed guard around the globe: Ulysses S. Grant's face on a $50, Andrew Jackson's...

Isn't it enough that this country built about 700 miles of fencing along a 2,000-mile border with Mexico -- the previous administration's stunt gesture toward "border control" that ranks up there with the TSA yanking grannies out of line at the airport to show that it's protecting us from hijackers,...

How old do you have to be to be the mayor of Los Alamitos, California?

Because I can't believe that the guy who sent out this stupefying email is more than six -- at least his sense of humor, and that may be doing a disservice to six-year-olds.

The Orange...

This time, ''Mission Accomplished'' really means it.

Back during the presidential campaign -- remember that? -- I busted the place that Sarah Palin said was her favorite shop.

It wasn't Neiman-Marcus or Bloomie's, she said. It was an Anchorage resale shop called ''Out of the Closet.''

''Out of...

Some of your employees are facing manslaughter charges. Your biggest customers just yanked your contracts.

How do you repair your image and your reputation?

Simple: Change your name.

The Outfit Formerly Known as Blackwater, the huge military contracting and consulting firm, made its bones and its less than salubrious name...

California's prisons are so overcrowded that three federal judges say it's damaging the physical and mental health of the inmates. So they've tentatively ordered the release of tens of thousands of non-violent prisoners to stop it from continuing.

With that in mind, may I issue an invitation to these...

The Constitution says that a president-elect becomes the president automatically, at the stroke of noon on the appointed day, meaning that Barack Obama had already been president for a few minutes by the time he took the oath of office.

So the nervous flubs by Chief Justice John Roberts...

So at first I thought, riiiiight ...

The Bush White House, on its last night in power, announces that Vice President Dick Cheney pulled a muscle in his back while moving boxes. He'll be in a wheelchair for the Obama inauguration.

Dick Cheney -- a man with a notoriously bad...

She's usually in one of the big chairs in those marbled Senate hearing rooms, but today she's at the witness table in her confirmation hearing for Secretary of State.

Are her colleagues giving her a grilling, or just a once-over light searing?

Senatorial courtesy already puts her in the...

I suppose twice isn't exactly a pattern, but twice, now, in the past couple of weeks, the Senate minority leader, Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, has obligingly dropped doozies the way California avocado trees drop pre-guacamole bombs.

First, it was when McConnell, contemplating a bailout of the auto industry, pontificated thusly: "Republicans...

You have to give them points for trying, I suppose. Just don't give them any of my money.

Porn mogul Larry Flynt and a fellow named Joe Francis, who dreamed up those "Girls Gone Wild" videos, say they want Congress to deliver a $5-billion bailout to the porn industry.

I've...

It looks like the economic rulebook has been thrown out the window -- and the guy who wrote it jumped out right after it.

So when it comes to money now, it feels like anybody is just as dumb, or just as smart, as the next person.

My new...

Sometimes, even the wiliest of politicians just pitches a slow and easy one across the plate.

So it was with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican.

In their eagerness to deliver a swift kick to those devil automobile unions -- even if it means playing Dr. Kevorkian...