Not long ago a question arose about the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Stylistically speaking, is this mighty ship a “she” or an “it”? The answer is, she is a “she.”That definitive and unequivocal reply comes from the public information office of the U.S. Navy. Nautical tradition must be served – and this tradition is not […]

Consider the shock and awe of good news:North Korea dropped its bluster and endorsed the multilateral talks that the United States insisted on. China decided it was a good idea to join those talks. (“The Iraq war has brought a change,” said a professor of international studies at People’s University in Beijing.) Iran’s former president, […]

So did we win?Or to put the question more precisely: “What did we win?The time has come to make an accounting of the costs and benefits of the Iraq war.That isn’t as easy as it might seem after the relatively quick defeat of Iraqi forces. Even the president has hesitated.“Our victory in Iraq is certain, […]

AUSTIN, Texas -Boy, there is no shortage of creatively terrible ideas from the Republican Party these days. Those folks are just full of notions about how to make people’s lives worse – one horrible idea after another bursting out like popcorn – and all of them with these sickeningly cute names attached to them.Consider the […]

So there I was, on hands and knees, crawling through a 40-foot long, four-foot-high, human colon.It wasn’t a real colon, of course. No human has a colon that size, except maybe Marlon Brando, and I’m sure he has security people to prevent media access.No, this was a replica. It’s called the Colossal Colon, and I’m […]

We take on so much that what we do often lacks quality. The congregation at my church is talking about how to spend money we commit to causes outside our walls.We are asking whether we should give a few bucks to a bazillion different agencies or give more significant amounts of money to fewer efforts. […]

The public hearing on the bill to allow the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes to have a casino occurred April 11 at the Augusta Civic Center, the normal location for proposals expected to attract crowds.As the hearing opened, Judiciary Committee co-chair Sen. Peggy Pendleton looked at the audience and set the ground rules:• No displaying of […]

“The recent shootings in the Washington area,” said the good gray New York Times, “has left the region nearly numb with fear.”Airlines are projecting huge losses for 2003, said the good gray Times, “and memories of how the first Persian Gulf war helped kill off Pan Am and Eastern Airlines only adds to the gloom.”The […]

We are in a strategic pause as the White House and the world try to assess the impact of the Iraq war.The Bush administration is clearly hoping there will be a “demonstration effect” from the fate of Saddam’s regime. Rhetorical slaps at Syria and Iran are testing whether other rogue states will bend without the […]

The quickness of the coalition victory must have disappointed the left terribly. Q: Mr. Answer Man, I notice that R.W. Apple, chief front-page analyst of The New York Times, got caught predicting another quagmire, though he had the wit to avoid the exact word this time. Why does he keep doing this?A: Quagmireology is not […]