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I was filling up my gas tank when a new, Milano Beige Metallic BMW 760Li sedan pulled up to the pump behind me. This 535-horsepower baby made my 328i look like a kid’s toy. A 760Li starts at $137,300 MSRP. But the driver looked like a regular guy—around fifty, trim with a head of dark…
Read More >>A woman was stabbed to death half a mile from my home last Monday. Her adult son apparently killed her and wounded his father. Police were called. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the alleged killer held up a knife in each hand and approached them. One officer fired a non-lethal beanbag. The man kept…
Read More >>America is big on halls of fame. Walls and walks of fame, too. But we’re missing one hall, and it’s more important than all the others combined. Yet we’ll never build it—it would honor too many people and so be way too costly. But these folks should be acknowledged. By way of explanation, I just…
Read More >>Congress’ “supercommittee”—six Democrats and six Republicans—is now meeting to determine how to help the nation get out of its debt crisis. They’ll recommend budget cuts. That’s a given. But the idea of raising revenue remains a legitimate consideration. As Doug Oberhelman, CEO of Caterpillar, told CBS News early this week, no politician who stands against…
Read More >>Yesterday—three days before the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (and with the government on alert to possible terror threats in New York and Washington, D.C.), President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress. He asked—17 times—that his proposed $447 billion American Jobs Act be passed “right now.” CBS’s Nora O’Donnell put it succinctly: “The President came…
Read More >>If Job couldn’t understand God’s ways, how can we? I refer to individuals who claim to speak for God and even speak to Him. God appeared to Job out of the tempest (or whirlwind) but did all the talking until the end when Job capitulated. “Indeed, I spoke without understanding / Of things beyond me,…
Read More >>Libyan rebels have taken the Tripoli compound of Muammar el-Qaddafi (New York Times spelling). The Libyan poet and writer Khaled Darwish wrote in a Times op-ed piece yesterday, “My son Mohammad waved our new flag of independence in one hand and held a martyr’s picture in the other as he chanted, ‘The blood of martyrs…
Read More >>I was driving back from Los Angeles and stopped for gas. A man in a yellow t-shirt with an illustration of a rattlesnake and the words, “Don’t Tread on Me,” saw me buying bottled water and commented, “Wish I could still afford that.” He held up two empty plastic thermoses. “Gonna fill up in the…
Read More >>New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff offered an interesting parenthetical remark on August 4: “(Whenever I write about Israel, I get accused of double standards because I don’t spill as much ink denouncing worse abuses by, say, Syria. I plead guilty. I demand more of Israel partly because my tax dollars supply arms and aid…
Read More >>The most courageous heroes often walk among us unseen. Sadly, many no longer grace us with their presence. On 3 August 1967, my fraternity brother and friend, First Lieutenant Howard Jon Schnabolk, a medical evacuation helicopter pilot, was shot down and killed in Vietnam. You would never have pointed to Howie as a hero. Yet…
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