Wednesday, May 22, 2013
East Montpelier I know just when this annual spring passion was born — not the date, but the situation. Great-Gramma Lange had taken my sister and me on our weekly walk to Washington Park, just two blocks from our home in Albany, N.Y. What marvels there were there! …
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
The Obama Justice Department’s crusade against leakers just took a quantum leap — and it’s extremely worrisome. It’s one thing to go after officials who leak classified information to the press. The Obama administration has gone after more of them than all previous administrations combined. Nonetheless, officials with …
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
I was 12 years old during Sam Ervin’s Watergate hearings, and watched them over the course of a long, hot summer, a time when I seemed to register the startling fact that my parents weren’t infallible and grownups did not necessarily know more about the world than I …
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
In Scottsdale, Ariz., there is a restaurant so far gone that even Gordon Ramsay’s shouting cannot save it. In fact, the owners of Amy’s Baking Company so terrified the man behind Kitchen Nightmares that he decided to quit working with them rather than endure them any longer. If …
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
You have to feel a teeny-tiny bit of sympathy for the Obama administration, which buckled to congressional pressure last year by agreeing to investigate a series of leaked news stories about clandestine victories in the war on terror, and is now being bludgeoned by many of those same …
Monday, May 20, 2013
The Chronicle of Higher Education tells us the median salary of public university presidents rose 4.7 percent in 2011-12 to more than $440,000 a year. This increase vastly outpaced the rate of inflation, as well as the earnings of the typical worker in the U.S. economy. It also …
Monday, May 20, 2013
Folks, deep breath time. This is not the end of the Obama presidency. It’s a bad stretch with an unfortunate confluence of unfortunate events. None of which will make the first paragraph — not even the first page — of the account of the Obama administration in the …
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Do you know your neighbors well enough to realize whether something horrible is happening in the house down the street? To call them if you need help? To trust that they’d put themselves at risk to help you? …
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Members of the Class of 2013, I salute you. As everyone keeps telling you, you are graduating at a difficult and even frightening time. I wish it were otherwise — that my generation was bequeathing you a finer world. We aren’t. The world into which you are entering …
Sunday, May 19, 2013
White River Junction We have a weed that grows on our farm, Agropyron repens, commonly called quack grass or witch grass, that grows and sets seed like most weeds but also propagates via a network of rhizomes — …
By Don's Early Light
