Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Fair enough.  What surprises me is how many think that opinion supersedes  due process,  a person’s right to impartial justice.  In a recent commentary about Al Franken in The Washington Post, Anna Marie Cox, host of Crooked Media’s,

Tis the season when charities are making a final holiday push for money to fund their causes.  They know how to tug at the heartstrings, but some folks still appear to have money to burn. Recently, I read the auction houses,  Sotheby’s and Christie’s, are offering purses wit

While in public office, I opposed local government giveaways that enticed corporations to move to their communities.  The promise of jobs and payrolls taxes  seldom matched expectations. One company decided to build in Portland after receiving huge incentives. What the locals got in

While I’ve been away, no one in Washington has been sleeping.  Unlike my memoir, which makes slow progress, politics never  has writer’s block or worries about stopping to research facts. I’ll write some opinions about the world stage over the next few days.  Then I’ll retu

Japan, a country at the forefront of robotics, has come up with a solution for loneliness.  No doubt robot companions are in our foreseeable future, but the Japanese, like the rest of us, know it’s no substitute for genuine contact. That’s why a company in that country has come u

Last week, I planned to board a bus and head for the city center.  The art museum was displaying a dozen, old upright pianos that had been ornamented with the work of local artists.  After the viewing, musicians would treat the audience to a piano concert.  Unfortunately, I had the

During my stay in England in my early twenties, I came down with a second attack of measles. While I was  in quarantine, my fiancé left a novel outside my door, a  favorite of his which he thought would ease my convalescence.  The book was The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey, a

Sitting down to coffee with a woman at the retirement center the other day, she remarked about the crane working on the tower of a building nearby. I’d never seen the crane move and as we have a similar view, I asked how she came to see the work being done.  “Oh.” She smiled. 

One afternoon, as a child out for a walk with my mother, I stepped on a bee. She assumed I’d done it deliberately, and perhaps I had. I was very young. I can’t remember. But I can remember how I felt when she asked me to imagine what the bee must have experienced when I trod on i

Last week, I had an experience that dropped me into an alternate reality. I was walking to my apartment at the retirement center, drifting along a sun lighted corridor lined with windows when, ahead of me, a young woman, a nurse by her uniform, appeared to be blocking the exit where