Columnists

Setting Limits With Obama

By Bob Burnett
Saturday September 24, 2011 - 04:03:00 PM

Barack Obama has been a disappointment but in 2012 Americans will either vote for him or a Republican Neanderthal. To stay in the White House Obama will need our support. That’s an opportunity to set limits, to make specific demands. Here are four suggestions.

Jobs: In the most recent New York times/CBS News poll 59 percent of respondents were most concerned about the economy and jobs. President Obama must focus on his jobs plan because every American who wants to work should be able to find a decent job with a living wage. -more-


New: Dispatches From The Edge: Arms, China & the Obama Administration

By Conn Hallinan
Thursday September 22, 2011 - 12:43:00 PM

The recent decision by the Obama Administration to sell $5.8 billion in arms to Taiwan is a bit of a head scratcher, rather like the hunter who goes into the woods with one bullet. Seeing a deer to his left and a turkey to his right, he shoots in the middle. It will annoy Taipei, irritate Beijing, stir up the China bashers in the U.S., and increase tensions in a region of the world that is already pretty tense. -more-


New: Laura's Law in a Nutshell

By Ralph E. Stone
Thursday September 22, 2011 - 02:36:00 PM

Laura Wilcox, a 19-year old sophomore from Haverford College, was working at Nevada County's public mental health clinic during her winter break from college. On January 10, 2001, she and two other people were shot to death by Scott Harlan Thorpe, a 41-year old mental patient who resisted his family's attempt to seek treatment. Thorpe was found incompetent to stand trial and was sent to Atascadero State Hospital and was later transferred to California's Napa State Hospital. -more-


Senior Power… The Only Disease

By Helen Rippier Wheeler
Thursday September 22, 2011 - 11:43:00 AM

Alzheimer’s disease (AD,) the only disease among the top 10 causes of death for Americans that has no known cure or treatment, already affects an estimated 5.4 million Americans, at a cost of $183 billion a year. -more-


My Commonplace Book (a diary of excerpts copied from printed books, with comments added by the reader.)

By Dorothy Bryant
Thursday September 22, 2011 - 11:49:00 AM

The works of a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and obscene owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish. What of Heroism, what of Eternal Light was in a man and his Life, is with very great exactness added to the Eternities, remains forever a new divine portion of the Sum of Things.

—Thomas Carlyle (1795—1881), prolific essayist, satirist, historian -more-


New: On Mental Illness: Something for Nothing

By Jack Bragen
Thursday September 22, 2011 - 10:53:00 AM

I spent most of my life with my mind dominated by magical thinking, and this caused me to have a lot of problems. My mind seemed to be on a different wavelength than those of other people’s. Without knowing it, I had a poor grasp of reality. When I made mistakes, ones that could create bad consequences, my mind didn’t acknowledge those mistakes. The rule was that my mind had to believe that everything was always O.K., and my perceptions of the world were warped to conform to that. Partly, I lived in a world of wishful thinking. Also, I was protecting my mind from the often upsetting nature of the truth. -more-


Wild Neighbors: Post-Communist Birds

By Joe Eaton
Wednesday September 21, 2011 - 03:07:00 PM
Eurasian Jay in Berlin: a post-Cold War winner.

Earlier this year I reported on a study out of Finland that contended that, in Europe at least, passerine (songbird) species with relatively larger brains made out better in urban areas than did smaller-brained species. Winners included corvids (crows and magpies), tits (relatives of the North American chickadees), nuthatches, and wrens. Buntings, Old World warblers, and Old Word flycatchers were among the small-brained city avoiders. -more-