Those Cherry Cokes in a can the Coca-Cola people are selling these days are convenient, I'll grant you, and at least come close to tasting like the real thing. But, boy, do they take the…
Posts published in “Essays”
“If liberty means anything at all,” George Orwell wrote, “it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” From all indications, the gatekeepers for big media in the United States…
Has the collapse of Enron finally pushed social security “reform” off the political agenda for the foreseeable future? Half the stock in Enron employees' 401(k) retirement plans was Enron paper, contributed as a company match,…
In 1968, while speaking at an Unbirthday Party for Lyndon Johnson held during the Democratic convention in Chicago, I revealed to the audience the true story of a reporter who had once interviewed LBJ. After…
SUV, pickup truck or sedan, hardtop or convertible, it doesn't matter. You're driving what is in effect a moving billboard, labeled front, side and rear with the manufacturer's name and distinctive logo. Racing car drivers…
The story had everything: drugs, rape, torture, angry Indians, a corrupt justice system, gringo intervention… Philip True would have loved to cover it. But True, one-time correspondent for the San Antonio Texas Express-News in Mexico,…
Guns or butter. Butter or guns. If you take both, you’ll run out of funds. For generations, the economic textbooks taught that a country had to choose between fighting well or living well. Yet for…
The weekend before Thanksgiving, as the Taliban fled into the Hindu Kush and America’s children flocked to Harry Potter, the nation’s opinion formers discovered that the Bush administration had hijacked the Constitution with the Patriot…