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Posts published in “from the archives…”

A Few Hundred Bucks Will Get Some Attention

Rest assured, nothing is going to be done about this, but the news is still worth some cogitation. The new figures are out, and they show that almost 44 million people are without health insurance.…

My First Day in Berlin Last Spring

I took the prescription sleeping pills before take-off but slept only in the thinnest intervals, perhaps one hour out of eight. This was to prove of some difficulty on my first day in Berlin, since…

Them Bums

Early in the 1947 baseball season; the season Jackie Robinson broke in; a sweet spring evening in New Jersey; I turned on our under the pillow radio and we found the Brooklyn Dodgers; Red Barber…

The Alaska Railroad

It was a late summer afternoon in Anchorage, Alaska. Dale and I were outside, in the backyard of the small house we rented. We lived in an older section of town called Spenard. A couple…

Rush to Judgment

Was Rush Limbaugh high when he said, “There's nothing good about drug use. It destroys individuals’ families, societies, some might say this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing…

Harvest Time

One of the most heated debates in the recall election centers on whether or not illegal immigrants should have California driver's licenses, with detractors of the plan already gathering signatures for a ballot measure to…

Seniors Set Record Time for Sinkyone

Alexander Cockburn and Bruce Anderson, legitimate recipients of mailings from the American Association of Retired People, hiked the arduously magnificent Sinkyone Wilderness Trail last weekend in record time. The sprightly seniors got from Bear Harbor…

Time Is Not On Our Side

Things are getting weird. My roommate has moved all of his furniture, which is to say, all the furniture in the house, into the middle of the living room. He says that his ex-girlfriend has…

Mendo’s Unstable Budget

The just concluded County budget hearings saw the supervisors institute an across-the-board 10.1% spending cut. Everything got whacked that much. Redundant departments?  Excessive pay for department heads? Crazy spending?  No.  No real cuts at all.…

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