Author Archive
Damn the Facts. Full Speed Backward.
I haven’t dragged economist-columnist Paul Krugman over here for a while because he’s been so ticked-off about everything in Washington, DC, but his NYTimes column today deserves a mention. He blows the whistle on Republican members of a commission charged with investigating what caused “the current financial and economic crisis in the…
Read More »Is Obama Just Being a Grown Up in a Room of Whiners?
Matt Bai of the NYTimes analyzes the compromise tax bill that is headed to the President’s desk today. Read the opinion piece here, and get the NYT if you want more. Such compromises, ideal or not, are the building blocks of responsible governance. If that makes Mr. Obama some kind of…
Read More »More Civil War Stamps
Globe Lists 10 ‘Most Educated’ Mass. Communities
See the slide-show list from www.boston.com.
Read More »Hot Art Market in Lowell; Creative Economy Shows Strength
LZ Nunn of the City’s Office of Cultural Affairs and Special Events reports that the art market in Lowell is surprisingly strong even as the Great Recession holds back the economy in general. Lowell has hundreds of artists of all kinds. Each one is a small business even if that’s…
Read More »Civil War Stamps
In the early 1960s, I was following my father’s lead and collecting stamps. I wasn’t obsessive about it, but I enjoyed the hobby for a while, particularly as the stamps were small windows onto history and geography. During the centennial of the Civil War (1961-65), the US Postal Service issued…
Read More »Whitman and Lincoln
The NYTimes online has an ongoing series about the Civil War, started in anticipation of the 2011 anniversary year when we will see lots of attention being paid to the beginning of the Civil War. This blog has already moved in that direction. Today’s entry at the NYT site is…
Read More »Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose
Lowell Gallery owner and all around good guy Guy Lefebvre sent me this nugget from an old Lowell newspaper. Some of the party platform planks have flopped and flipped through the years, but the rhetoric remains modern. This is from 1834, when Lowell was still a town, two years before…
Read More »Six More US Soldiers Die in Afghanistan
The top story in the NYTimes online at this hour is the loss of six more US soldiers in Afghanistan, killed when a van loaded with explosives blew up at an outpost manned by US/NATO and Afghan troops. Many Afghan and US soldiers were wounded in the attack, for which the…
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