NEWS
By Garrison Keillor | January 13, 2010
I went to church in San Francisco on Sunday, the big stone church on Nob Hill, whose name is an old slang term for a rich person, where a gaggle of railroad tycoons built their palaces high above the squalid tenements of the poor back in the Gilded Age, and there with considerable pomp we baptized a dozen infants into the fellowship of faith and we renounced the evil powers of this world, which all in all is a good day's work. The term "evil powers" is one you hear only in the church, or in Marvel comic books, or Republican speeches, and it isn't something I renounce every day. I am a romantic Democrat, raised on William Saroyan and Pete Seeger and Preston Sturges, and we have faith in the decency of the little guy, and we believe you can depend on the kindness of strangers.
NEWS
June 19, 1995
An ambassador, someone cynically once said, is sent abroad to lie for his country. U.S. career diplomat John D. Negroponte confused that with lying to his country. As U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the early '80s, Mr. Negroponte systematically suppressed reports to Washington describing kidnappings and murders of political dissidents by a secret unit of the Honduran army. Instead he was responsible for false reports to Washington that portrayed the Honduran regime as committed to democracy and the rule of law.Why should an experienced U.S. diplomat send false reports to the State Department concealing damaging information about the nation he was assigned to?
NEWS
By Tim Warren and Tim Warren,Sun Book Editor | August 14, 1994
"Dixie City Jam" is the seventh crime novel by James Lee Burke, and it appears that, by its early position on the best-seller lists, that he is finally getting the recognition he deserves. Mr. Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels have been among the best in American crime fiction of the past decade, and while fans have been touting this series from the opening book, "Neon Rain," commercial success has come more slowly. "Dixie City Jam," one of the strongest books in the series, may just put him over the top.Robicheaux is a former New Orleans homicide detective, a recovering alcoholic, who now operates as a sheriff's deputy in New Iberia, La., and also runs a fishing camp there.
SPORTS
By KEVIN ECK | September 7, 2008
I've been waiting for weeks to hear those two glorious words spoken with vitriol as only Vickie Guerrero can. Goodbye, whimpering, apologetic Vickie. Welcome back, scowling queen of mean. I'm so glad that WWE has resisted turning SmackDown's wickedly entertaining general manager babyface (reportedly that was to be the original ending of her story line with Edge). It was great to see her morph back into the woman viewers love to hate on SmackDown. (Go to baltimoresun.com/ringposts)
NEWS
By Jonah Goldberg | August 6, 2008
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. Peter Rodman is dead. And memory is dying with them. Over the weekend, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, the 89-year-old literary titan, and Mr. Rodman, the American foreign policy intellectual, passed away. I knew Mr. Rodman and liked him very much. We were partners in a debate at Oxford University last year. He provided the gravitas. A former protege of Henry Kissinger and high-ranking official in two Republican administrations, Mr. Rodman was one of the wisest of the wise men of the conservative foreign policy establishment.
NEWS
September 22, 2005
SIMON WIESENTHAL, who dedicated his life to not allowing the world to forget the extraordinary atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, will himself be long remembered for his extraordinary moral courage. He served all of humanity by calling evil to account. Mr. Wiesenthal, who died Tuesday at 96, somehow survived the horror of years in Nazi death camps (and two suicide attempts) to then summon the strength to pursue the surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust to the ends of the earth - in some cases, for decades.