Lessons

"The first kick I took was when I hit the ground. " -- Bruce Springsteen, "Born in the USA. " So now, Jonah has received a lesson in How Things Are. He is 19 months old. Sitting on his mother's lap on a recent Delta Airlines flight on approach to Atlanta, he was doing what babies tend to do on airplanes, particularly airplanes that are changing altitude. He was crying his little head off. Shut that "n----r baby" up. Those were the alleged words of the alleged man in the next seat just before he allegedly slapped the baby with an open palm, leaving a scratch below his right eye. The alleged man, 60-year-old Joe Rickey Hundley of Hayden, Idaho, denies this sequence of events and pleaded not guilty last week to a charge of simple assault.

It has been 10 years since then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's U.N. speech on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. I watched the secretary's presentation intently on assignment to Fort Jackson, S.C. that day. The presentation, of course, would make the final case for war with Iraq before the world, Congress and, arguably most importantly, the American people. Like many of my colleagues on active duty, I had been highly skeptical of this pretext for war while serving as a military planner, particularly over what many regarded as plausible exaggerations and outright distortions.

I never thought I'd hear a Baltimorean say such a thing. Last week, while reporting on the Rawlings-Blake administration's 10-year financial plan, I spoke with the mayor's press secretary, Ian Brennan. We covered a lot of ground in our hourlong phone conversation, but one comment in particular rewound itself repeatedly in my mind like a game-deciding, goal-line drive. One day, said Mr. Brennan, "We would love to be spoken of like … Pittsburgh as a city not suffering post-industrial urban decay any longer.

Letter writer Ruth Fleishman's fear that quarterback Joe Flacco may not renew his contract with the Ravens reminded me of an old Irish folk tale ("Flacco holding out? Say it ain't so, Joe," Feb. 16). In a small town in the west of Ireland along the Hills of Connemarra, there lived a precocious boy named Seasamh (pronounced "SHO-sav"). Seasamh was quiet, but inside him burned a desire to make his talents known to his fellow townspeople. Each year, all of the towns in the west of Ireland would send a representative to compete in a brutal contest of physical ability.

Raymond "Chip" Mason first met Joseph A. Sullivan over dinner at a Chicago restaurant, where the founder of Legg Mason Inc. interviewed the young bond trading manager for a job with the Baltimore company. A lot of the conversation, Mason recalled, was about whether Sullivan and his family were prepared to uproot themselves and move to the Charm City. Mason had seen such moves not work out before. "He admitted it would not be simple," said Mason, who retired after nearly 40 years at Legg's helm and now spends much of his time in Naples, Fla. But "he thought he could do more with us than anyone else.

It doesn't take a football fan to feel good about the Baltimore Ravens winning the Super Bowl . As thousands gather Tuesday morning for a victory parade through the streets of Charm City, let us take stock of just what an extraordinary moment this is. A team that oddsmakers saw as a prohibitive fourth-seed underdog in the National Football League playoffs had to overcome away games against star-studded franchises like New England and Denver and...

It took until the fifth try and the eighth day of the season, but the Washington Capitals finally managed to put together a complete game under the guidance of first-year coach Adam Oates and come away with a victory. Fueled by contributions from every corner of the lineup, from Alex Ovechkin through to Joel Ward and John Erskine, Washington played a smart and aggressive brand of hockey to defeat the Buffalo Sabres, 3-2, on Sunday afternoon at Verizon Center . It was the only reward the Capitals wanted after days of making gradual progress in getting up to speed with their new coach and new system.

Outspoken Del. Patrick L. McDonough outlined his plans for tough penalties for gun crimes as firearms owners gathered at a Bel Air shooting range as part of a national series of events to push back against proposed gun control measures. "What I'm mad as hell about is they want to take our Second Amendment rights away, but they don't care about people who are really committing the crimes," McDonough said of people proposing new gun laws. He was speaking at the Horst & McCann indoor gun range in Bel Air as part of a series of events dubbed "Gun Appreciation Day," by a Republican political consultant, and staged as a protest against new gun laws that President Barack Obama and governors including Martin O'Malley have proposed in the wake of the mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school.

One of the great works in politics and political rhetoric is John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage. Courage has always been important to the Kennedys, who created a Profile in Courage Award a generation ago, and the awards, although usually liberal in their basis, have included conservatives as well. The 1956 work itself is ideologically pretty balanced. The book, which I read decades ago and also very recently, concerns political courage, irrespective of political party or philosophy.

Waiting at Patient First this morning for my bronchitis to be diagnosed, I was trapped in an examining room listening to Christmas music. There was also a small child in a nearby room screaming in pain and panic, and that helped me to understand what Mary and Joseph must have thought about that kid with his damn drum.* Withal, I arrived at a fresh understanding of the importance of this music. That "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" prefigures the surveillance state has long been understood, but I had not had much occasion to reflect on the lyrics to "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.