President Obama can talk about having no grand schemes and making no big gains, but the reality is he can't get anything of significance through Congress.
Presidents are not only the country's principal policy chief, shaping the nation's domestic and foreign agendas, but also the most visible example of our values.
The true snob never rests; there is always a higher goal to attain, and there are, by the same token, always more and more people to look down upon.
Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.
A lady is nothing very specific. One man's lady is another man's woman; sometimes, one man's lady is another man's wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide.
the only graceful way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you cant ignore it, top it; if you cant top it, laugh at it; if you cant laugh at it, its probably deserved
There was a taboo as a result of the Holocaust that people respected that anti-Semitism was an ugly thing and should be avoided. Now that taboo seems to have been broken with impunity.
I never read a single book as a child. I did not read as a child. I worked on the farm. I had books in the classroom, but that was it. I never read a single book outside of the classroom.
And so, I was not a military test pilot, but as soon as NASA expressed an interest in flying scientists and people who were not military test pilots, that was an epiphany that just came like a stroke of lightning.
We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.
The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial zodiac, too.
What is so seductive about texting, about keeping that phone on, about that little red light on the BlackBerry, is you want to know who wants you.
During the financial crisis and bailouts of 2008, it probably occurred to very few average people that we were entering a period of hardship for billionaires.
The pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation's city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration's economic recovery strategy for the nation.
Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and 'zombie' financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead.
In the subprime mortgage industry, bankers handed out iffy loans like candy at a parade because such loans meant revenue and, hence, bonuses for executives in the here-and-now.
In the last James Bond movie, the villain was a culture captain, a tycoon of culture, a Murdoch figure. It's not as if people don't know what is going on.
Public borrowing is costly these days, true, but interest rates on municipal bonds are still considerably lower than those borne by corporate debt.
The Obama administration's plan is to have the Federal Reserve regulate banks that might pose a 'systemic risk' if they were to fail.
Whereas all liberals are thought to erupt self-righteously whenever they feel like it, conservatives believe that they themselves are never permitted to say what they really think.
For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose in mind: to solidify the GOP base or to damage the institutions and movements aligned with the other side.
