Archive for ‘Opinion’

  • My Irish Up: News of the Weak

    By Mike Corrigan BN Columnist Last week, at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, United States President Barack Obama shook the hand of Cuban leader Raul Castro! There is photographic evidence! Senator John McCain likened the gesture to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938 — though McCain could not confirm that the Cubans were promised […]

  • Small World: U.S. decline — making the best of it

    By Henry Precht BN Columnist “For the first time in nearly 40 years, most Americans believe their country’s influence is on the decline and that the United States wields less global power than it did a decade ago. A majority also believes for the first time that the United States should ‘mind its own business,’ […]

  • My Irish Up: Back to the stupidity

    By Mike Corrigan BN Columnist Exhausted from an arduous schedule of raising millions of dollars so they can get elected again next year, the 113th Congress is about to go home. Exhausted, in 2014 they plan on giving themselves 252 days off! Only! With Washington abandoned, activity in Congress could well pick up this Christmas, […]

  • Uppermost House: Reaching for butterflies

    By S. Peter Lewis BN Columnist He was trying to catch butterflies, the man thought as he knelt by the couch. But the thought made no sense. None of this made sense. He’d sped home from an evening meeting interrupted by a strange and urgent phone call, the secretary at first annoyed by the blaring […]

  • Small World: National service or disserve?

    By Henry Precht BN Columnist A few weeks back four of us — retired Foreign Service friends — got together for lunch. Some might have called it the meeting of a socialist cell, Nostalgia Division, because we spent most of the time lamenting the present and at the end divided the bill equally, notwithstanding that two […]

  • My Irish Up: Declaring war on Black Friday

    By Mike Corrigan BN Columnist It’s not like we don’t have enough contentiousness in this country already, we can’t be happy unless we’re starting another war on something, anything. Fifty years ago, we had a War on Poverty and, because that worked for a while, we decided at some point that war was a profitable […]

  • Small World: No runs, no hits, plenty of errors

    By Henry Precht BN Columnist These past weeks have revealed damaging mistakes in Washington. All — with a little attention to detail and a lot of inspiration driven by the public good — might have been avoided. None, especially without that crucial second condition, will be easily corrected. If we lived in a “shame” society […]

  • My Irish Up: The real story of Thanksgiving

    By Mike Corrigan BN Columnist Remember those November-time plays you performed in elementary school, the servers in paper Pilgrim’s hats, all the third graders running around like wild Indians, an early form of type-casting? Well, Thanksgiving wasn’t actually like that in 1621 — though today it is, provided you take the family out for dinner […]

  • Small World: Ode to 8.3 million souls

    By Henry Precht BN Columnist We spent two weeks in New York City this month, renting an apartment in Brooklyn Heights from a friend of a relation. We had visited the city occasionally, but never longer than passing through for a few days. For me, the place holds a sort of mythic memory. It’s where […]

  • Uppermost House: The gift at the door

    By S. Peter Lewis BN Columnist On a recent Friday evening, following sketchy directions from a toothless guy at a gas station, I turned a rented sedan onto a quiet street in a small town in western Virginia and began scanning house numbers. When I got close, I flicked the headlights off and drove the […]