CHARLESTON, S.C. -- They are nearing 70 now, the 11 men who were 12-year-old boys in 1955 and who are remembered for the baseball games they could not play. They were -- actually, with their matching blue blazers and striped ties, they still are -- members of the Cannon Street All Stars.
WASHINGTON -- Liberals have a rendezvous with regret. Their largest achievement is today's redistributionist government. But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.
WASHINGTON -- In 1927, seven years before the board game was created, Washington state decided to play monopoly. It gave a private interest the exclusive right to operate a ferry on 55-mile long Lake Chelan in the northern Cascade Mountains.
WASHINGTON -- On Oct. 12, 1948, the campaign train of Tom Dewey, Republican nominee against President Harry Truman, pulled into Beaucoup, Ill., where, from the rear platform, he would speak to about 1,000 people. Before he began, the engineer mistakenly caused the train to lurch a few feet backward, frightening some but injuring none.
LOS ANGELES -- In 1941, Carl Karcher was a 24-year-old truck driver for a bakery. Impressed by the large numbers of buns he was delivering, he scrounged up $326 to buy a hot dog cart across from a Goodyear plant. And the war came.
"People who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks."
-- Randall Jarrell,
"A Sad Heart at the Supermarket"
WASHINGTON -- Shortly before the Supreme Court agreed to rule on the constitutionality of Obamacare's individual mandate, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed, 2-1, its constitutionality. Writing for the majority, Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee, brusquely acknowledged that upholding the mandate means there is no limit to Congress's powers under the Commerce Clause.
WASHINGTON -- Born during what is mistakenly called the debt-ceiling "debacle" last summer, the supercommittee may die without sending Congress a 10-year $1.2 trillion (at least) deficit-reduction plan. This is not properly labeled a failure.
WASHINGTON -- The Stolen Valor Act of 2005, a compound of political pandering and moral exhibitionism, was whooped through the Senate, aka the "world's greatest deliberative body," by unanimous consent; the House, joining the stampede, passed it by a voice vote. So Xavier Alvarez now hopes the Supreme Court will save him from punishment for lying.
WASHINGTON -- A few millennia from now, when archaeologists from an ascendant Brazil or Turkey or wherever sift the shards of American civilization and find the ruins of the Big House in Ann Arbor, Mich., they will wonder why a 109,901-seat entertainment venue was attached to an institution of higher education.
