Well, I do take my country personally and think, for someone who loves a free society, there's no other way to take it. I've been told by a fellow writer who I respect enormously, that I'm the last American who gives a shit.

I'm damned if I'll believe that.

I think we're a country that pretty consistently comes to our own rescue late . . . but late is not never and we always seem to get there. People who care have been wringing their hands since Mark Twain, but Twain never gave up on us. He was pessemistic about the influence of lobbyists, but so was Will Rogers and so am I.

Twain said "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time
and the government when it deserves it." That's a fine definition of taking your country personally.

• Ted Turner, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Andrew Carnegie
  The big news is that Warren Buffett has decided to give away most of his wealth. And the manner in which he has chosen to do that is big news as well.
• Veering For Sure, but Veering Back
  If the President uses his annual State of the Union speech before Congress as a kind of report-card, then why not the 4th of July for we citizens to chip in our opinions?
• The Sustainable Mind
  Sustainable is the word of the decade, possibly the adjective for an entire century yet to come—a buzz-word, jargon, lingo of the linguists and necessary part of every top-ten, self-help or planetary-help best seller. Necessary hyphenated headline for the hip, the in, the new-age when that term is already old-age.
• Real Estate Prices and Martin Luther King, Jr.
  What Martin Luther King, Jr. was unable to completely accomplish during the Civil Rights Marches of the sixties is happening now, in cities where segregation was most problematic.
• You and I Should Be ‘Stuck’ Like This
  First, it’s kind of a jolt to be led to believe that Jeff Skilling’s lawyers won’t get paid, only to find they have already cashed in to the tune of $40 million and are merely whining about more.
• Glacially, The New York Times Enters This Century
  The New York Times was printing in 1906, as it was in 1946. During those intervening forty years, America fought two world wars and “Fair Dealed” its way out of a devastating depression.
• Trying to Get My Mind Around Barbaro
  The colt’s racing career is over, his crushing injury witnessed by a crowd dressed for a wedding instead of a funeral.
• Mint Juleps and the Smell of Kentucky Bluegrass
  Racing is still more Ernie Banks than Barry Bonds, more Bing Crosby than Michael Jackson.
• A Writer, Not Necessarily an Author
  Recent embarrassments into the realm of plagiarized work notwithstanding, Viswanathan’s publisher, Little, Brown and Co., pulled her chick-lit book from the bookstores nationwide in a record seven days from the first whisper of impropriety.
• Angry As Hell For Not Paying Attention
  We are, as individuals, as a nation, as faith-based groups, bloggers, husbands, wives, entrepreneurs and wage-slaves . . . angry.
• Lessons Forgotten from My Old Daddy
  America has its own old daddies, we keep referring to as founding fathers, but we don’t really believe it. Not all that much history taught anymore about how we came to be a nation.
• A Wake-Up Call Over Arrogance and Power
  The next to fall, although it may be a few years down the line, are likely to be among the Christian conservative broadcasters. Last year, Harper’s Magazine ran a piece by Chris Hedges subtitled Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters.
• The New Americans
  The heads of industry today don’t build roads or automobiles. They don't build anything. They bankrupt and merge, fire off and wiggle out, whine and complain about the position in which they find themselves. They beg for help from the courts and federal government while conspiring to negotiate their golden parachutes.
• The Guy-Child, Lost In Space
  Modern parents are guilty of entertaining their children beyond any logical limits. The youngster who doesn’t have a cell-phone, iPod, library shelf stacked with video games and a 600 channel TV in his room is underprivileged. He’s been cocooned since infancy and remains, unsurprisingly, an infant.
• Sebastian and Me
  In an acknowledgement of codgerism, I remember how American industry crowed and preened and beat its chest after the 2nd World War, raking in all the chips left on the production table. We misread having the only industry that wasn’t in smoking ruins, for being somehow on top of our game. As the industrial world recovered it began sixty years of kicking our American industrial ass.
• Starting With a Clean Sheet
  The technology news today talks about Microsoft delaying its planned introduction of the next-generation Windows until 2007. The delay of Vista makes me feel pretty much behind the curve, as I loaf along reasonably happily on Windows 2000.
• To Watch It All a Second Time, Press 9
  When Wall Street cheers, hang on to your wallet. The denizens of the financial community are currently in love with the sixty-three-thousand-million dollar deal that reunites AT&T with Bell South to cobble together a monopoly the feds broke up in 1984.
• Parenting Kids and Occasionally, When Needed, Our Country
  It’s time, way past time but not yet too late, to march President George Walker Bush by the ear, to the national corner-store and require his shamefaced confession.
• Something Way Out of Whack (and I Just Patented Whack)
  The Blackberry (in case you’ve been on another planet) is a much-loved hand-held device that lets you write and receive e-mail from the airport VIP Lounge. One can only hope that other much-loved, hand-held devices are exempt from patent.
• A Cheap-Shot at the Cheney-Shot
  Manners in the field have much to do with the proper clothes in England, but our far more democratic rules merely frown on shooting your hunting buddies.
• Man Refuses to Sell Big Mac, Sues McDonald's For Loss of Job
  Contacted at the corporation’s Oakbrook, Illinois headquarters, a spokesman asked “Why are you reporting this perfectly bogus story?”
• If You Can't Stand the Heat
  The newspaper business is not in danger from ‘personal attacks, profanity and hate speech,’ but it is in great risk of irrelevancy, as news continues to be fed to us too quickly for print runs.
• Google vs Microsoft, Beauty and the Beast
  Like we say “Give me a Kleenex” when we’re talking about any brand of tissue or “can you Xerox that for me” in a copy store full of Canons, “Googling” has become the lingua franca of search.
• Our Newly-Lost Sense of Astonishment
  If you want to astonish anyone these days, they gotta be old enough to pre-date the personal computer.
• Great Reasons to Entirely Get Rid of the Income Tax, #1
  An estimated $6 trillion in offshore business assets would come back home except for the tax code.
• Doing Away With Tookie
  Twelve days from now, unless Governor Schwarzenegger commutes his death sentence, California will put Stanley Williams to death by lethal injection.
• We Tried “Limited Government” and it Failed
  A hundred years ago, Mark Twain said “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” That was correct in his day and there has been a sharp decline in the intervening years.
• Detroit's Delphic Oracle
  Two different Delphis here, the auto parts manufacturer in Detroit and the ancient Greek city on Mount Parnassus.
• A Life Well Spent
  Harry Heltzer died last week and Harry was not exactly a household name, but then at 94 he’d been out of the public eye for quite a time.
• Labor and Management, Mutual Destroyers
  Demanding the impossible and caving to those demands locked labor and management into mutual destruction. Any first-year actuarial student would have forecast disaster and now it has arrived.
• America Coming of Age
  I hear echoes from fifty years back, a reverberation of that lost generation with whom I shared the decades, who claimed nothing was worth the doing because we were all doomed to nuclear holocaust.
• Corporate America, Way Too Greedy At the Top
  Wall Street has become a huge game of musical chairs. All the players walk in circles, paying each other outrageous salaries and benefit packages because they know that the music stops periodically.
• The Need to Belong
  Street gangs, I would suggest, are not any different in their appeal (and therefore their success) than college fraternities and sororities, political parties or Little League baseball teams.
• Detroit Auto-Makers On the Cutting Edge
  And so it’s Back-To-The-Future with the American producers building muscle-cars and four to five-ton behemouth SUVs as gasoline edges toward $4.
• Apple and the Music Industry, Two Flavors of Intransigence
  The old political adage of it’s the economy, stupid is turned on its ear within the music biz and screams to anyone who listens that it’s the Internet, stupid.
• Taking the Time to Take Time-Off
  My grandfather had that greatest of luxuries, the now quickly disappearing lavishness, not of money or finer things, but of time.
• Pat Robertson Needs a Reality Check
  Pat Robertson is the best argument I know against intelligent design.
• Trim the Hedge Before the Hedge Trims You
  Of course the last time we allowed really extreme leveraging of investments (also known as buying on margin), we got the ’29 crash for our efforts but that’s way back there with the Civil War in anyone’s current memory.
• Another Chicago Architectural Landmark
  The Santiago Calatrava building planned for the lakefront, unlike the botched-up Skidmore redesign of the World Trade Center in NYC, may actually get built as the designer intended.
• Where Are You Now, John L. Lewis?
  On this last day of July, storm-clouds are gathering over what’s left of the union movement, begun a hundred years ago in Chicago with the birth of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World).
• Hospitals: Places Where You Go to Get Sick
  It bugs me to have to visit someone in the hospital and, until recently, being bugged was a manner of speech, but it has now taken on darker implications.
• Dressing For Dinner
  I really thought it was pretty much impossible to under-dress for a meal at McDonalds, but that will soon enough not be the case.
• A Bunker Mentality at WTC
  Call it Freedom Tower if you must, but it’s been bunkerized, made fearful instead of free by the heavy hand of Skidmore, Owings Merrill (the Wal-Mart of architectural firms).
• No Child Left Behind . . .
  . . . even if we have to drag him, fake her statistics or jam their futures down everyone’s throat. Which confirms the universal truth that figures don’t lie, but liars figure.
• The Jack-Armstrong Political Action Committee
  We’re going to bring Congressional payoffs out of the darkness and into the sunshine.
• It's 1am, Do You Know Where Your Credit-Card Is?
  Forty million more credit cards at risk out there, who-knows-where. That, according to this morning’s revelation and this time it's an Arizona credit-card processor, Credit Card Solutions, who dropped the ball.
• Those Rascally Computer Games
  Choking over my morning coffee as I read (New Yorker, May 16th, Brain Candy by Malcolm Gladwell) that computer and video games are increasing rather than decreasing our national average IQ scores, I looked for the disclaimer.
• To Quote John Dillinger
  The modern and up-to-date 21st century gunslinger pays off someone at FedEx or UPS or bribes a baggage-handler to get the map of where the money is.
• Poles Apart
  And so, as the Avery polar expedition opens the page to Admiral Peary, another opens that tells of Peary’s indispensable companion, Matt Henson.
• Losing Sight of FDR
  Roosevelt presided over a country flat on its back. It wasn’t a matter of two-job families struggling to buy their first home, it was no-job extended families losing everything they ever owned.
• My Plan to Save General Motors
  There has to be a plan, because without one GM is a dead-man standing and has no chance whatsoever of surviving in the marketplace.
• Dissent and My Right to It
  What I find most troubling is the hollow promise of allowing First Amendment dissent and then cordoning it off, out of sight and presumably out of mind, in secure zones.
• Puttin' On My Derby Hat
  Life is a heartbreaker and the Derby is an annual restorative.
• The Essence of America
  The choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience defines essence and if America is an idea then Woody Norris is as much its essence as anyone.
• Closing Time
  Three other ‘new guys’ made headlines this past week as Viacom sneaked it’s compensation disclosure under the door at the SEC . . . after the Friday market closed.
• Dear Valued Customer . . .
  As soon as they call you that, you know the scam is on, these same PR types responsible for the endless ‘hold’ on the phone, breaking in from time to time to assure you that your call is important.
• GM's Cocooned 14th Floor
  It’s typical of a company that’s suffering from a stultified executive culture to grab at a marketing effort to gloss over decades of failed imagination.
• Saying Goodbye to Daddy's Cadillac
  Daddy drove a ’59 Cadillac and it was the first of many he was to buy brand new, that nowadays classic with the CBS taillights. White over yellow, it was huge and powerful, grand and slightly ridiculous by today’s standards, but it represented General Motors at their Zenith.
• The Fallacy of the 80 Hour Week
  Larry Summers famously stated that tenure-track at Harvard requires eighty hour weeks and that’s part of the reason women are not competitive in mathematics disciplines.
• Who's God are We Talking About?
  It’s now called intelligent design which posits that someone helped nudge science along and that someone of course was God.
• What's With the Clothes?
  Robin critiqued Condoleezza Rice’s choice of clothing at her Wiesbaden Army Airfield tour on Wednesday and (apparently) found it soaked in sexual meaning.
• No Finger's Gonna Save This Dike
  Hollywood and the music industry keep trying to stick a finger in the hole in the downloading dike and it's not going to work
• Sometimes You Just Gotta Laugh . . .
  . . . because otherwise it hurts too much to read what's actually going on inside what passes for Homeland Security.
• Bob Samuelson's Column
  I hope the link to Bob's column, Cut My Benefits, stays active at the Washington Post archives for a while, because we all ought to read it.
• A Market Economy Gone Rogue
  I am a lifelong ‘market economy' supporter, a guy who thinks the major force behind our national success is surely part multi-ethnic, part individual opportunity, part regulatory simplicity, but mostly developing markets where they did not exist.
• Gaming Your Retirement Income
  Sounds like roulette but it's called ‘privatizing social security' and a good many thoughtful economists think W named it thus because it takes a public trust and puts it in private pockets.
• The Corporate Chop-Shop
  2005 is to be the Year of the Merger. It's been declared such on the front page of the New York Times and who would argue with such a venerable icon as the NYT?
• Religion (and other things) Without Fear
  The world's religions are based on fear. Fear is as necessary to being a Muslim or Christian as water is to fish. All of which prevents much forward motion in the religions of the world.
• Time For the Landscape Architects
  It's past time for my profession to be invited in to ameliorate the “bunkerization” of Washington, as well as our embassies and corporate entities around the world.
• Here's a Hundred Bucks, Go to College!
  Is it irony, George? Some sort of perverted sense of humor, or are you serious, standing up there behind the lectern at Florida Community College, promising to increase the maximum federal grant for low-income college students by $100 a year for five years.
• Phillip Johnson
  Phillip Johnson is dead and for the most part the public will glance at the page-one notice, acknowledge that 96 years is a long life and turn to the sports section.
• A Little Song, a Little Dance (a little high-test down your pants)
  You gotta hand it to Chevron-Texaco and “trust the man who wears the star” to jump right in there when times are tough, the country is at war and a quick profit can be turned.
• Don't Blame the Old-Timers
  The whole world is getting older and panic is rampant, particularly in America and Europe.
• Don't Need to Study This
  There must be a lot of money in it, because we are endlessly studying things, from whether or not the globe is getting warmer to if chewing gum is related to the use of ‘like' in conversation.
• What Drives the Poverty Rate
  The poverty rate was up for the third year in a row, according to 2003 records and that included almost thirteen million children.
• The Trouble With Hubble
  No one knew, when the Hubble telescope was launched, that it was going to be a star-of-the-show on the level of Galileo, Marco Polo or Magellan.
• Red State, Blue State, a Lot of Crap
  Crap perfectly describes my attitude toward those who have suddenly found it fashionable to divide my country up like a poorly-made quilt.
• Alan Greenspan - It's Not Always “Better Late Than Never"
  Alan Greenspan is warning us now about the dangers of the growing deficit, when three years ago he supported the Bush giveaway of trillions to the rich.
• Merck & Vioxx, Blind-Siding the Back Ache
  A couple of days ago a Washington Post article about the withdrawal by Merck & Co. of their flagship painkiller Vioxx caught my eye.
• Our Lemming Side
  Becoming as a species ever better-informed and lesser-educated, our increasing similarity to those furry-footed rodents is apparent and Darwin be damned
• Blindsiding The Back Ache
  I'd written a column just a little over two years ago that questioned the sanity of advertising drugs like they were luxury automobiles and the Vioxx ad was my target.
• Our Pants Have Long Been Pressed in the American Crease
  Reading last night, a low fire burning comfortably in the fireplace, isolated in this small Czech village and snug (smug?) in the vastness of my personal comfort.
• PAC Formed for Americans to Buy Back Government
  The plan is to solicit an annual five bucks from every American, with which he will bid for the votes of senators and representatives on significant issues.
• Young Killers
  The newspapers are littered with calls to action. Gotta do something now that we're seeing this strange youth culture of violence played out across the high school campuses of the nation
• Used Car Brokerage Houses
  So, you're interested in this fine little stock over here on the back of the lot. Looks a bit dusty, I know, but she's a real strong driver
• Skinning the Tax Man
  Here's the deal. You buy insurance. In 1913 Congress approved an exemption from taxes on life insurance in order to help widows and orphans
• Breaking Up is Hard to Do
  She's led me on so unashamedly for all these years and for what? I don't want to say I'm bitter about Golf, ‘cause I'm not a bitter man but you give and you give and you give and all she remembers is the day you stopped giving.
• Thirsting For Missile Defense
  How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee more than fresh water, more than alternative fuels that would break our addiction, more than fast, efficient ground transportation
• It Means Something, But What?
  I'm sitting here at my computer while most of America, and the west coast for sure, is asleep and I'm thinking about the numbers
• The Heresy of Juxtaposition
  Few things bring me so indignantly out of my chair as items in the news that fly in the face of one another and don't point out the irony
• An Increasingly Isolated America
  It's a lonely and unsatisfactory life to be the toughest kid on the block and we as a nation have been that for the twelve years since the fall of communism
• Remembering Ray
  A letter in my mailbox this morning from Apryl Kennedy, way over here in the Czech Republic where I live now and I knew the moment I fished it out of the box that Ray was dead.
• Bill Gatesmanship
  My grin begins to broaden when I read of the hand-wringing, soul-searching and committee-meeting going on over my good friend Bill Gates
• The IRS Gets it Wrong Again
  The Internal Revenue Service has a new broom, Commissioner Mark Everson, who's declaring war on low income tax cheaters.
• Seawater to Freshwater
  We're not going to work our way out of water dependence by mining the few underground resources left to us
• We're Headed For Another Franklin Delano Roosevelt
  Franklin Delano Roosevelt swept into power as a populist after the devastating 1929 stock market crash, the choice of a badly scared electorate, fed up with the incompetency of several Republican administrations
• The Big Man in Finance, Alan Greenspan
  The big man in finance is the institutional investor and it's long past time for him to exert pressure for reform to a degree that matches his power.
• Ads For Wonder Drugs
  There's a photograph of Dorothy Hamill, right in the middle of my magazine, smiling a pain-free smile and lacing her skates.
• Death, a Conversation Around the Table after Dinner
  The conversation was about death, a dialog that's fascinated mankind as long as he has been aware of his mortality.
• Damtrak
  Rail transport is America's idea that just won't fly
• The Tax Man Cometh, But Not to All
  Bob Morganthau says we ought to pay our taxes and 'equity' has a part to play in that
• The Big Man in Finance
  The Institutional investor, bigger than Alan Greenspan
• The Enronification of America
  The mire into which international accounting firms wallow is oftheir own as well as corporate making, with the connivance of Congress
• Gun Control
  The Second Amendment was framed in times of muzzle-loading rifles.
• What Is it Makes Me Sleepless?
  This is a middle of the night thing and I only bring it up because it's my measure of when I might just turn my shoulder the other way and drift deliciously off and when I know damn well I may as well just go read for a while.
• The Millennium
  It strikes me that as we approach the millennium and everyone has their shot at the memorable or important events of the closing century, that too much emphasis may be placed upon technology and politics
• Lobbyists
  There have been lobbyists as long as there has been an American government.
• The World Trade Center / Pentagon Disasters
  A shock, a hell of a shock, but not really a surprise. Non-nuclear and that's a relief, I've been fearing a suitcase nuclear device in lower Manhattan for years
• Who Will Eat and Who Will Serve
  The recent events in New York and Washington suggest, indeed insist upon, a new paradigm in our response to world events and politics.
• Timing Is Everything
  Well, Princess Diana will be missed, a young woman of great charm and an icon of her times if there ever was one
• Capitalism
  It's difficult to discuss any of the isms without generalizing in the extreme
• Toward a Downsized Bureaucracy
  Without all those worker-bees we disdainfully call bureaucrats, we'd be up to our knees with things to do and no one properly trained to do them
• Drugs
  Aside from the fact that national prohibitions are proven by a long and dismal history not to work and aside from the fact that a huge amount of capital, both financial and human, is wasted on such efforts, the striving in the direction of drug control is actually harmful to its solution
• Internet and Zari
  One can hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine without seeing another article about the Internet.
• Education
  By international comparison, our primary and secondary schools fall far below the quality of many developed nations and yet our universities are recognized as among the best in the world
• Elections
  Jefferson believed in an informed aristocracy as the most fit to govern and Lincoln believed equally sincerely in the judgment of the common man
• Nervous Wealth
  I've got a pretty long memory but can't remember a time when there was so much nervous wealth.
• The Have-Nots
  We call them disadvantaged, a word more comforting than poor, a word that makes us somehow not responsible, able to discuss their plight or more often not-discuss it, dispassionately
• One More Thing
  One can hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine without seeing another article about the Internet
• The Press
  It can't be much fun to pick up the morning papers in the White House and find oneself cartooned and reviled and pricked with the thousand needles of discontent and second-guesses
• Abortion
  I stand exactly on the same ground from which I consider all matters of philosophy or religion, intrigued by the arguments on either side and between the cracks of such matters, interjecting my own thoughts with vigor.
• Profit, or the Fun of Fundamentals
  A computer manufacturer fessed up in my paper just the other day that they would 'break even' and were disappointed that a $5.7 billion quarter would leave nothing but a bone in the cupboard.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today