At a time when respect for journalists ranks somewhere between televangelists and politicians, the outpouring of respect and affection for Tim Russert was something of a phenomenon. The main reason so many people liked him was that he was the antithesis of the hatemongers and charlatans – yes, this means you, Limbaugh and Michael Savage […]

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A few days before the Kentucky Derby, former Governor Brereton Jones was standing on the backstretch at Churchill Downs, talking about trainer Larry Jones’ decision to run the filly Eight Belles in the Kentucky Derby instead of the Kentucky Oaks. Brereton applauded the decision, and not just because it meant that his filly, Proud Spell, […]

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I’m eagerly awaiting my invitation to the big victory party that will be thrown somewhere across our borders.
The guests of honor will be the members of the Kentucky House of Representatives, who boldly allowed the proposed casino amendment to die from lack of support or benign neglect, whatever you want to call it As I […]

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Whatever the issue, university presidents seem perfectly willing to make exemptions for their sports programs. They tolerate, even encourage, a double standard that, if examined, leaves them open to criticism and disdain from faculty members and others who still cling to the quaint notion that universities exist mainly to educate, not to sponsor winning teams.
At […]

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It was during the Vietnam War that Simon & Garfunkel posed the question, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” The message was as clear as it was powerful: The cynicism wrought by the war, and the civil rights movement, had stripped America of its heroes, the symbols […]

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Here in our little corner of the world, we have a bad habit of making issues more complicated than they really are. We have an aversion to simple solutions. I don’t know why. It must be due to some strange fungus that grows in our government buildings – a fungus that paralyzes the brains of […]

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Coming so soon after the Boston Red Sox swept the Colorado Rockies in the World Series, it would have been downright un-American if the New England Patriots had trounced the New York Giants to win the Super Bowl. No one city deserves to corner the market on our most coveted trophies. Heck, Boston was almost […]

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ESPN proved to be such a smash hit with the nation’s sports junkies that Ted Turner decided to create a similar cable network for political and pop-culture junkies. He called it CNN, which begat the Fox News Channel, which begat MSNBC and all sorts of other around-the-clock cable channels.
The net effect has been to virtually […]

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Hypocrisy, n., 1. False claim to virtue; insincerity, pretense, deceit, duplicity, playacting, phoniness. (The Oxford American Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus)
The desire to have a statewide referendum on casino gambling should be viewed, essentially, as a tourism and economic-development issue that will give our economically-troubled commonwealth an important new source of jobs, taxes […]

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Now that our Mayor and the City Council have finally put their big feet down on smoking in public places, I am awaiting the opening of our city’s first private smoking clubs. These clubs would be modeled after the “Speakeasys” that were established in cities around the nation after 1919, the year the moralists in […]

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