On his last day, according to historian Alan Brinkley, he woke up as a president "with admirers and detractors, a man with a record -- some of it good, some of it not. "By the evening of that day, he had become a legend, enshrouded in a fog of grief and posthumous adulation from which he has never fully emerged," Brinkley said. ...The number of books written about John F. Kennedy surpasses 40,000... How JFK went from history to memory -- which is how we choose to remember history -- and how that memory was shaped, is the subject of...
[...] It's progressive politicians who should be paying more attention. More than a hundred years ago, Charles Dickens's cockeyed optimist, Wilkins Micawber, explained to David Copperfield that the difference between happiness and misery involves the positive or negative difference between income and expenses. [...] As the government confirmed once again last week, rising costs have outpaced stagnant wages in ten of the last 12 months. [...] The Bush administration is in an ideological straitjacket. But progressive politicians have several issues they should raise, particularly long overdue increases in the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit -- kitchen table...
<p>WASHINGTONFOR THOSE who prefer that their political analysis be a tad contrarian, here are some Howard Dean polling numbers from New Hampshire this year - in rough sequence: 15, 13, 16, 22, 20, 21, 19, 19, 18, 21, 22, 19, 22, 28.</p>
<p>NOT FOR THE first time, the fractious Bush administration is putting its own silly quarrels ahead of a determined response to the most serious threat to American security -- nuclear weapons in North Korea. The quarrel is worrisome because it involves a proposal from the Donald Rumsfeld-Dick Cheney camp that could easily escalate to full-scale war -- an embargo on North Korean movement of weapons and illegal drugs on the high seas.</p>