Category: President Reagan

Years ago, when I was in a quandary about the direction of my career, I got some sound advice: Never fall in love with a corporation, because it’s constitutionally unable to reciprocate.

This week, the Supreme Court created a limited redress to that issue in Citizens United v the Federal Elections Commission, giving corporations unfettered permission to spend their general funds on the campaigns of politicians they favor, and turning them into “a real live boy” as Slate put it. Who says money can’t buy you love? If the Rehnquist court handed Republicans the presidency in 2000, it’s hard to believe the Roberts court hasn’t handed them the Congress in 2010.

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If bound and published, the stories of the early part of my parents’ marriage might be titled “Tales of the Great Depression.” Like the dreams of most people, theirs were thrown to the wind when the economy fell apart.

The crash of 1929 cost my mother her scholarship to a Chicago conservatory, and she went home to Alabama a year short of graduation. “If I hadn’t met your daddy, I’d have starved to death,” she liked to say. She had been living in a boarding house and wringing out a living teaching piano lessons when someone fixed her up with a young pharmacist from Georgia.

Not that pharmacy was his first choice. Daddy had dreamed of a career in professional baseball, and he would have much preferred the outfield to standing behind the counter in his father’s store. But the economy dictated a practical profession, one to which he turned out to be well-suited.

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Hillary has spoken and it is good.

Senator Clinton’s speech Tuesday night to assembled Democrats and watchers around the nation and the world was superb. The historian Michael Beschloss said it was the best he’d heard her give.

Like a lot of Democrats, I was holding my breath.

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