Editorials & Opinion

The winner of the 2008 Nero's Fiddle Award is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

What is it with a simple, straightforward apology? Why is that so hard?
No, I'm not thinking of the recently embarrassed Illinois governor or any politician for that matter. I'm thinking of my kids. (And plenty of adults I deal with too.)

The sheer monotony of it is overwhelming. A once-popular politician turns out to be corrupt -- or at least has aspirations of being so but may have been more inept than successful at it -- often after promising to clean up government. Over and over again, history repeats the scenario.

What is it with a simple, straightforward apology? Why is that so hard?
No, I'm not thinking of the recently embarrassed Illinois governor or any politician for that matter. I'm thinking of my kids. (And plenty of adults I deal with too.)

The age-old question of Chicago politics has always been, "Where's mine?" As in, "You got yours, now I want mine."

Zimbabwe's dictatorial Robert Mugabe has added another misery to the long list of miseries he has inflicted on his long-suffering country -- cholera.
That's in addition to a brutal police state, a ruined economy with 90 percent unemployment, an "official" inflation rate of 231 million percent and the 5 million people that the U.N. says face starvation next year.

In a year of bizarre economic events, here's one of the strangest: This week the rate on four-week Treasury bills fell to 0 percent. Even so, the Treasury managed to sell $30 billion of these non-performers.

The price of gasoline is down -- from over $4 a gallon to about $1.70 a gallon. That's because the price of oil is down from almost $150 a barrel to around $40 a barrel. This is good news for moms who chauffeur their kids to soccer games, music lessons and religious school, and for truck drivers moving products from factories to stores.

The uncertainties built into the Bush administration's still largely untested system of military commissions may have denied victories, although of a vastly different kind, to President Bush and five Guantanamo Bay detainees charged with masterminding 9/11.

ACTION MEMO TO: President-elect Barack Obama & Veterans Affairs Secretary-designate General Eric Shinseki.
RE: Why We Need to Re-Name the VA _ to the Department of Veterans Advocacy.