'Tis the season for giving.
Wow, this T-shirt costs only $8. Great color. Problem is, your finger could punch a hole through it. In most Americans' shopping experience, colors change and styles come and go, but there's one constant: low quality and a sweatshop-country label.
Not many foreign policy experts would argue with the proposition that the country with which the United States has the most problematic relationship is Pakistan.
How is it possible that Barack Obama did not know that his beloved healthcare.gov website was a botch? That's a question many thoughtful people (including thoughtful Democrats) are asking.
We heard him say that he wouldn't have boasted that it would be as easy to use as amazon.com or obitz.com had he known that it wouldn't. I'm not "stupid enough," he said at his Nov. 14 press conference. Most Americans agree that's true.
An elderly friend I'll call Jeff perfectly summed up the stress of digital living. He'd read an article on the race by cyber-merchants to get online purchases into consumers' hands within an hour of their pushing the "place your order" button. One such service, eBay Now, has its own app enabling shoppers to follow the delivery people as they bike or drive to their address.
Had today's politicians and opinion-makers been in power four centuries ago, Americans might celebrate "Starvation Day" this week, not Thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims started out with communal property rules. When they first settled at Plymouth, they were told: "Share everything, share the work, and we'll share the harvest."
The colony's contract said their new settlement was to be a "common." Everyone was to receive necessities out of the common stock. There was to be little individual property.
During the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, it's been hard to defend the law, much less to call it "great." But great it is -- for the American economy and for the American people, rich ones included.
The defects of the Obamacare website have become well known. But the problems with the law go further than the website. These problems are not incidental, but central to its design and the intentions of its architects.
Many Obamacare backers, including Barack Obama, would prefer "single-payer" health insurance. The government would pay for everything and you would get health care for free.
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Nobody in Washington talks much about the poor in America these days, even though they are more and more with us in the economic aftermath of the Great Recession. Perhaps that is why the Washington Post welcomed Paul Ryan's recent declaration that he wants to fight poverty "with kinder, gentler policies to encourage work and upward mobility."
Much we believe about turkeys is not true.
Myth No. 1: They were served at the "first Thanksgiving" feast in Plymouth, Mass. There's no evidence for that.
The Plymouth Colony governor, an observer wrote, "sent foure men on fowling" for the dinner. Fowling is an Old English reference to waterfowl. So ducks and geese were probably on the menu, not turkey.
Myth No. 2: Benjamin Franklin proposed that the wild turkey become the national symbol. He did call the bald eagle a bird "of bad moral Character" and praised the turkey as a "Bird of Courage." But he didn't endorse one bird over the other.
