ArcaMax

As near as I can understand Alabama's abortion law, it arises from two things:

1. It's in the Bible.

2. The school system in Alabama stinks.

Still, it's an interesting idea, praise Jayzus!

If it has a heartbeat, you can't kill it.

That's a pretty good idea of law, and there is precedent. If I stab my neighbor Frank, I will be jailed/...Read more

I've already seen naked pictures of Pres. Donald Trump's wife, so why won't he let me see his taxes? Pardon me. I was educated by nuns. In the 1960s. Their laser focus on sin never left me, not even when I was sinning.

For me, a child of a repressed, orderly age, the idea that you might value the sight of your tax return more than you value the...Read more

If you add all the Americans who take Xanax to all the Americans who drink beer, and all the Americans who use cocaine, and all the Americans who smoke meth, and all the Americans who use heroin, and all the Americans who use prescription pain killers, it's a wonder anything ever gets done around here.

Which it does not.

I often think that the...Read more

Someone who may not have spent enough time sitting on a folding chair at a school committee meeting once wrote that small town politics are so serious because the stakes are so low.

This is a wise-sounding saying that has no basis in the reality of school board meetings in towns of 20,000 people, only 1,500 of whom voted in the last election.

...Read more

I watched Notre Dame de Paris burn from my couch, located in my house, located one block from a 100-year-old Catholic church that is 80 percent empty on Sundays. In the back of the church is a redbrick Catholic school, abandoned for decades.

And I was baptized in Notre Dame de Lourdes in Fall River, Massachusetts, a huge granite church built ...Read more

When I was very young, maybe 40 years ago, I worked with a number of unreconstructed workingmen. They had been born on farms, most of them, and many of them had plowed with a mule, or picked cotton by hand.

They'd left that life and found factory work in a large Midwestern city. They all smoked, and they wore no jewelry except a gold wedding ...Read more

I live in Massachusetts, a state that's been showered with sports championships in the last few years. Super Bowl. World Series. There may have been some others, but I'm not a sports fan, so I can't be sure.

It's been fun, though. People wear "Champions" T-shirts, and everyone's happy about the victories, and I like living among happy people.

...Read more

In between the Confederate monument and the tiki torch parade, there's a party goin' on.

And there are fine people on both sides. The bikers and the military and the cops are there, counting the days toward the pension, or toward selling crystal meth, depending on the uniform worn.

The reason?

No Russian collusion! No Russian collusion! Pump ...Read more

I live in Fall River, Massachusetts, a blood clot of abandoned mills and tenement houses. There are almost 90,000 people here, all of us living close to the highway that New Yorkers and Bostonians take to Cape Cod.

A former miracle of the Industrial Revolution, Fall River is known for its numerous derelict cotton mills, some of which have been ...Read more

I once kidded an inept editorial writer I worked with by asking him, as he prepared to write, "Are we concerned or outraged today?"

He gave me a weak smile, which meant he would have hit me if it were not for the fact that he'd never hit anyone. If he'd decided to hit me, he wouldn't have known what to do first, and the trick to hitting ...Read more

When I left the world of full-time newspaper employment to enter retirement, I left, as all workers do, with a box of things I'd taken from my desk.

It was a fairly stereotypical load. There were books, pictures of my wife, pens, some small Christmas decorations I stored in a drawer between seasons.

And a mug.

It's a white mug with the seal ...Read more

Pray God it comes hard.

Since I left the newspaper business, I've called myself "semi-retired." I say "semi" because I can't really stop working. I wasn't bred to stop working. I was bred to compulsively pull in every dollar I can until I die or become too sick to work.

Boohoo, right? America is full of people like me, hustling our way up to ...Read more