Inquirer

Currents

Latest Auth Cartoon

Tony Auth archives | tauth@phillynews.com

Let us not forget whom Memorial Day is really about: In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky
What’s really fueling gas prices: By Charles Lane Good news for Memorial Day weekend: Since peaking at a national average of $3.93 on April 5, the price of regular gasoline has fallen almost 25 cents a gallon. That’s like a $25 billion tax cut for consumers.
A soldier claimed by the long shadow of the Civil War: By Walter Fox I remember as a boy seeing the rusted cast-iron flag holder, bearing the letters "G.A.R." encircled by a wreath, on a grave in my mother’s family plot. I knew even then that someone in her family had served in the Civil War, but I was never really clear on who that person was.
It’s the season for going straight to the box scores: It was our much-anticipated quarterly lunch with Tim Kurkjian, baseball analyst extraordinaire, at which George Will and I bathe in a constant flow of obscure statistics, Kurkjian oddities, and ribald anecdotes — like the one about the Red Sox beat writer who accidentally walked in on a players’ prayer meeting and was greeted by the burly rightfielder, newly born-again and not yet practiced in the language of Christian fellowship, bellowing "Hey! Can’t you see we’re having f—ing chapel here?" After which, Kurkjian asked us about our daily reading habits. I confessed that during baseball season, I give the front page of the morning paper about 90 seconds before going right to the box scores.
Letters to the Editor: The risks of fossil fuelsI kept thinking the article "U.S. must work to adapt to new energy landscape" (May 20) by Chris Lafakis would address the need to invest in "new energy," such as wind and solar power. However, it’s all about the refining and pricing of oil, including dirty tar-sands oil from Canada.I would have thought that a Moody’s economist, with risk management in his mind-set, would have at least mentioned the risk to our economy, public health, and the environment if we continue to use fossil fuels as our predominant energy source. The Environmental Protection Agency is considering the historic step of declaring the carbon released into the atmosphere as we burn these fossil fuels to be a pollutant. It’s high time it did, and I hope concerned individuals will let the EPA know of their support for this move.
Doing battle with Comcast and Verizon: My contest with the twin pterodactyls of Philadelphia has not been pretty. They have bloodied me. My wife, Libby, was ripped apart, too. My advice for future combatants: Lie down, assume the fetal position, and hope for the best. And make sure your children are safe.
In search of Roman’s ‘lost boys’ of World War I: "I resolved to find what remained of Company D for (my grandfather), and for (his fellow soldiers), and for myself, as well, and complete a story begun on a hot July day so long ago, when young men raced across open fields toward machine guns and disappeared into history."— From "The Remains of Company D: A Story of the Great War" by James Carl Nelson
Disco nights at the Jersey Shore: Donna Summer died too soon at age 63. The moment I heard of the disco diva’s passing, I immediately thought of a recurring scene at the Anchorage in Somers Point, N.J., at the height of her popularity.
Cutting pot penalties cuts jail costs: A bill introduced in New Jersey that would impose fines rather than jail time for marijuana possession offers a more reasonable approach to the war on drugs.
The swelling song of a less divided America: I, too, sing America. So wrote Langston Hughes, the unofficial poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes, whose 65 years spanned the lynch mobs of the early 20th century and the race riots of the mid-1960s, intended a defiant reminder to a nation too often content to include him out, a nation quick to regard him as the eternal Other, separate from and threatening to what they saw as the "real" America, i.e., the white America.
Letters to the Editor: Coercive policiesCharles Krauthammer has been so intent on committing the nation to policies that its citizens do not believe in that he cannot conceive of President Obama personally endorsing some form of gay marriage as anything but a coercive national program to overturn laws nationwide ("The missing link in Obama’s same-sex marriage evolution," Monday). This is hardly Obama’s method of operation.Krauthammer has been more than happy to commit our country to two seemingly endless and exceedingly expensive wars. He has been more than happy to acquiesce in the coercive indenture of our children in order to qualify for decent employment, and to "free" banks to make money-losing gambles with our money. Krauthammer’s free-trade policies have been instrumental in shipping jobs and factories overseas, while Krauthammer’s immigration policy has left Alabama with unharvested crops that Americans were unwilling to harvest at the going rate. It is Krauthammer, not Obama, who favors coercive national policies that increasingly constrict the freedoms Americans remember as their birthright.
Memory Stream: Caspar Wistar was once one of the premier physicians in Philadelphia. Born in the city in 1761, Wistar was the son of Richard and Sarah Wyatt Wistar, a Quaker family. As a teenager, Wistar assisted the wounded from the Battle of Germantown in 1777, and this experience reportedly inspired him to go into medicine. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and received his doctorate in 1786.
Quiz Answers: 1. c. William Howard Taft. 2. a. Robert Todd Lincoln. 3. b. John Marshall. 4. d. Thurgood Marshall. 5. c. Medgar Evers. 6. b. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. 7. a. Anita Newcomb McGee. 8. c. Edward H. White. 9. d. Walter Reed. 10. d. 1900.
Time to put brakes on domestic spying: Inquirer editorial: Americans who pick up the phone to call overseas have no way of knowing whether they’re on the modern-day equivalent of a party line. For that, they can blame the unwarranted expansion of U.S. antiterrorism surveillance in the wake of 9/11.
High court’s suspension of Orie Melvin is dubious: Lost in the relief over the seeming resolution of the status of indicted state Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin is the illegality of the court’s suspension of her and its threat of further legal action. Which is the greater threat to the rule of law: a single justice who may have mixed politics with state business, or a court that ignores the constitutional structures voters put in place to rein it in?