I turned 65 last week.  For many years in my youth, I never thought that day would come.  Not that I had some morbid thought that I would die young—nothing like that.  I just didn’t think I would be 65 one day.  That was the age my maternal grandmother was when she died.  I […]

            There was a veritable buzz in the air in the minutes leading up to the beginning of the season-opening concert at the Mondavi Center (on the campus of U.C. Davis) last week.  The occasion was the reunion tour of Return to Forever, in its fourth incarnation and therefore labeled RTF IV.             Jackson Hall […]

            Should any political party attempt to abolish social security … and eliminate labor laws, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.  There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things.  Their number is negligible and they are stupid. -Dwight D. Eisenhower (1954)             […]

            It didn’t take Rick Perry, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, long to back away from his first comments on Social Security.  After he boldly called it a Ponzi scheme in a debate last week, suggesting it was an unconstitutional government sham, he tactfully reversed himself over the weekend by claiming that […]