Is the presidency of Barack Obama really all that different from the one Hillary Clinton would have had?              That question might not be all that important in the grand scheme of things as the president completes his first year in office next week.  But it is one that many who wildly supported Obama […]

            I wrote the following column ten years ago at the start of the new century.  I offer it again here as a check on my own optimism (at the time) and to keep us all focused on what our generation is accomplishing (and not accomplishing) in pursuit of our destiny.             Well what do […]

            The year just concluded was a bad one for the economy but a very good year for artistic performances in and around Sacramento.  We’ll let others decide if these two facts are causally connected.  Our job, as the calendar changes yet again, is to rank the top performances we experienced in 2009.              Ten […]

             First of all, what do we call it?  Was it the zeros, as in “zero one, zero two, …”?  Something seems to be missing in that handle.  Or maybe the thousands, “thousand one, thousand two”?  Night exactly the right ring, with all due respect to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”              The oh’s […]