The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

Political nature abhors a vacuum, which is what often exists for a year or two in a party after it loses a presidential election.

It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.

Baseball is Heaven's gift to mortals.

Stalin's henchman Molotov, 96, died old and in bed, a privilege he helped to deny to millions.

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes

So the Clinton-Gore era culminates with an election as stained as the blue dress, a Democratic chorus complaining that the Constitution should not be the controlling legal authority, and Clinton's understudy dispatching lawyers to litigate this: It depends on what the meaning of 'vote' is.