Congratulations go out to Chuck Wieland for his recent letter conveying his thoughts on the state of the economy in the good old USA. There are a few things that I do agree with him on. One is the fact that the extension of the 2017 tax cuts do help the rich, however he did fail to mention that the tax cuts helped a huge majority of the taxpayers and they definitely helped the middle class. Perhaps the ones it didn’t help are the nearly 40 percent of the people who pay little

Lisa Scottoline’s books almost always make the top tier of my favorite books. But I suppose that there’s an exception to everything. “Come Home” (2012, 368 pages in soft cover) simply isn’t up to the vaulted Scottoline standard. The theme that runs through the novel is that a stepmother is always a mother, just as a mother is always a mother. It’s sentimentality taken to the upchuck level. I kept turning pages because I thought that the standard Scottoline would come through

When I was a junior in high school, my English teacher, Mrs. Donaldson, told my class that she’d been browsing in a book store and found a book that perfectly described the typical American teenager. Of course, she was not talking about us, as we were all superior human beings. The title of the book was “Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing,” by Robert Paul Smith. According to Amazon.com , it was a “hugely popular bestseller when it first appeared in 1957.”  I don’

Imagine living in a small, quiet community that is just a few miles from a minimum-security prison. Well actually it used to be minimum security, but an escalating crime rate, overly-full prisons for serious offenders, and some administrative slight of hand has changed the prison population considerably. The facility now houses some of the most violent and dangerous prisoners in the state. In “A Small Town” (2020, 320 pages in softcover format), author Thomas Perry paints a p

As too many Americans wonder how they can pay their monthly bills AND buy Christmas presents, let’s peek at economic affordability. It was a DAY ONE important issue in last year’s election. The president has put coal in our stockings. He cut taxes for the rich at the expense of the middle class and the poor and imposed tariffs that raised prices for American consumers. He grades himself on the economy as A+++++. But now, as most Americans disagree with him, he calls affordabi

“Buona sera. This is Il Ristorante L’Anima d’Italia. How may I help you?” “Hello. I’d like to make a reservation for two at seven toes and half a pinkie. And we’d like a booth.” Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But wait. Consider that we’ve been brainwashed for centuries into believing that a day is divided into 24 hours, hours into 60 minutes, and minutes into 60 seconds.

Greg Iles died a couple of months ago at the age of 65. He was born in Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg, West Germany, but lived his life in Natchez, Mississippi. He was one of the great American novelists to have obtained his college education at Ole Miss. And like many other best-selling authors (some in the Southern Tradition, some not) like humorist Dave Barry, Stephen King, Ridley Pearson, Amy Tan, James McBride, Mitch Albom, Scott Turow, Roy Blunt, and Matt Groening, he was

Around the turn of the century, maybe earlier, education critics were saying that college majors in English, or philosophy, or art history were likely to spend their post-college years living in their parents’ basement. At the time, automation and cybernation were already replacing human beings in jobs, but they were mostly factory jobs that were easily converted to machine technology, like painting automobiles or filling bottles with wine and then corking them. That level of