It's the big question most people want to know from those who work at and report on the United States Supreme Court: What's it really like behind those marble walls? A new book now helps bring to life the often mysterious place where great power is wielded by nine little-known justices.
Superfluous (su-PER-flu-us): Adjective. Unnecessary or needless; difficult to pronounce for a president with a split lip.
A split lip and saying "superfluous" causes President Obama to be tongue-tied at the Kennedy Center Honors reception.
If "taxes are the price we pay for civilized society," to quote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., then April 15 is the day that bill comes due for every working American.
I doubt Oliver Wendell Holmes was a soccer fan, but in thinking about this week's column, I recalled a great quote of his: "The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving."
A century ago, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes described Supreme Court deliberations among his colleagues as "nine scorpions in a bottle," fiercely protective of their own agendas and power bases.
When Don Imus denigrated in clearly racist terms the championship women's basketball team from Rutgers University; when actor Michael Richards screamed at black guests in a comedy club, calling them the "n-word" and invoking the threat of lynching; when Trent Lott said that things would have been better if a southern segregationist had been elected president a half-century earlier, responsible white people from across the ideological spectrum stepped forward to explain that these individuals were not racist.
President Obama: Thank you. Thank you.
With three innings to play in the fifth game of the American League Championship Series, clubhouse workers and officials for the Tampa Bay Rays began preparing for a celebration in the visiting clubhouse at Fenway Park. Twenty cases of champagne and 15 cases of beer were unpacked and loaded into huge tubs of ice. A separate stash of high-end champagne was set aside to be chilled for Rays executives. AL CHAMPIONS T-shirts were being sorted by size for the players. Nine outs still needed against the Boston Red Sox -- who, come October, die about as easily as vampires -- typically is no time to make party preparations. But if there is only one lasting lesson from the 2008 baseball season, it is this: The Tampa Bay Rays are not your typical World Series team.
CNNMoney: Strangest taxesupdated: Wed Mar 31 2004 11:49:00
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - You know taxes are a fact of life, or, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, "the price we pay for civilization."
Let's go someplace, shall we? No, not some golf club in Bermuda or Pebble Beach, that's too much like business. Not even a simple, sweet pensione on a bank of the Arno. Travel is broadening -- but ...
Your servant has a friend, a lifelong New Yorker, who had a revelatory experience a while back. A high-paid magazine editor and denizen of a luxury apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, he suff...
The present writer was a bit slow off the mark in getting to the great flag- burning row, as it took him a while to research the one assertedly coherent idea he brought to the Supreme Court's decis...
Consider this: If the more than 100 billionaires examined on the following pages liquidated all their assets, they could comfortably eliminate the 1987 U.S. budget deficit. Dream on, Gramm-Rudmanit...
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