On Nov. 9, 1989, I found myself on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall in the apartment of a dissident Lutheran pastor whose church provided safe haven for disaffected East Germans.
The ninth day of November is laden with meaning in Germany. Two of those dates in the 20th century, 1938 and 1989, have special significance and everlasting lessons,
Iwatch Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources media-review show most Sunday mornings on CNN. That's partly because since Fox News scrapped its weekly News Watch, it's the only regular program on national television that looks at the news media critically. That's also because Kurtz, The Washington Post's chief media writer, does a good job bringing in knowledgeable people to talk about the major traps the media fell into that week.
As I was talking recently with the founder of a large American corporation, the conversation turned (inevitably) to healthcare reform. His employees in their 20s, on average, cost the company about $1,500 a year in health bills. Those in their 50s cost at least 10 times more. The effect of proposed healthcare reform -- which limits the ability of insurers to charge higher premiums for older adults -- would be, he said, a large shift of America's healthcare burden to the younger generation.
There's little I can add to the big news about the secret kept for decades by Juanita Castro: Her valiant collaboration with the CIA to save from imprisonment and execution the democrats of the domestic opposition whom her brothers Fidel and Raúl crushed with such virulence. Her memoirs and statements testify to her private crusade.
Since the time of the American Revolution, this country has had a military comprised almost entirely of citizen volunteers. Until the First World War almost all of our wars were fought close to home, which helped the military retain high visibility and rapport with the civilian population. This gave the people the sense, and in many cases literally, that they were personally being protected. Frequently it was a father, brother or son fighting a hundred miles or less from home. The military were heroes, the good guys who were lauded in songs and novels.
It's been 11 years since I looked through a photo album smuggled out of Afghanistan by a brave young woman. ``This is a doctor,'' she said, pointing to one picture. ``This is a teacher.'' It was impossible to tell one woman from another under the burqas enforced by their Taliban rulers.
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