Tom McMahon

While a Senator, Gore was notorious for his rudeness and insolence during hearings. A favorite trick was to pose a question and as the witness began to answer, Gore would begin a whispered conversation with another committee member or a staffer. If the witness paused in order that the senator not miss the response, Gore would instruct him to continue, then resume his private conversation, leaving no ambiguity: Not only is your testimony unimportant, I won't even pay you the courtesy of pretending to listen to it.

Every presidential aspirant knows there could come a moment when he must accept the fact that the game is over. For Sen. John Kerry, the man the Democratic establishment considered a shoo-in for the 2004 nomination, that moment might have arrived this week with the release of a poll that finds him trailing the Rev. Al Sharpton.

For those Americans still queasy about the United States using military force to right wrongs and save lives, the choice seems to be Dean. For those who understand that this is precisely what history asks of the world's leading nations, there is Bush. So where does that leave Kerry, who voted for the war, then opposed it, then got turned into a rhetorical pretzel by Hussein's capture? I'll tell you where: bringing up the rear to a flamboyant preacher who, like Kerry, doesn't have a prayer.

Dave Dudley, a Wisconsin native who had a hit record in the 1960s with the truck-driving song "Six Days on the Road," has died. He was 75. He achieved his greatest fame as one of the first artists to record songs that glorified trucking, said Eddie Stubbs, a Grand Ole Opry announcer and radio personality for WSM-AM (650) in Nashville, Tenn. "He had many hit records, but the songs he did related to trucking were really his best remembered," Stubbs said. "He was at the forefront of a movement or trend, if you will, in country music where it was popular to record songs about trucking," Stubbs said by telephone from the WSM studios Tuesday night. "There was a number of people who followed suit thereafter and had a lot of success with songs in that fashion."

The left got angry and decided to start its own radio network because with the exception of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Capital Times, Isthmus, Public Television, Public Radio, Time, Newsweek, The Today Show, Al Franken, Michael Moore, Hollywood, prime time television, Maureen Dowd, John Nichols, Dave Zweifel, Rolling Stone, the Nation, and the internet — they just can’t get their message out.

Today's lavish displays do more than brighten the night. They tell a story of economic progress. Like the electronic gadgets aimed at gift buyers, the tiny lights outlining rooflines and tree limbs illustrate new sources of growth, productivity, and prosperity. Aesthetic pleasure, they tell us, is an increasingly important source of economic value and hence of new jobs and business opportunities. And the same trends that boost living standards in other areas also make Christmas lights more abundant. A holiday-lighting dollar simply goes further than it used to. Homeowners buying Christmas lights benefit from the same intense retail and manufacturing competition that have driven down prices and improved reliability in so many other industries, raising the American standard of living.

Coffee is not native to Jamaica. Beans were brought to the island in 1728 by the governor at that time, Sir Nicholas Lawes. The arabica beans flourished and now coffee is a major export. Japan is the largest importer of Blue Mountain coffee (90%). Blue Mountain coffee has a very clean taste, with a noticable sweetness. The flavour is bold, smooth and rich. Because of the rather restricted geographical range where it is grown, Blue Mountain is available in limited quantities and can sometimes be difficult to find. In order to maintain the high quality of this coffee, Jamaica has established the Jamaica Coffee Industry Board to oversee the production and processing. Most Blue Mountain coffee beans are grown by small farmers, rather than huge coffee estates seen in other regions.

"The belief that once you get a customer they're yours for life is complete bollocks." People don't just drift from brand to brand. As they get older they go out of their way to reject brands they once embraced, brands they now associate with their less sophisticated, former selves. When a young woman heads off for college, chances are that she isn't going to plaster her dorm room with the boy-band posters that used to decorate her walls at home. Just because the Backstreet Boys had a robust teen following doesn't mean that the Backstreet Boys brand built customers for life. Over the course of her college career that same young woman may well drink countless kegs of Milwaukee's Best at frat parties. But once she has a job in the big city, she isn't likely to fill her fridge with cheap beer. And while our friend is paying off her student loans, she might gladly buy a Chevrolet Cavalier. But that hardly means GM has a lock on her. "When a guy gets promoted, he doesn't get a more expensive Chevy," says Mr. Ries. "He buys a BMW."

Barely 24 hours after absorbing the numbing news that Favre’s father, Irvin, had passed away as the result of a massive heart-attack, the younger Favre opted to play on.

Oh boy, did he play on.

Offering a resounding reminder that he can still compete at an MVP level, Favre tossed four first-half touchdowns and threw for 399 yards in leading the Packers to a 41-7 rout over the Oakland Raiders Monday night in Network Associates Coliseum in Oakland.

Heaving bullet after bullet, Favre threw scoring strikes to wide receiver Javon Walker twice, and tight ends Wesley Walls and David Martin as the Packers staked a 31-7 halftime lead.

Favre finished the first half with a perfect passer rating of 158.3 and completed 15 of his 18 attempts for a career-best 311 yards in what will undoubtedly go down as his finest 30 minutes of football.

And it wouldn’t be a stretch to call Favre’s overall performance one of the finest in sports history considering the circumstances.

Q: You talk a lot about setting boundaries. But Jack Welch often spoke about making General Electric boundaryless. Do you think he was wrong?

A: Yes. My views are the exact opposite of Mr. Welch's. I want formality back so we can all regain some dignity. Besides, employees were never taken in by all that talk about informality. On one hand, the boss was firing people; on the other, he was saying, "Oh, we're just like family." And employees thought, "Oh no we're not!"

A significant advantage of getting old: I can re-read books, with virtually no memory of having read them the first time.

J-Walk Blog

Richard S. Strong is trying to sell Strong Financial Corp. quickly and is giving potential buyers a tight time frame to inspect the company's records, mutual fund industry observers say. There is not much hope for saving the nearly 1,300 jobs at the company's headquarters in Menomonee Falls - unless there is a management buyout, those observers said. "I could see where they might offer people the chance to move to Minneapolis or wherever the headquarters (of the acquiring firm) is, but I would say it's very unlikely they would want to keep all those people in Wisconsin," said Rachel Barnard, an analyst who follows asset management stocks for Morningstar Inc. in Chicago.

The short time window isn't surprising, given that Strong's mutual funds had nearly $3 billion of net outflows since Sept. 3, when New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer named the firm as one that may have allowed improper trades in its funds. The majority of those outflows occurred after Spitzer's office said Oct. 29 that it planned to take action against founder and former chairman Richard S. Strong personally, based on allegations of improper short-term trading in his company's mutual funds. Spitzer has filed no civil or criminal charges against Strong, who resigned as chairman of his firm Dec. 2.