He did not consider it “the function of law to jack up the moral tone of any community.” That, he said, was “the function of the home and the church.

But Taft also believed that the citizen who obeys only laws that he endorses “is willing to govern, but not be governed” – willing, in other words, to destroy the rule of law.

There wasn’t a single teetotaler “among the world’s really great men,” Stoll wrote; on the contrary, he said, the roster of wine-loving giants ran from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Columbus, Dickens, Lincoln, and Bismarck, not to mention Verdi, Wagner, and Admiral Dewey.

That first week, I also went to Washington. That was really tough. I sympathize with those Washington figures who have to face 40 Times Washington bureau reporters. They ask hard questions and they’re relentless. And they were quite suspicious and quite dubious about me.

With that single previous exception, the original Constitution and its first seventeen amendments limited the activities of government, not of citizens. Now there were two exceptions: you couldn’t.

Gough had delivered more than ten thousand speeches to audiences estimated at more than nine million people. Among his listeners was a San Francisco surveyor who named one of the city’s main thoroughfares in his honor – out of either a sense of gratitude or, possibly, irony.

San Francisco in 1890 might have seemed barely more saloon-sodden than that, reporting one for every 96 residents – but this was a measure only of the city’s 3,000 licensed establishments, while less restrictive estimates threw in an additional 2,000 unlicensed places.

The iron miners who belonged to the Italian Club in the town of Virginia, Minnesota, took pains to procure more suitable grapes, dispatching a grocer named Cesare Mondavi to the San Joaquin Valley late each summer to acquire their supply. Inspired to get into the grape business himself, Mondavi soon moved his family to California, where his precocious son Robert would make his own name in the winemaking world.

It’s a very complicated issue about when is a fact not a fact in the context of opinions.

But I think it’s undeniable that the Times is a liberal paper.