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Rising above bullying

Dear Annie: My 81-year-old mother lives in Florida with her same-age boyfriend of 10 years in a 55-plus community, which requires residents to maintain the interior and exterior of their home. I live in Ohio and fly down periodically to maintain this property. I also stay there. My last visit, while I was completing a plumbing repair, I caught a glimpse of her boyfriend mocking me behind my back. And this was not the first time, I will state. I ignored him and completed my task. My mother obviously sees this behavior and says nothing. I feel hurt and have not returned since. This ...

Don’t smile for the camera

A trial in Great Britain has just concluded with potentially dangerous implications for personal freedom here. Great Britain is currently the most watched country in the Western world — watched, that is, by its own police forces. In London alone, the police have erected more than 420,000 surveillance cameras in public places. That amounts to 48 cameras per 1,000 residents. What do the cameras capture? Everything done and seen in public. The cameras use facial recognition technology that can capture a grimace, a pimple, a freckle, even an eye blink as you walk the streets. Software ...

Email onslaught

Dear Annie: I have a friend who sends email “blasts” to a long list of recipients on a daily basis. He has been doing this for years, ever since emails became as common as phone calls. Sometimes, he sends several in a day. The contents are usually links to articles that he finds interesting or opinions with which he agrees. He must spend several hours every day browsing his personal interests and concerns, and then impulsively “blasting” his finds to friends and acquaintances. I have politely asked him more than once to take me off his mailing list and to send me personal ...

Like Trump, Democratic candidates have trouble staying within boundaries

It’s exhausting being both a conservative and a critic of President Trump. When I aim my pen at the White House, many of my comrades on the right go nuts. And readers who love it when I go after Trump turn into a cage full of poo-flinging monkeys when I turn my attention to the Democrats. So let me try to head things off at the pass and say that, yes, the president is inexcusably contemptuous of constitutional norms and the basic processes of our system. He is transparently ignorant on these matters, possessing a thumbless grasp of basic civics. With that out of the way, I have a ...

Behavior changes causing neighborhood conflict

Dear Annie: I am a single senior woman. I am very close to a neighbor family. I love them, and they tell me they love me as if I were their family. The older stepfather lives with them. He and I are close in age. We have been great friends. Neither one of us is interested in a romantic relationship with each other or anyone else. But over the past year he has become mean, judgmental and jealous of my relationship with his family. He gets angry for no reason and says offensive things to all of us. We have tried talking to him about the problem. We suggested talking to his doctor and ...

Something’s off about Elizabeth Warren

Ed Rendell recently whacked Elizabeth Warren when she bashed Joe Biden for taking rich donors’ money. The former Pennsylvania governor wrote that he himself had run a “swanky” fundraiser for Warren’s Senate race, for which she thanked him royally. Furthermore, she transferred $10.4 million of her big-money hauls into her presidential campaign while bragging that she was only accepting small donations. Calling that maneuvering sleazy would be overdoing it, but there is certainly something untoward about it. Warren refuses to say what taxes she would raise to cover her ...