I drove through my old neighborhood last week. It is like many suburban neighborhoods that sprouted up in the 1960s. Many of the people who moved there grew up in the city. All of them wanted big yards in which their kids could play. Many wanted to be near St. Germaine Catholic Church and its […]

Looking over the program for the festivities commemorating the 50th anniversary of the civil rights March on Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, it’s hard to not feel sober about the whole thing. I say sober because there is good news and bad news. What’s the good news? […]

This week has pissed me off. It’s been a week filled with news I’d rather forget, but really, it’s one we all should remember. It should be a rallying cry, an opportunity for those interested in justice to reform a broken system and expedite a punishment reserved for a deserving few. A college baseball player […]

Imagine you are a teenage boy who feels an attraction to other males. Imagine further that you detest having those feelings, feelings for which you would like to seek professional help to overcome these proclivities and lead what you consider to be a normal life. Well, if you are, in fact, that poor, confused teen […]

After celebrating his 87th birthday last week, semi-retired communist dictator Fidel Castro did something nobody expected him to do: He contacted Pope Francis to hear his confession. “Forgive me, pontiff, for I have sinned. Is 65 years since last confession.” “Sixty-five years!” said the pontiff. “This is going to be a long one. Go on, […]

Why? Why would President Obama support the Muslim Brotherhood while Gulf States including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates support the military over the champions of Sharia law? In The Guardian, David Hearst makes the case for Saudi King Abdullah supporting the military rule, citing evidence that the Saudi monarch fears a growing popularity […]

It was an atypical August summer day in Washington, D.C., 50 years ago next week. Temperatures were in the low 80s, about 10 degrees cooler than normal. Skies were partly cloudy. Most government officials were vacationing. I was a young copyboy at the NBC News Washington bureau. Correspondent Jack Perkins asked me to accompany him […]

Here’s how you know the California prison inmate hunger strike is a stunt, if a dangerous stunt: The strike to protest security housing units in California prisons began with 30,000 participants; Jay Leno, Susan Sarandon and other celebrities signed a letter that denounced the SHU as “solitary confinement” and “torture.” As of Thursday, the count […]

The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which focuses on constitutional law, is urging: a federal district court in California on behalf of 18 members of Congress to permit a private group to obtain the Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial in San Diego. This proposed remedy is an alternative to the plaintiffs’ request for a court […]

There you go again, Hollywood. You’ve taken a great story about a real person and real events and twisted it into a bunch of lies. You took the true story of Eugene Allen, the White House butler who served eight presidents from 1952 to 1986, and turned it into a clichéd “message movie.” “Lee Daniels’ […]

New York City seems on the verge of making the same mistake that Detroit made 40 years ago. The mistake is to abolish the NYPD practice referred to as stop and frisk. It’s more accurately called stop, question and frisk. People were stopped and questioned 4.4 million times between 2004 and 2012. But the large […]

President Obama has demonstrated leadership qualities ranging from poor to nonexistent. But is a president who lacks visible leadership qualities really such a bad thing? Or is he lazy like a fox? A lack of leadership — whether deliberate or accidental — can have a surprising upside, as none other than the French have historically […]