Here’s what’s amazing about events in New York City, and Austin, and Denver, and Miami, and 62 other locations so far. We were thinking that young people were off soaking their brains in social media ooze — overly expressive chipmunks, angry birds, double rainbows. Instead, what do you know? They were paying attention to stuff…
DetailsHey, we get it. The state of Arizona pleads almost frantically on its “Build the Border Fence” web site that walls work. Take the triple-layer fence America’s tax dollars built to buffet the southern flank of Yuma, Ariz., under the Bush administration. The state calls it “extraordinarily successful,” thwarting “95 percent of illegal crossings in…
DetailsA few years ago back in peacetime — yes, way back then — I jokingly wrote that we needed a war to distract policy makers from their chronic top-down meddling in public schools. George W. Bush had just ascended to the presidency. His flight-deck mission then: to become the nation’s school superintendent. After all, he’d…
DetailsWacky, bewitching Michele Bachmann, whose candidacy is melting, melting, actually has offered something of substance to voters just before she becomes a vapor. She’s called the hand that has suddenly doused her campaign with her own tea-steeped brew, the hand of Rick Perry. So doing, she's made a very important point. …
DetailsDo the geese talk all the way? It’s work enough — winging from Canada’s marshes to America’s heartland — without also flapping one’s bill nonstop. That appears to be the case, however. All I know is that when the Canada geese are over my head in in Colorado, south-bound now, they…
DetailsIt’s a dirty shame that the Pew Research Center, in seeking a head count of extremism among Muslims in the United States, didn’t seek the same of extreme Christians. You might have noticed the story — the polling organization, at 10 years post-9/11, getting a sense of what American Muslims are thinking. …
DetailsThis is the way the world works — at least our corner of it. In 2006, drug giant Pfizer faced an embarrassing controversy, only not about what it was doing that was truly disgraceful. Red faces were in bloom over a series of TV and newspaper ads touting cholesterol-lowering drug…
DetailsLights, sequins, syncopation. They do put on a performance. Governing? No. But glitter, glam and that good old anti-government sound? Oh, yeah. You can almost hear the Gipper tapping his toe. They are the show that’s trying to stop the show. They are The Extremes. Michele. Rick. Rand. There’s Texas right-winger Louie…
DetailsIt doesn’t come often in the average person’s life — maybe never: the transformative thought. The light bulb of invention and inspiration. It came often to Einstein, Edison, Tesla. For us? Not so much. For the sake of America’s children, let’s hope the one Arne Duncan just announced isn’t it — that epiphany…
DetailsThe convention center was a multicolored whirl of abstinence education — in every room — from teen girls learning about the exploitation that can come with a grown-up suitor, to adolescents making a reach into a purple velvet “grab bag” only to find a deathly dilemma in hand, like AIDS or syphilis. …
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