Archive By Section - Other Views
Did the Brothers Tsarnaev fail?
"Whatever they thought they could ultimately achieve, they've already failed," says President Obama of the Boston Marathon bombers.
Don’t mourn planet’s destruction
Should we have wept or cheered on Earth Day? Both. The first step toward any recovery is admitting that we have a problem. In fact, beaucoup problems. For example, despite the squawking of profiteering polluters and professional deniers, our very atmosphere - without which everyone and everything dies- is rapidly being degraded by our addiction to fossil fuels, literally altering Earth's climate in disastrous ways. Yet, as we burn, our policymakers fiddle. Let us fiddle ...
Will the GOP embrace amnesty?
During President Eisenhower's first term, 60 years ago, the United States faced an invasion across its southern border.
Media lobbyists lose on guns
President Obama suffered a large, embarrassing loss in the Senate on a slew of gun-control bills. If this were a Republican president, they'd be sounding the lame-duck alarms on the nightly newscasts. But most media outlets can't do this. They were fully vested in this campaign alongside Obama, and to underscore his weakness is to acknowledge their own.
The Army goes off the grid
Do you know about "net zero"? That's the wonky phrase attached to an elegant idea: converting communities to total renewable energy, complete recycling, and a culture of conservation to bring humankind's carbon footprint into a sustainable balance with a healthy earth.
Boston bombing: Hitting home
I'm from Boston. Over the years, I lived in two apartments within a stone's throw of Monday's bombings. Over the years, I stood and cheered marathon runners countless times. I know every square inch of the area in all the pictures, which is hardly unusual. It's the center of Boston. My nephew was around the corner when the explosions went off.
Is Christianity homophobic?
That "loving Jesus means hating gay people" is "proclaimed in Christian churches and on Christian television and radio broadcasts."
Our empire addiction & resources
Ruling the world, as our government does, is tricky. Uncle Sam can never relax. The moment resisters in some subservient country, like Pakistan, sense weakness, they test him. He can't afford to be seen as soft and he's got to keep his eye on previously uncontested lands, like Mali.
Obama’s growth-busting budget
No matter how you slice the Obama budget pie, the inescapable fact is that the president wants to get rid of the roughly $1 trillion budget-cutting sequester and substitute in a $1 trillion-plus tax hike. In other words, more spending, more taxing. Growth-busting. The GOP should just say no.
Free speech, hidden cameras don’t mix
USC lecturer Darry Sragow dismissed California Republicans as "really stupid," "racist" and "angry old white people" before his political science class last fall. Those remarks wouldn't be news - except that student Tyler Talgo secretly videotaped Sragow, and the bias-watchdog group Campus Reform posted 15 minutes of excerpts from the 2 1/2-hour class, which the Drudge Report picked up. That turned Sragow into a chew toy for cable news pundits. As a Republican, I found ...
Who Is winning the gun war?
Attacks from abroad - Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have united us. Yet domestic atrocities lately seem only to deepen our divisions. The bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City was seized upon to savage government critics like Rush Limbaugh. After the murder of six innocents, including a 9-year-old girl, and the wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and a dozen others in Tucson, Ariz., by a certifiable lunatic, Sarah Palin was charged with moral ...
More demeaning than Brad Paisley
Country music star Brad Paisley is either an idiot or a genius. If he wrote the song "Accidental Racist" to stir a whirlwind of (mostly bad) publicity, he's a genius. But the negative cultural consensus strongly suggests he should have never been dumb enough to try to write a racial-harmony song.
The Texan turf war over grasses
Turf wars can be the silliest of all scuffles, and no place does silly with more zeal than Texas.
Guns, God & background checks
I happened to be sitting in the Fox News bureau between "hits" on Tuesday morning, when the news broke about the stabbing at Lone Star College in Houston. Watching it unfold in real time, I couldn't help but think (as I'm sure all of us did) about the Newtown, Conn., massacre and the families flying to Washington and the fear that the parents of the Texas college students must be feeling.
The rationale behind knives on a plane
When the Transportation Security Administration announced that it will allow passengers to carry small knives on planes effective April 25, my reaction matched that of Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., who has called the policy change "misguided and, frankly, dangerous." It's impossible to think about the ban on knives on planes without remembering what prompted it - the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Articles by Section - Other Views
What should Americans die for?
"The American people are weary. They don't want boots on the ground. I don't want boots on the ground. The worst thing the United States could do right now is put boots on the ground in Syria."
Too much information is leaking
As a journalist, I am not supposed to admit this, but: I sympathize with the Obama administration's frustration over national security leaks. After a spate of leaks last year - notably, The Associated Press' reporting that national security officials foiled an underwear bomb 2.0 attempt last May - Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein joined Republicans to denounce the Beltway's proclivity for leaking classified information. "This has to stop," quoth DiFi. "When people say they ...
Obama’s legacy? Scandal
The Obama scandals started piling up on top of each other in the last few days. The civil servants who testified on Benghazi were heartbreaking. Then the IRS admitted a punitive agenda against tax exemptions for groups with "tea party" in the name or groups that "educate about the Constitution."
The art of inequality
Monumental gifts to museums are coinciding with the erosion of arts programs at the nation's public schools.
Benghazi Cover-up matters
Last Sept. 11, a terrorist attack left four Americans dead at the Benghazi, Libya, diplomatic mission. The next day, a State Department official wrote in an email, "The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists." Days later, however, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice went on Sunday talk shows and blamed an anti-Islam video for the violence, even though others in her own department knew better.
That ‘pretty white girl’ comment
Three young Cleveland girls missing and presumed dead turned up alive and in good health. A hero of the story is a neighbor, Charles Ramsey, a black man who helped free the girls from the home in which they were apparently imprisoned for some 10 years.
Free speech & conservative students
It sounded like a freedom-of-religion case when a Columbus, Texas high school relay-race team was disqualified from the state track championship because Derrick Hayes pointed heavenward after his team won the race. That would seem odd in a red state like Texas. It turned out that officials were so strict, they warned runners to make no hand gestures after the finish line. Hayes had apparently pointed forward, and then upward, and for that he was out.
Big ag chokes on its own scam
Amy Meyer was curious. Then she was appalled. Then she was charged with the "crime" of using a cell phone to video what appalled her.
How we pay for CEO ‘performance’
Federal unemployment benefits for 400,000 Californians out of work since last fall recently dropped 18 percent, a $52 cut out of weekly checks that average $297. Similar cuts are rolling out in other states.
The drunk guy in the parking lot
The report from the Arlington, Va., Police Department is, on its face, hardly newsworthy:
Obamacare: Train wreck ahead?
Obamacare was supposed to be a big success by now, according to predictions made by liberals who railroaded it through Congress in 2010. Instead, as admitted by one of its leading architects, Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, it's heading for a "train wreck" later this year.
PC mentality and the NBA
Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III started tongues wagging when he posted this cryptic message on Twitter: "In a land of freedom we are held hostage by the tyranny of political correctness."
Whitewashing eight awful years
Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that we saw George W. Bush on TV reading The Pet Goat to some second graders. Now he's all grown up and has an entire , super-duper, king-sized library filled with big books and other neat stuff - all dedicated to him.
Is it a Bay Bridge of cards?
After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake shook loose a big chunk of the Bay Bridge, local politicians did not signal that they wanted to take decades to build a new eastern span, so commuters should get used to driving on a span expected to crumble in a big rumble. Instead, they made grandiose promises about a "world-class" structure. Then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown demanded a tony design; then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown stood up for Treasure ...
Thoughts on a gay man in the NBA
It is almost unbelievable that this is a first.
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