Archive By Section - Other Views
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.
Who Is winning the gun war?
Attacks from abroad - Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have united us.
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.
Lies help Dems snag Black vote
As recently as 1956, nearly 39 percent of blacks voted Republican in that year's presidential election. After the Civil War, Abe Lincoln's Republican Party easily carried the black vote - where blacks were allowed to vote. Unwelcome in the Democratic Party, most blacks voted Republican and continued to do so through the early part of the 20th century. It wasn't until 1948, when 77 percent of the black vote went to Harry Truman, who had desegregated the military, that a majority of blacks identified themselves as Democrats.
Remembering (& forgetting) Thatcher
The legendary British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died, and the national media tried to pay their respects, not only for breaking Britain's "glass ceiling" with a "bruising" political style, but for transforming Britain and helping wind down the Cold War.
From the AP Stylebook: How to obscure
The Associated Press announced last week that it no longer sanctions the term "illegal immigrant" in its stylebook. Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll explained that the AP has decided it is wrong for reporters to use the word "illegal" to describe a person, but it's OK to use the word to "describe only an action, such as living or immigrating to a country illegally."
Articles by Section - Other Views
Father of Obamacare
Last week, by 2-1 vote, a Washington, D.C., appellate panel ruled that the Obama administration unlawfully changed Obamacare. Meanwhile, on the same day, on the same question, a panel from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the other way. This issue is headed for the Supreme Court.
The Indian mascot killers
Anyone who thinks the cultural left is going to stop its political correctness with the Washington Redskins isn't reading USA Today. On the top of their Sports front page on July 22, the paper reported on activists taking a stand against "redface," championing a group called Eradicating Offensive Indian Mascotry.
Pot prohibition doesn’t work
The New York Times has seen the light. On Sunday, the paper editorialized in favor of an end to the federal ban on marijuana. According to Tony Newman of the Drug Policy Alliance, The Gray Lady has become the first major national newspaper to support legalizing marijuana.
Congress hides its debt to lobbyists
When I heard our Congress critters are taking an extended vacation for all of August and part of September, I had two incongruous reactions: gratitude and anger.
FBI: Gone fishin’ in SF
The FBI's motto is "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity." But given the FBI sting against Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow - a convicted felon who was freed from prison in 2003 because the feds got him to testify against a confederate - I suspect that a more apt motto might be "Fuggedaboutit."
Israel wasn’t the aggressor
The "crossfire" mentality that defines public discourse today has the obvious problem of ignoring the fact that most of us land somewhere in the middle, turning every debate into a shouting contest between the extremists who generate passion and ratings, and rarely reflecting the views of the majority in the middle. I've been saying for years that it might be just as entertaining, and certainly more productive, to see where ideological opposites find common ground. But until someone actually attempts it, we will keep spiraling down into extremism and incivility.
Prostitution & the Internet
The news that Google executive Forrest Hayes died on a yacht after being injected with heroin by a "date" he met on a website that connects "sugar daddies" with "sugar babies" has prompted not only charges against the woman, 26-year-old Alix Tichelman, and an investigation of a similar death (ruled accidental) involving Ms. Tichelman in 2013, but also questions about the website that brought the dead husband and father into contact with the woman who literally killed him.
Hillary’s bullying the media
Hillary Clinton's $35 doorstop of a memoir is a flop. It was a best-seller to hard-core Democrats, but her advance is estimated at $14 million, which means Simon & Schuster is taking a bath in the hopes of a publishing a future president.
The Day of the Hawk
The bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie was premeditated mass murder. Gadhafi was taking revenge for Reagan's raid on Tripoli in 1986.
Bracing for an attack by veterans
From 1776 forward, Americans have opposed having soldiers do police work on our soil. But in recent years, Pentagon chiefs have teamed up with police chiefs to circumvent that prohibition.
Disinvestment of fossil fuels
A group called Fossil Free UC wants regents to divest the University of California's endowment fund of all fossil fuel holdings. "As one of the leading public institutions in the world, we have the privilege and the responsibility to take action where we can influence change," Fossil Free UC explains on its website.
Cargill’s integrity-free soybean oil
Can you have your hypocrisy and eat it, too?
Triumph of dubious appeals
A - all bow - federal judge has ruled that California's death penalty is unconstitutional because the state's "dysfunctional administration" has meted out the punishment to more than 900 murderers but imposed it on "only 13" since 1978. That's too arbitrary, wrote U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney of Santa Ana. Besides, "the slight possibility of death, almost a generation after (killer Ernest Dewayne Jones) was first sentenced, violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment."
N. Carolina’s moral freedom summer
The Moral Monday movement is mobilizing again.
Triumph of dubious appeals
A - all bow - federal judge has ruled that California's death penalty is unconstitutional because the state's "dysfunctional administration" has meted out the punishment to more than 900 murderers but imposed it on "only 13" since 1978. That's too arbitrary, wrote U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney of Santa Ana. Besides, "the slight possibility of death, almost a generation after (killer Ernest Dewayne Jones) was first sentenced, violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment."
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