I went to a strip club once. OK, maybe it was twice. The guys were going; I was curious. It reminded me of the first time I walked into a casino, in a hotel in Reno where I was staying on business. I expected glamour, James Bond look-alikes in dashing tuxedos. I found sad-looking seniors throwing away their Social Security money and standing in line for cheap buffets. Even "high-end" strip clubs are full of ...
Just when you think the tea party Republican majority in the U.S. House couldn't possibly get any screwier, up jumps Rep. Allen West.
Calling America's criminal justice system "racist" is not confined to "civil rights leaders" like the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Then-Sen. Barack Obama, during the 2008 presidential campaign, said it, too. Blacks and whites, said Obama, "are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates (and) receive very different sentences ... for the same crime."
As it turns out, Hilary Rosen was wrong about Ann Romney not working a day in her life. She's plainly working right now, as a strategist for her husband's campaign, not a stay-at-home mom. For all the shock and chagrin about Rosen's comment (which was, of course, poorly put, but was an effort to address the question of whether the Romneys could understand the problems of "people like us," as pollsters usually ask it), it ...
President Barack Obama calls his proposed tax on millionaires the "Buffett rule," based on financier Warren Buffett's claim that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Obama claims that the "Buffett rule" asks millionaires to "do their fair share" by paying the same income tax rate that middle-class families pay.
Never again. That should be the determined motto of California legislators who will set dates for this state's future primary elections, now that it's perfectly clear the June 5 California Republican presidential primary election will mean little or nothing, just like all other June primaries contested here since 1972.
I've not weighed in on the Trayvon Martin killing, because I really didn't have anything to add. Until now.
"I don't know any polite way of putting this - but he's lying," said professor John Ellis, president of the National Association of Scholars' California division. Ellis was reacting to a critic's characterization of the NAS's damning report, "A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California."
The shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and its galvanizing effect on African-Americans has been compared to the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till.
God save me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies. That thought must be coursing through the mind of President Obama right now as his White House rigs for silent running in the murder trial of George Zimmerman. Obama foolishly inserted himself into this volatile case weeks ago, and injected the issue of race. Expressing empathy with the family of Trayvon Martin, Obama flashed a signal of racial solidarity: "If I had ...
The news is stuffed with "studies" in which "experts" tell us how we should behave. One recently found that conservatives have lost their trust in science over the last 40 years. That's probably because the very political academics of science are routinely summoned to prove the right-wingers are not only wrong but dangerously wrong and not just dangerously wrong but evil, too.
"Godfather" director Francis Ford Coppola is a big shot - and not just in the film world. As a vintner and restaurateur, Coppola apparently sees himself as the capo di tutti capi - the boss of all bosses - who owns the Italian dictionary. Last year, Coppola won a U.S. trademark for the phrase "a tavola" - Italian for "to the table" (or, in American English, "come and get it"). It seems the U.S. Patent ...
There was much ado about not much when President Obama declared last week that it would be "unprecedented, extraordinary" for the United States Supreme Court to overturn the health care reform law that passed both houses of Congress with substantial majorities.
President Barack Obama chastised the media last week. "I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they're equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle," the president chided those attending the American Society of Newspaper Editors luncheon. <p align="LEFT" style="text-indent: 0.13in; margin-bottom: 0in; letter-spacing: normal; font-style: normal; ...
The charter school movement was presented to the American people as a way to have more parental control over public school education. Charter schools are public schools financed by local taxpayers and federal grants.
Sen. Carl Levin was aghast.
Fifty years after poverty in America briefly became a front-burner issue on our nation's political agenda, it's time to move it off the back burner again.
In late March, Kennedy Johnston made a Facebook post about going to college to become a teacher. One of the first responses was from her big brother, U.S. Army Sgt. Michael Cable, who was serving in Afghanistan.
The bill created in secret by the Gang of Eight is an outrageous betrayal of American workers, both high-skilled and low-skilled. Claiming it is bipartisan, the drafters were Democrats and globalist Republicans.
They're hunkering down at SAC Capital, the hedge fund empire of billionaire Steven A. Cohen. Federal prosecutors have been picking off SAC's second bananas one by one, plea bargaining for information that brings them ever closer to Cohen.
No one should pretend that dealing with leaks of highly sensitive and classified national security documents is easy. I remember hearing plenty of conservatives taking to the airwaves to accuse The New York Times of nothing less than "treason" for publishing materials provided by WikiLeaks. I thought the Times publication was squarely within the bounds of First Amendment law, just as I think James Rosen was acting within the bounds of the First Amendment in ...
When you win the White House, you get to pick the team you want. Sure, that sounds simple and doesn't need any clarification, but it's clear that simplicity and clarity is lacking in Washington, D.C.
On Sunday, Fox News' Chris Wallace spoon-fed former GOP Sen. Bob Dole one of the media's favorite questions: Could Ronald Reagan - or Dole - make it in today's Republican Party? "I doubt it," Dole answered. "Reagan wouldn't have made it. Certainly, (Richard) Nixon couldn't have made it, because he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it."
After a British soldier wearing a Help for Heroes charity T-shirt was run over, stabbed and slashed with machetes and a meat cleaver, and beheaded, the Tory government advised its soldiers that it is probably best not to appear in uniform on the streets of their capital.
No, this is not Watergate or Iran-Contra. The AP, IRS and Benghazi matters represent a scandal not of presidential wrongdoing, but of presidential indolence, indifference and incompetence in discharging the duties of chief executive. The Barack Obama revealed to us in recent days is something rare in our history: a spectator president, clueless about what is going on in his own household, who reacts to revelations ...
I hate Apple. There was a time when I would look at my iPhone, and my heart would skip a beat. With its stylish white-and-gray cover, it felt like a luxury car I could hold in my hot little hand. It told me things I didn't know. It told me how to get where I wanted to go. It was exciting. It purred cute little noises that let me know I was wanted, desirable, in demand.
Whenever one of our cities gets a star turn as host of some super-sparkly event, such as a national political gathering or the Super Bowl, its first move is to tidy up - by having the police sweep homeless people into jail, out of town, or under some rug.