Column

Comedian Jimmy Fallon is a celebrity fraud's best friend. He's an answer to normal America's question: How do creepy stars get away with their grotesqueries? If you're lucky enough to sit by his late-night throne and join his cool-kid games, all your troubles will melt away. Funnyman Jimmy is not just a bread-and-circuses buffoon. He's the keeper of the pop culture immunity necklace.

It's good to see conservatives have gotten back to letting The New York Times choose their nominees for them. The only silver lining to Mitt Romney being pushed out of the presidential race -- temporarily, I hope -- is that the media's preferred GOP candidate, Jeb Bush, is catnip to the stupidest influence-seekers, so Wall Street will be wasting all kinds of money over the next few months.

After 12 years, Brian Williams is coming clean, admitting the helicopter he traveled in during NBC's coverage of the 2003 Iraq invasion never once came under fire, despite Williams' many repetitions of a lie claiming it did. According to The Hollywood Reporter on Jan. 30, NBC Nightly News posted a video of Williams to Facebook, in which Williams recounts the false story during a news segment.…

New York's schools are the most segregated in the nation, and the state needs remedies right away. That was Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch's message to New York's governor and Legislature. She said that minority children are disproportionately trapped in schools that lack teaching talent, course offerings and resources needed to prepare them for college and success. Simply calling for more school…

President Obama has no intention of heeding the call of American voters to curb his statist agenda. That's not what extreme ideologues do, and that's not what he did after his party's shellacking in the 2010 congressional elections. In fact, despite what conciliatory bones he may have thrown the Republicans after those elections, he doubled down on his agenda. Having done that, he still won re-…

The network meteorologists barely had time to come up for air while "forecasting" the latest snowstorm non-disaster. Politicians, fearing what might happen to their approval numbers if a blizzard hit, went on TV to announce they were taking proactive measures. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio shut down tunnels, bridges, even the subway to prepare for the worst. Governors Andrew Cuomo and Chris…

Republicans in Congress need to hold tobacco company-style hearings, hauling in the presidents of various universities and asking them to justify their multimillion-dollar salaries.

That MSNBC routinely, almost compulsively, mischaracterizes what conservatives say is nothing new. It's what makes the network so adorable. But in a recent trend, anchor Rachel Maddow has been upping the ante, altering quotes we just heard her play on tape. On Monday night, for example, Rachel ran a news clip from President Reagan's 1983 Martin Luther King Day signing ceremony:

The poker-faced NBC News anchor Brian Williams has viewed, with apparent dispassion and even amusement, scenes of his actress daughter Allison committing bizarre and debasing sexual acts on the HBO series “Girls.” "She's always been an actress,” says the evidently unmoved and unmovable journalist.  “For us, watching her is the family occupation, and everybody has to remember it's acting, no…

If we can't have a wholly unified Republican Party, can the GOP at least agree on some major issues that are essential to the Republican brand and, more importantly, help to get this country back on the right track? If we can't come together on some of the basic issues that have always defined us, how do we effectively oppose President Obama's ongoing destructive agenda? How do we sell ourselves…

Social media is agog over George Clooney'stribute to his wife, Amal, at last weekend's Golden Globe Awards in Hollywood. Women, especially, are swooning in their tweets and Facebook postings. Said Clooney, "Listen, it's humbling to find somebody to love, especially when you've been waiting your whole life, especially when your whole life is 53 years ... Amal, whatever alchemy brought us together…

I gather from Obama's "free" community college proposal that his plan for dealing with the Republican Congress over the next two years is to throw out ridiculously expensive ideas no one has ever heard of before, and then denounce Republicans for being naysayers.

"Whether one is a conservative or a radical, a protectionist or a free trader, a cosmopolitan or a nationalist, a churchman or a heathen, it is useful to know the causes and consequences of economic phenomena." That quotation, from Nobel laureate George J. Stigler, is how Dr. Thomas Sowell begins the fifth edition of "Basic Economics." It's a book that explains complex economic phenomena in a way…

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times, Paul Conrad, frequently used religious symbols to illustrate his point of view. Conrad drew the ire of some readers whenever he used the Star of David or a cross in his drawings. Letters to the editor denounced him, but to my knowledge no one showed up at the newspaper to kill him. This is the difference between…