Column

I’ve been a sports fan all my life. Of course being raised in the Southeast we took our college football very much to heart and it would be hard to be raised in North Carolina as I was and not be Dixie proud of the legendary brand of basketball that’s played in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

At what point do environmentalist liberals become accountable for the results of their policies instead of their allegedly good intentions? Why isn't President Obama held accountable for his ideologically based interference with lower oil prices? Obama has repeatedly shown his willingness to use his executive authority discriminatorily to implement his preferred environmental policies. On the…

"What can you do to stem the tide of teen pregnancy?" Jacquelyn Wideman asks from New York City, where the rate is at least 12 percent higher than the national average. "Get them engaged," she says, answering her own question. To do this, she proposes New Directions, a proposed charter school for Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The idea behind it is to get teenage mothers and…

Most parents think of video games as a child's pursuit, especially the innocent ones. Many people who bought a Nintendo Wii video game system would consider this the most innocent of them all. They watch their children play Super Mario Brothers on it, or join the family in playing tennis or golf or baseball with their little childlike”Mii” characters on Wii Sports. I never imagined this game…

My fellow Americans, who are "your people"? I ask because U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who is black, used the phrase "my people" in congressional testimony this week. It was an unmistakably color-coded and exclusionary reference intended to deflect criticism of the Obama Justice Department's selective enforcement policies. It backfired. In pandering to skin-deep identity politics and…

With all of the union strife in Wisconsin, Indiana and New Jersey, and indications of more to come, it might be time to shed a bit of light on unions as an economic unit. First, let's get one important matter out of the way. I value freedom of association, and non-association, even in ways that are not always popular and often deemed despicable. I support a person's right to be a member or…

One of the pleasures of an earthly transition is that you can write nice things about a person while they are still around to read them. And so, I rise to praise my friend and favorite newspaper writer, Frank Rich Jr. as he leaves The New York Times for New York magazine. What, you say? You are a conservative and he is among the most politically liberal people in journalism. Or, as someone…

I know that all of you recognize the first line of the Marine Corps (pronounced “core,” Mr. President) Hymn. But did you ever wonder what the shores of Tripoli had to do with it? Actually, it has quite a lot. A few centuries ago there was a band of cutthroats operating in that part of the world who became known collectively as the Barbary Pirates, the Barbary Corsairs or the Ottoman…

A frotteur is someone — usually male — who takes aberrant pleasure in rubbing his fully clothed groin area against someone else — usually female — generally in a public place, say, a subway, perhaps a funeral parlor. The frotteur is a pretty weird duck. The word is obviously French in derivation, and it unsurprisingly has an arty origin. Frottage is "the technique or process of taking a rubbing…

If public school teachers spent more time teaching in classrooms and less time community-organizing in political war rooms, maybe taxpayers wouldn't feel as ripped off as they do. Before the Big Labor bosses start complaining about "teacher-bashing," let's be clear: An increasing number of rank-and-file teachers feel exactly the same way. Retired New York teacher Vinne Cusimano, who was…

President Obama has said his view of same-sex "marriage" is "evolving." Apparently he thinks that the law should be based on a kind of Darwinian jurisprudence which allows it to "evolve" and become whatever the ruling politicians at a given moment say it is (or isn't). How else to explain the decision by the president and his attorney general, Eric Holder, not to defend the Defense of…

How much longer can the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and other leftists successfully maintain the ruse that intolerance, hatred and the propensity for violence mainly come from the right in this country? The lie is getting old. The left's ideas continue to fail in the real world, and the majority of the people reject them, which is why their proponents so often disguise their true…

I love teachers. I really do. And I'm sure that most are overworked and underpaid. Certainly, no one is getting rich from teaching kids. I applaud the hardworking teachers across this land. But, as has happened in Wisconsin, when teachers unions muscle legislators like the Mafia and Democrats abandon their voting posts because they don't like projected outcomes, haven't we abandoned the very…

Barack Obama's new era of civility was over before it began. You wouldn't know it from reading The New York Times, watching Katie Couric or listening to the Democratic manners police. But America has been overrun by foul-mouthed, fist-clenching wildebeests. Yes, the tea party movement is responsible — for sending these liberal goons into an insane rage, that is. After enduring two years of…