While waiting for a plane in Dallas airport I read the New York Times staggering article that suicides among active-duty military personnel have eclipsed the number of troops dying in battle. These suicides among soldiers while still on active duty are “just the tip of the iceberg,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and [...]

Those of us who lived in the dark ages of the 1960’s and 1970’s sexual revolution remember Grand Slammer Billie Jean King’s 1973 famous whipping of men’s tennis champ Bobby Riggs as an athletic moment of joy. The year before, in June of 1972, Title 9–a landmark civil rights law barring gender discrimination of education [...]

(Myra MacPherson profiled Newt Gingrich for the Washington Post’s Style section in 1989.) Reporters, listen up: Stop calling Newt Gingrich a “scholar.” In fact, spend some time learning about his real history. Yes, Gingrich calls himself a “historian,” but there was a time when reporters went to the clips to check things like that. Now, [...]

One of the last great radio and television correspondents, Bob Pierpoint, died Saturday. The following information isn’t all that matters, of course, in the scheme of who a person is or was, but his career statistics are impressive. As CBS White House correspondent Pierpoint covered six Presidents, from Eisenhower to Reagan, 12 national elections, President [...]

If you are a progressive, perhaps you got a “First, fill in your name” email requesting money from Barack Obama back during the ’08 campaign? That artful first person oh-so-friendly email, adroitly and effectively designed to make you feel that, hey, you could walk right into campaign headquarters and get a big fat hug from [...]

“Kick the can down the road.” Is everyone tired of this latest in political speak? Nearly every TV anchor, reporter or pundit uses it with the solemnity of pure gospel, threatening to replace in sheer repetitive annoyance the “mushroom cloud” of Bush the second’s reign during WMD debates. From President Obama on down it is [...]

The media have been rightly laudatory about Betty Ford, who died at 93. Her candor and her caring were extolled by many. She was the accidental First Lady, standing in stunned insecurity as her husband took the oath of office when Nixon resigned. Sometimes the exploitation of political wives can be difficult for them, to [...]

From Dublin to Lisbon, London to Paris the newspapers and television were filled with grumblings about bailing out Greece, of course. Parisian disgust with Sarkozy was as common as croissants for breakfast, economic downtrends were predicted everywhere. Obama, once a shining leader, was relegated to the back pages. But where was the doom and gloom? [...]

Unless they are diehard supporters or detractors, the first thing some people say when they talk of Julian Assange—which seems curious to me—is that he is creepy or weird looking, and then there is a quiet murmur of dissent: “What if he releases something that could damage someone or get people killed? My answer is: [...]

An interesting Glenn Beckian tidbit from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank: “One day, he rhetorically asked his Fox News viewers: “Why did we buy Alaska in the 1950s?” As Milbank says, “a good question” seeing as how “we”, the U.S. of A., bought it from the Russians in 1867. It was known as Seward’s Folly [...]