Forums: B

In the middle of the battle for this year's Republican nomination, a curiously irrelevant diversion has appeared. Suddenly, we're told, a "Hillary 2016" bandwagon has sprung up out of nowhere. Senator Gillibrand proposed the idea, Nancy Pelosi endorsed it, Bill Clinton has coyly denied it (but given it his blessing), and a Google search discloses over 300 hits about it. In Hollywood, they say that if a starlet gets on a magazine cover, she's lucky, if she gets on two, she's good, but if she gets on half a dozen, all at once, she's got a good agent. Those 300...

The press corps has a mild buzz going about a weekend contretemps ginned up, for publicity's sake, by Sarah Palin's camp, in her ongoing campaign to show how badly she is victimized by the media. The odd thing is that she has been victimized by the media, horribly so, and many of us (myself included, in several posts after the Gabby Giffords shooting) have rushed to her defense -- so she doesn't need to gin up controversies out of thin air. But that's exactly what she and her team did this past weekend.

San Francisco's irrepressible former mayor, Willie Brown, was walking along one of the city's streets when he happened to run into another former city official that he knew, James McCray. McCray's greeting to him was "You're 10." "What are you talking about?" Willie Brown asked. McCray replied: "I just walked from Civic Center to Third Street and you're only the 10th black person I've seen." That is hardly surprising. The black population of San Francisco is less than half of what it was in 1970, and it fell another 19 percent in the past decade. A few years ago,...

The New Black Panther Party says it will monitor the Patriots after Patriots leader Catherine Engelbrecht was caught on video warning poll watchers about Black Panther members in Houston.

As the New York Times has reported, Connecticut Attorney General and Senate candidate Richard Blumenthal remained stateside during the Vietnam War thanks to five deferments he obtained, the last of which enabled him to take a job in the Nixon White House. During research for my book The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Doubleday 2008), I uncovered some documents that showed Blumenthal, then a staff lawyer for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a key domestic policy adviser to the president, had aroused the suspicions of Attorney General Mitchell. The year was 1969, and the country was wracked by...

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama says he has not succeeded in bringing the country together, acknowledging an atmosphere of divisiveness that has washed away the lofty national feeling surrounding his inauguration a year ago. "That's what's been lost this year ... that whole sense of changing how Washington works," Obama said in an interview with People magazine. The president said his second-year agenda will be refocused on uniting the country around common values, "whether we're Democrats or Republicans." "We all want work that's satisfying, pays the bills and gives children a better future and security," Obama said in the...

First it was social promotions. When our children had difficulty passing, we went to a pass/fail system that no longer honored achievement but simply sent the student on to the next grade in order to NOT stigmatize the child. Less emphasis was placed on factual and historical learning and placed on project achievements and social awareness sensitivity. 2 + 2 could = 5 if we tried hard. And we get dumber. Next we went to No Child Left Behind. In order to increase the minimal education level of American students, we began to “test Teach”. That is, the teachers and...