Longboat Key, FL–If the government announced, “Sorry folks, no presidential election this year,” Americans would take to the streets and blood would spill. But deny a substantial chunk of voters a chance to participate in a key part of that election, the nominating process, and the reaction is muted at best. In the months I’ve [...]

“Close enough” only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and the Democratic Party’s side of the first-in-the-nation Iowa presidential caucuses. The wisdom of including horseshoes and hand grenades in “close enough” is self-evident. As for Iowa politics — critics will say that compared to the caucuses the Electoral College is a model of precision and expression [...]

Just the title of the bill making its way through the Congress ought to frighten hell out of us or at least prompt a reporter worth his or her computer to find out more: “The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism and Prevention Act.” Yet so far no one in the Main Stream Media–newspapers, television or [...]

After the Bush administration denied that it manhandles prisoners, it was revealed that it does. Since turnabout is fair play, it would be appropriate for the White House press corps to try its hand at enhanced interrogation techniques to pry information out of its high-value source, George W. Bush. No rough stuff, of course, no [...]

Now, was that so bad? When six Republican candidates for president showed up last night for a forum at Morgan State University in Baltimore, my hometown, people in the audience all acted like they had some sense. The panel – Pulitzer Prize winner Cynthia Tucker, PBS’s Ray Suarez and Juan Williams, an NPR and Fox [...]

Wow. You just never expect this. You never expect to pick up the phone to discover you’ve won a MacArthur Fellows program “genius” grant. But sure enough, this morning my cell rings and a voice informs me that my (admittedly esoteric) research in applying nanotechnology to Pez dispensers has been recognized to the tune of [...]

The nation’s early leaders believed in calling a spade a spade, so when they needed to name the agency of government charged with fighting the new nation’s battles they called it simply the War Department. The name survived from 1789 to 1947 when “defense” entered the picture with a cabinet-level “Secretary of Defense.” Two years [...]

Perhaps we should give up asking President Bush any more questions. While the questions may be interesting, his answers, I’m certain, will be useless or irrelevant. But there is an important and possibly revealing question to be asked of the presidential candidates, especially the Democrats, for we can presume what the Republicans will say. And [...]

A three-star general was rebuked and may lose a star and a half-dozen other brass took it on the chin last week for their part in misleading the public and the family of Pat Tillman in the aftermath of his accidental death three years ago in Afghanistan. The military had gone so far as to [...]

First it was New Orleans levees, now the I-35 West bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Two examples of the country’s deteriorating infrastructure. Today on NPR’s Day to Day, Thomas Rooney, a civil engineer based in St. Louis, talking with Alex Cohen about bridge safety, shocked me by saying that one bridge collapses every [...]