Newt Gingrich either has a serious memory deficit or he simply will say or do anything to call attention to himself. Gingrich’s latest is to declare that the GOP is the party of paychecks and Democrats the party of food stamps. Catchy, no? Reflect on it a bit and you realize that Gingrich has sacrificed [...]

It seemed odd that the federal judge who blocked President Obama’s order temporarily halting further deepwater drilling for oil may have had a personal financial stake in the issue. The most recent financial disclosure statement by District Judge Martin L.C. Feldman of New Orleans shows he owned stock as recently as last year in several [...]

(Written with Herb Strentz) The Des Moines Register in 1991 won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for exemplary coverage of a rape, coverage that set a high standard for sensitivity and responsibility. On June 16 of this year the Register once more gave noteworthy coverage to a young woman raped multiple times that again [...]

The Patient Protection and Affordability Act, sometimes known as the full employment act for lawyers, has critics salivating to get into court to challenge the law’s requirement that everyone buy health insurance. The critics are beside themselves over the provision. To hear the moans and gnashed teeth you’d think the very foundations of Western civilization [...]

Can’t Barack Obama do anything right? When he’s not being rebuked for being too much in the limelight (the New Yorker, Jan. 25), he’s being zapped by Frank Rich in the March 7 New York Times. Or was it Rich? The high-profile, hard-hitting lift-out quote in his column – “One year on, everyone is puzzling [...]

Ask an American audience what it knows about Britain’s’ “Chilcott Inquiry” and chances are you will draw blank looks. That’s too bad. Americans ought to be intently interested in the Chilcott inquiry, named for its chairman, senior civil servant Sir John Chilcott, because it’s likely to provide the only authoritative account they will have into [...]

Richard Reid, the Briton who attempted in 2001 to blow up an American airliner with explosives packed in his shoes was quickly dubbed the “shoe bomber” by the press. No one to my knowledge has referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as the “crotch bomber” for his attempt to destroy a plane with explosives concealed in [...]

Now that the battle over health care has moved to the halls of Congress, lobbyists will take center stage. Insurance companies, drug manufacturers, physicians, nurses, hospitals, nursing homes and nearly everyone else with a stake in the health-care system will make their pitches to lawmakers. Note that I didn’t mention patients. The system exists to [...]

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For me, the most intriguing item in the July 20 New York Times was tacked on to the end of Ross Douthat’s op-ed column. It said: “Paul Krugman is off today.” “Off” in the sense that what Krugman turned in was not up to his or the Times’s standard? Newspapers are seldom that candid. Or [...]