Columns

WASHINGTON -- Recent events from Ferguson, Missouri, to Staten Island, New York, might prompt an observer to infer that American cops are racist and that a bigoted white populace tolerates unnecessary lethal force against minorities.

For the third time, the cops of the NYPD have turned their backs on the mayor of New York.

I am excited to announce I will actively explore the possibility of running for president of the United States. -- Jeb Bush

WASHINGTON -- Standing at the intersection of three foreign policy crises and a perennial constitutional tension, Bob Corker, R-Tenn., incoming chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, may be the senator who matters most in 2015. Without an authorization for use of military force (AUMF) tailored to novel circumstances, America is waging war against an entity without precedent (the Islamic State).

For the first time since 2004, Floridians had more to celebrate on New Years Day than just the dawn of 2015. Floridians could also celebrate the elimination of hurricane tax assessments on their insurance policies -- a real savings for families and small businesses.

"If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you," said Calvin Coolidge, whose portrait hung in the Cabinet Room of the Reagan White House.

WASHINGTON -- A writer seeking profound pronouncements for a year-end column is likely instead to find herself awash in punchlines. Life isn't a comedy. It's a joke.

In July of 1870, King Wilhelm sent Foreign Minister Bismarck an account of his meeting with a French envoy who had demanded that the king renounce any Hohenzollern claim to the Spanish throne.

WASHINGTON -- In 1968, a singularly traumatic year -- assassinations, urban riots, 16,899 Americans killed in Vietnam -- Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the ebullient Minnesotan, said his presidential campaign was about "the politics of joy." This was considered infelicitous.

Looking back at our popular culture in 2014, it appears that Hollywood's power is on the wane. Politically, the leftist celebrities and the "Rock the Vote" gang couldn't help dig the Democrats out of their rut. Even that paragon of permissiveness Sandra Fluke couldn't exploit her Limbaugh-victim aura to win a state Senate seat in libertine California.

I dont recall the exact November 1943 day that Mexican government agents hustled my mother, me, my uncle and great-grandmother (abuelita) onto a train bound for El Norte, the United States of America.

Historians will record that 2014 was a terrible year for liberal Democrats, not just at the polls but also in the news. The networks spent most of the fall campaign pretending there wasn't a fall campaign, and for good reason. Obama's Hope and Change aura had completely sunk into the muck as Obama's honesty and competence both took a hit in the hard news of ISIS and Ebola.

"NYPD, KKK, How many kids did you kill today?"That was one of the chants of anti-police protesters in New York City. Another was, "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!"

Defending the indefensible is a job only a lame duck should undertake.

Has there ever been a president more eager to make concessions to vicious regimes than Barack Obama? The opening of diplomatic relations with Cuba is the latest and, one fears, not the last in a string of pre-emptive concessions.