Columns

The widespread reporting on hacked emails from Sony Pictures -- spurred by the upcoming release of an allegedly funny movie about assassinating North Korean despot Kim Jong Un -- might encourage some gloating from people who would like to bring Hollywood down a peg. But hold the schadenfreude. The media's ethics -- or seeming lack of ethics -- are troubling.

The celebrations in Havana and the sullen silence in Miami tell you all you need to know about who won this round with Castro's Cuba.In JFK's metaphor, Obama traded a horse for a rabbit.

WASHINGTON -- First there's the spark, then the conflagration, followed by the litigation and then, surely, the movie. Call it "Moonlight Fire," and prepare to suspend disbelief.

Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are polar opposites, a Tea Party conservative and an Occupy Wall Street socialist. Then there are the similarities: Both were elected in 2012, both have Harvard on their resume and both are mentioned as presidential material. But the media's read of the two demonstrates an unquestionable slant.

In an earlier column, I looked at the role the abortion issue would play in the 2016 election -- not very much, I concluded -- and promised another column on other cultural issues. Here goes.

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." -- Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield"

President Barack Obama has launched a new initiative to get American schools to teach computer science. Appearing at a Newark, New Jersey, middle school, the president suggested that students, especially girls and minorities, should learn "not just how to use a smartphone but to create the apps for a smartphone."

Brought before a House inquisition, MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber burbled a recantation of his beliefs about how that triumph of liberalism had been achieved.

WASHINGTON -- It is probably too soon to declare a feminist reformation, but a few signs here and there give one hope. Hold it, sirs, don't stop reading yet. I realize that seeing the F-word in the first paragraph is like discovering that your bride is wearing pantyhose, but bear with me.

No parent wants to consider the travesty that when he sends his 18-year-old daughter to college, she could be vulnerable to sexual assault. But in the increasingly punitive atmosphere surrounding sexual-assault allegations, he should also fear sending his 18-year-old son to campus, where he may be falsely accused of rape.

Has the time come to reconsider the way we pay for transportation? Should the Highway Trust Fund and its fuel tax revenue continue as the main source of funding for the federal transportation program?

The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice is a relatively young state agency, having been carved out of the old Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services back in 1997.

Rush Limbaugh is a savvy guy who thinks Republican leaders are wrong to shun the idea of another government shutdown. Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," he argued that the only important poll is the one held on Election Day. "(The GOP) won a landslide election 10 months after that so-called shutdown. ... The essence of a poll is an election, and I've got two of them. And we would have won in 2012 if 4 million Republicans hadn't stayed home."

Law enforcement has been taking a beating, and it is getting worse. Police in New York City are being warned that a group of black militants is planning to murder police officers on duty.