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Iraq, immigration, inversion. On all three of the issues referred to, President Obama finds himself forced by events to do something he dislikes -- and he's in trouble with much of his Democratic Party base for doing so.

The argument over funding of the public schools in Florida drones on, generating far more heat than light.

NBC's Chuck Todd got a good deal of attention for warning that "(Obama's) on the precipice of doing Jimmy Carter-like damage to the Democratic brand on foreign policy."

No ones perfect, least of all university professors -- at least I speak for myself. We do our best daily to encourage students to speak their minds, write and create well, and think critically. When we fail, we try again. Independent thought, evaluation of evidence, and open discussion are the core of our profession.

WASHINGTON -- In his Islamic State speech, President Obama said many of the right things. Most importantly, he finally got the mission right: degrade and destroy the enemy.

I read with great interest the story on the U.S. Sugar project in Hendry County in Thursday's edition of the Palm Beach Post.

"Twentieth-century technology," writes economic historian Joel Mokyr in the Manhattan Institute's excellent City Journal, "was primarily about 'large' things."Large in physical size, that is. Mokyr's examples include the diesel engine and the gas turbine, shipping containers, communications satellites launched by giant rockets, oil-drilling platforms, massive power stations, giant steel mills and huge airplanes.

Recently some FSU professors bought a full-page ad in the Tallahassee Democrat and another professor wrote an op-ed to slam Sen. John Thrasher for many perceived mistakes in the hope that he wont become FSUs next president.

WASHINGTON -- Since Barry Goldwater, accepting the Republicans' 1964 presidential nomination, said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," Democrats have been decrying Republican "extremism." Actually, although there is abundant foolishness and unseemliness in American politics, real extremism -- measures or movements that menace the Constitution's architecture of ordered liberty -- is rare. This week, however, extremism stained the Senate.

It is amazing the degree to which the media can politicize -- always from a leftist perspective -- just about anything in the news. No matter what the issue, there's the spin, always the spin, especially in the "analysis" reports where "journalists" go in screech advocacy mode while projecting a sober, dispassionate evaluation.

While we talk about democracy and equal rights, we seem increasingly to let both private and government decisions be determined by mob rule. There is nothing democratic about mob rule. It means that some people's votes are to be overruled by other people's disruptions, harassments and threats.

WASHINGTON -- Speaking on Aug. 29 -- at a fundraiser, of course -- Barack Obama applied to a platitude the varnish of smartphone sociology, producing this intellectual sunburst: "The truth of the matter is, is that the world has always been messy. In part, we're just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through." So, if 14th- century Europeans had had Facebook and Twitter, they would have noticed how reallydisagreeable the Hundred Years' War was.

By releasing the grisly videos of the beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, ISIS has altered the political landscape here and across the Middle East.America is on fire.

WASHINGTON -- At his first press briefing after the beheading of American James Foley, President Obama stunned the assembled when he admitted that he had no strategy in Syria for confronting the Islamic State. Yet it was not nearly the most egregious, or consequential, thing he said. Idiotic, yes. You're the leader of the free world. Even if you don't have a strategy -- indeed, especially if you don't -- you never admit it publicly.

Elder financial exploitation is a growing problem. Many senior citizens have worked for decades, paid off their homes and saved money for retirement. However, these assets can make seniors a prime target for individuals who seek to financially exploit them.