Columns

Among the demands of the "protesters" in Ferguson is that the investigation and prosecution of police officer Darren Wilson be taken away from St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch.McCulloch is biased, it is said. How so? In 1964, his father, a St. Louis police officer, was shot to death by an African-American.

I firmly believe if the state of Florida does not man up and adopt a statewide water quality policy, we are in deep trouble.

Those of us who admit that we were not there, and do not know what happened when Michael Brown was shot by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo., seem to be in the minority.

I've written some variation of this letter many times over the last decade and each time I've set it aside, hewing to the old advice, "If you can't say something nice " But then, I am upbraided by supporters for leaving charges unanswered, saying silence is agreement.

"America is on trial," said Rev. Al Sharpton from the pulpit of Greater St Mark's Family Church in Ferguson, Mo.At issue, the shooting death of Michael Brown, Saturday a week ago, on the main street of that city of 22,000, a neighbor community to Jennings, where this writer lived in the mid-1960s.

It was May 1980. The annual session of the Florida Legislature was wrapping up and on this day, most of the members were back in their legislative districts getting ready for their re-election campaigns.

The Ferguson, Mo., police department released convenience store surveillance tape that showed Michael Brown allegedly stealing some cigars minutes before he was shot by a police officer. Aware that the release of this footage might look like posthumous character assassination of the shooting victim, Captain Ronald Johnson of the Ferguson police explained that the tape was released pursuant to freedom of information requests.

There may be another incumbent-tossing in the wind for Northeast Florida.

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama, presiding over an unusually dismal post-recession economy, might make matters worse with a distracting crusade against the minor and sensible business practice called "inversion," more about which anon. So, consider his credentials as an economic thinker.

Last week, we were told there were 40,000 Yazidis on Sinjar Mountain facing starvation if they remained there, and slaughter by ISIS if they came down.But a team of Marines and Special Forces that helicoptered in has reported back that, with a corridor off the mountain opened up by U.S. air strikes, the humanitarian crisis is over. The few thousand who remain can be airdropped food and water. The rest can be brought out.

"Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle." -- Hillary Clinton, The Atlantic, Aug. 10 WASHINGTON -- Leave it to Barack Obama's own former secretary of state to acknowledge the fatal flaw of his foreign policy: a total absence of strategic thinking.

We all have dreams. A young couple dreams of purchasing their first home together. New parents dream of the day when they can send their child off to college. Our country is rooted in the American dream, which tells us that the opportunity for a better life exists for each of us.

WASHINGTON -- This far into the human story, only the historically uninstructed are startled by what they think are new permutations of evil. So, when Russia sliced Crimea off Ukraine, Secretary of State John Kerry was nonplussed: "You just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext." If, however, Vladimir Putin is out of step with the march of progress, where exactly on history's inevitably ascending path (as progressives like Kerry evidently think) does Kerry, our innocent abroad, locate the Islamic State?

U.S. air strikes since Friday have opened a corridor through which tens of thousands of Yazidis, trapped and starving on a mountain in Iraq, have escaped to safety in Kurdistan.

In 1978, there was only one Tiger Bay Club -- the original at the famed DuPont Plaza Hotel on the mouth of the Miami River.