Columns

Conservatives have this in common with sharks and polar bears: They eat their own.

Americans change their minds on some issues. One of them is crime and punishment.

The next 72 hours will be decisive in the career of the speaker of the House. The alternatives he faces are these: John Boehner can, after "consultation," give his blessing to Barack Obama's decision to launch a war on Syria, a nation that has neither attacked nor threatened us.

Whether or not Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons, President Obama has no legitimate grounds to intervene.

WASHINGTON -- Having leaked to the world, and thus to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a detailed briefing of the coming U.S. air attack on Syria -- (1) the source (offshore warships and perhaps a bomber or two), (2) the weapon (cruise missiles), (3) the duration (two or three days), (4) the purpose (punishment, not "regime change") -- perhaps we should be publishing the exact time the bombs will fall, lest we disrupt dinner in Damascus.

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama's foreign policy dream -- cordial relations with a Middle East tranquilized by "smart diplomacy" -- is in a death grapple with reality. His rhetorical writhings illustrate the perils of loquacity. He has a glutton's rather than a gourmet's appetite for his own rhetorical cuisine, and has talked America to the precipice of a fourth military intervention in the crescent that extends from Libya to Afghanistan.

It's ironic that President Obama so often carps about politics -- blaming "politics as usual" or "hyperpartisanship" for everything from the lack of economic growth to joblessness to climate change -- when he is the most relentlessly partisan president in recent memory.

Founded in 1923, our companys tree farm was one of the first 50 to open in Florida. Back then, we harvested timber to build wire-bound wood crates, which carried Floridas fresh citrus to grocers and community markets in the Southeast.

Last Friday, Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian here on a baseball scholarship, was shot and killed while jogging in Duncan, Okla., population 23,000. He died where he fell.