Columns

By now we have all heard about the presidents tour of colleges to tout his plans for making higher education more affordable. Being lectured by the head of a government in perennial deficit is interesting.

New York City seems on the verge of making the same mistake that Detroit made 40 years ago. The mistake is to abolish the NYPD practice referred to as stop and frisk.

WASHINGTON -- Egypt today is a zero-sum game. We'd have preferred there be a democratic alternative. Unfortunately, there is none. The choice is binary: the country will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood or by the military.

Buried in a New York Times story about the economy was this arresting statistic: Median family income for black Americans has declined a whopping 10.9 percent during the Obama administration. It has declined for other groups as well -- 3.6 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 4.5 percent for Hispanics -- but the figure for blacks is huge.

WASHINGTON -- Nowadays the federal government leavens its usual quotient of incompetence with large dollops of illegality. This is eliciting robust judicial rebukes, as when, last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia instructed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stop "flouting the law."

Nothing symbolizes the Utopianism of our times like both liberals and some conservatives calling for us to cut off aid to the Egyptian military, because of the widespread killings in what is becoming a civil war in Egypt. Such utter lack of realism from the left is not new, but hearing some conservatives saying the same things takes some getting used to.

In the near term, bet on the men with the guns. The Egyptian Army, being slowly squeezed out of its central role in the nation's life by Mohammed Morsi, waited for the moment to oust the elected president and crush his Muslim Brotherhood.

Attendance Thursday at the annual Associated Industries of Florida (AIF) meeting in Palm Beach should be mandatory for politicians.