Columns

WASHINGTON -- When H.L. Mencken said that Puritanism was "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," he was barely grazing the iceberg of the titanic fundamentalism to come.

WASHINGTON -- In the political marketplace, there's now a run on Obama shares. The left is disappointed with the president. Independents are abandoning him in droves. And the right is already dancing on his political grave, salivating about November when, his own press secretary admitted Sunday, Democrats might lose the House.

As part of our ongoing commitment to bringing the jobs and environmental benefits associated with clean energy to Southwest Florida, Kitson & Partners recently joined the ranks of Citizens for Clean Energy, a new coalition dedicated to educating and working with lawmakers to support policies that will advance the clean-energy jobs and technologies that will kick-start Floridas economy and bring an entire industry to the state.

Let me first do what some in this business fail to do: reveal a potential conflict of interest and remind readers that I served as Newt Gingrich's political chairman before and while he was speaker of the House. I've known him 30 years. But those who follow this column, including Gingrich, have not always enjoyed my views on some of his words or actions.

WASHINGTON -- The story mocks a cliche: As they were leaving the Garden of Eden, Adam said to Eve, "Darling, we live in an age of transition." The first sentence of Barack Obama's letter introducing his new strategic review says Americans have often coped with "moments of transition" such as today's "time of sweeping change." Such boilerplate makes one weep -- and yearn for serious, meaning unsentimental, assessments of America's foreign policy tradition.

WASHINGTON -- Sarah Palin, the ubiquitous enchantress of the disenchanted, may not have been ready to lead the free world back when John McCain anointed her as his running mate. But she's left rubber on the road that leads to fame, fortune and a new feminine mystique that drives certain men and women wild -- in very different ways. For what it's worth, I get a kick out of Sarah. May I call her Sarah?

If you could spend vast amounts of other people's money just by saying a few magic words, wouldn't you be tempted to do it? Barack Obama has spent hundreds of billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money just by using the magic words "stimulus" and "jobs."

When you call to mind images of Floridas Space Coast, depending on your generation you may think of JFKs immortal speech sending us to the moon or you may remember watching your first shuttle launch. Regardless of which memory comes to mind, the context is that of incredibly thrilling innovation and patriotic pride.

WASHINGTON -- Fifty years ago Sunday, a novel hit Americas bookshelves that changed the way millions thought about race and the inexplicable South. Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird, by some estimates the most-read book in American schools, has grown old enough to have become slightly dotty in the minds of fresher readers, many of whom have only a textbook understanding of the way things were.

WASHINGTON -- Remember NASA? It once represented to the world the apogee of American scientific and technological achievement. Here is President Obama's vision of NASA's mission, as explained by administrator Charles Bolden: