Columns

We're entering the summer vacation season, and conservatives continue feeling confident that an electoral wave is going to wash over the opposition come November.

By vetoing SB 2044, Gov. Charlie Crist not only secured his place as one of the least consistent politicians in Floridas history, he also established himself as one of the most selfish.

WASHINGTON -- Proving ones feminist bona fides has become the latest challenge for women aspiring to public office. Is she a real feminist who walks in lockstep with traditional feminist orthodoxy? Or is she a faux feminist, i.e., a woman who has benefited from traditional feminism, become all that she could be, but, alas, thinks independently on certain sacred tenets of the sisterhood?

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics.

It's that time of year when America celebrates the donor we used to call "Dad." Granted, many children still have an in-house father, but millions don't. Some fathers have become alienated through divorce. "Baby daddies" never were invited to the commitment party. Still others are anonymous in the truest sense -- mere DNA donors who made a deposit and picked up a check.

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama doesn't do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill. He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian "I feel your pain," a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting.

WASHINGTON -- Evidently Hamid Karzai did not get the memo on terminology. U.S. military commanders have stopped using the word "operation" to describe the drive, now delayed, against the Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city. This word connotes danger and stirs dread among the population, whose allegiance is the prize for which counterinsurgency is waged.

In 1992, the feminists in the media rejoiced at what they called "The Year of the Woman," when 10 Democratic women (and one Republican) were running for the Senate in the aftermath of Anita Hill's unproven sexual-harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas. Just two years before, seven Republican women (and two Democrats) ran. But the media yawned.