Polishing her mettle

More Stories

Reluctant White House welcome

Obama disses Netanyahu while U.S. Jews yawn

Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009

If a photograph is worth a thousand words, a sharp newspaper cartoon is often worth the book. One Israeli cartoonist depicts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the missus arriving at the White House to meet with President Obama. Mrs. Netanyahu knocks at the front door with the explanation: "We just happened to be in the neighborhood." Another cartoon depicts the prime minister pulling up at the White House, and telling the driver to wait: "I'm not sure they're at home."

The fall of the wall

In one moment, a second chance for humanity

Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009

Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. If Humpty Dumpty had been sitting on top of it, not Soviet soldiers nor Stasi spies could put Humpty together again. It wasn't the end of history, as some liked to call it, but rather like history on a pause button that showed the world in one powerful moment that some of the evil that men do can be undone.

Home economics reduced

Shriver Report condescends to full-time mothers

Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009

Maria Shriver is no "wife of," even though she's married to the governor of California. She's no "niece of," although her uncle was president of the United States. She credits her late mother Eunice Kennedy Shriver for encouraging her "to believe we had the ability to change the world," and as the inspiration behind "The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything."

An inconvenient rebuttal

New film takes on Al and the global-warming elites

Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009

Ann McElhinney's low-budget documentary refuting the global-warming hype and hysteria arrives in Washington just in time to break Al Gore's crystal ball. "Not Evil Just Wrong," the feature-length film she made with her husband Phelim McAleer, coolly reveals how Mr. Gore's disguise of hot fanaticism as cold fact arrives as the Senate begins to gear up for debate on "climate change" legislation.

Noble achievements - and deserved

Three American women honored for science

Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009

Enough already. Barack Obama got the Nobel Prize for Hope and Hype, and now the rest is up to him. But there are more important Nobels, and this year, women won three of those for scientific research. They won not for what they might do, sometime, maybe, could be, or hope so, but for what they already have done. Just eight women have won Nobels in physiology or medicine, and the recognition of these women strikes down pernicious myths about women and science. These were not affirmative-action awards.

Sense and sexuality

Sensibility has been replaced in Hollywood's America

Thursday, Oct. 8, 2009

Not so long ago, rape was a capital offense, right up there with murder. When death was not decreed, convicted rapists could count on a long prison sentence. No one took rape lightly. The crime was an absolute evil, the moral equivalent of neither shoplifting nor stealing a kiss.

A revolution too far

Children should be off-limits

Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009

Austin, age 13, is touching and familiar. With his helmet of short brown hair, biggish ears and sensitive eyes, he's typical of a tender age almost on the cusp of manhood.

When defenses go down

And remembrance of a Cold War autumn

Thursday, Sept. 24, 2009

Autumn in Washington is often cruel. The heat and the humidity have lifted and Congress returns more or less refreshed from summer vacation, but the pressure cooker continues to cook politics. Conversations about health-care legislation and the economy continue to get top billing on the Hill and elsewhere, but Barack Obama is playing football with foreign policy. It's the season of the gridiron, after all.

It's multicultural, stupid

Textbooks infused with Muslim spin

Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009

The attack on America on Sept. 11, 2001, set off alarms everywhere. We were shocked to discover that few Foreign Service officers were fluent in Arabic or Farsi, the dominant languages of the Middle East. We didn't know much about Islam. Children grew up on the engrossing and romantic "Tales of the Arabian Nights," but few parents thought much about the implications of women portrayed in veils and harems, as the property of men.