Ours may be remembered as the era of the Big Sleep. Barack Obama and the Democrats lie comatose at the switch as the federal government continues to swell up like a dead mule in the heat of late July. Air-traffic controllers doze off with airliners circling airports, frantically trying to get landing instructions.
Embracing a recent invitation by the Castro brothers, Jimmy Carter visited Cuba last week. "We greeted each other as old friends," gushed the former president after his meeting with Fidel Castro.
The period under discussion in British writer and broadcaster Patrick Wright's intriguing book is 1954, a year after the death of Josef Stalin, when there were high hopes in the West that there could be real changes in the communist world and an opportunity to, at the very least, reduce Cold War tensions.
America has death camps. This is the heinous reality liberal elites have been trying to conceal. A Philadelphia abortion doctor, Kermit Gosnell, was arrested Wednesday along with his wife and eight other suspects. The 69-year-old abortionist is charged with causing the death of a woman during a botched abortion and also killing seven babies. Prosecutors say the infants were born alive following illegal late-term abortions and then were murdered by having their spinal cords ripped apart with scissors.
American politics can be vicious and un-principled, but they are not deadly. Defeated politicians join think tanks, give big-dollar speeches and plot campaign comebacks.
It's customary at year's end to share our favorite news items from the year past - from happy moments to outrages. As a professor and historian, I tend to highlight things I fear are lost to American education. To that end, I've become somewhat of a pessimist, especially as I observe what the next generation is not being taught.
The debate over New START has ushered in a new consensus on the need to modernize our nuclear deterrent and the resources required to get the job done. All that is left is for Congress to vote this month to finish the job by approving New START and the president's investment in our nuclear security. In doing so, it will have reversed years of neglect and decline in our nuclear establishment, and made the American people safer in the process.
"I think we're going to hell in a handbasket." That comment was uttered at a recent public gathering here in Washington by Paul Kengor, political science professor at Grove City College and a best-selling author. In "Dupes: How America's Adversaries Manipulated Progressives for a Century," he presents mountains of research lending some credence to his above-quoted verdict on the country's direction.
"The Gulag Archipelago" is essential reading for Russian students, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Tuesday _ unusual words of praise from a former KGB agent for Alexander Solzhenitsyn's explosive book on the crimes of the Soviet regime.
