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Cal Thomas: U.S. won't be a winner in Syrian uprising

Two recent newspaper editorials illustrate the double-mindedness some feel about President Obama's decision to provide small arms and ammunition to Syrian rebels. The Washington Post headlined an editorial: "No time for half-measures: Syria's rebels need a robust intervention from the Obam...

David Sirota: Ugly truths surface concerning NSA dislosures

Whether in celebrity culture or in our Facebook-mediated interactions, we live in the age of the human being as a public brand. So there's nothing surprising about the reaction to the recent disclosures about the National Security Agency's unprecedented surveillance program. In our cult-of-person...

Rich Lowry: Washington can't duck IRS connections

The Internal Revenue Service hadn't spoken four sentences about its targeting of conservative groups before it blamed "our line people in Cincinnati." Those were the words of Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner on May 10, when she acknowledged the misconduct in an answer to a ques...

Planned tax incease will hurt Maine families

Last week, the Maine Legislature voted to raise taxes on struggling Maine families and small businesses to pay for increased government spending.  Rather than right-size unsustainable programs, most Democrat and some Republican legislators decided that state government still isn’t big ...

When it comes to budgets, the politics are different

It was a productive week at the State House. Against long odds, the unanimous budget report from the Appropriations Committee survived intact by better than the required two-thirds, landing on the governor’s desk with a loud thud. Gov. Paul LePage, who’s been fulminating agains...

Leonard Pitts: Real life consequences to spreading ignorance

I cannot write this the way I want. Doing so would invade the privacy of too many people. But I can’t be silent, either. Recently, you see, President Obama spoke before a conference of mental health advocates at the White House. It is necessary, he said, to remove the stigma of menta...

Connie Schultz: Hillary tweets, pundits take their shots

Hillary Clinton is now on Twitter. This woman looks for trouble, I swear. As has been widely reported with the breathless rush of an alien sighting, Clinton's Twitter profile reads, "Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner...

Cal Thomas: Bad behavior should carry serious consequences

Ever since President Clinton "did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," whatever remains of standards seem to have fallen even lower among people who hold offices and positions once thought to require good behavior and strong moral character. Last year, several Secret ...

Froma Harrop: High heels and workers' rights

One of the strangest artifacts of American culture is the spiked heel as a symbol of female power. Many waitresses at America's casinos feel otherwise. From Las Vegas to Atlantic City to the Connecticut woods, women balancing trays of drink have been forced to walk miles a day in high heel...

Austin Bay: Egypt threatens Ethiopian dams

In a humiliating example of self-inflicted electronic bugging, last week a live broadcast television microphone in Egyptian President Muhammed Morsi's Cairo office caught the president and Egypt's most senior political leaders plotting sneak attacks on the upstream Nile's biggest dam builder, Eth...

Leonard Pitts: Freedoms lost yet safety not assured

It will not be with guns. If ever tyranny overtakes this land of the sometimes free and home of the intermittently brave, it probably won’t, contrary to the fever dreams of gun rights extremists, involve jack-booted government thugs rappelling down from black helicopters. Rather, it ...

Cal Thomas: When government cannot be trusted

Without the slightest hint of irony, President Obama said last week, "If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress, and don't trust federal judges, to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we're going to have s...

David Sirota: Rethinking American exceptionalism

"American exceptionalism" is perhaps the most misunderstood phrase in politics. If, like the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, we define "exceptionalism" as "the condition of being different from the norm" — then it's certainly true that America is exceptional. But we rarely stop to ask: Should w...

Rich Lowry: Obama abusing Abe Lincoln's core beliefs

When Barack Obama announced his presidential campaign back in February 2007, he did it in front of the old Springfield, Ill., Statehouse in a speech full of references to Abraham Lincoln. He has clothed himself in the mantle of our 16th president in ways large and small throughout his pres...

Joanne Boyington: The real importance of small town celebrations

I grew up in an ocean-front community, and every year on Labor Day weekend, there was a three-day celebration for the residents, called “Short Beach Days.” There were swimming races at the public beach, foot races at our little community park, tables of homemade food to sample,...

Katie Hansberry: Voters should have the say about bear hunting practices

Maine has the sordid distinction as the last place in the country that allows a trifecta of cruel methods of killing bears. We let people — the majority of whom are from out of state — hound, bait and trap bears. Hounding is the cruel practice of training packs of dogs to haras...

Nasser Rohani: Baha'i leaders in Iran still face persecution

In Iran, an unrecognized religious minority group with an estimated 300,000 members, the Baha’is, has been systematically persecuted and subjected to arrests, torture and false imprisonment, according to Amnesty International. A peaceful religion with no political agenda, which recog...

John Henderson: Where there is art, there is life

Everyone likes art, whether it is as simple as a comic book, or as subtle as a Monet or Mona Lisa. Most of our buildings are pieces of art; some simpler, some more complex. Church buildings in particular tend to be artfully conceived, as they are meant both literally and figuratively to inspire u...

Bethany Picker: Government must respond to epidemic of gun violence

June 14 is the sixth-month anniversary of the tragic Newtown, Conn., shootings when 20 first-graders were horrifically killed at their school. As a parent, I look at my own first-grader and marvel at what the past six months has brought: another visit from Santa, a wonderful family vacatio...

Olympia Snowe’s book and how its themes recall those of Margaret Chase Smith

In the 15 months since Sen. Olympia Snowe stunned the nation with her surprising renunciation, both Maine and the nation have been awaiting a more revealing explanation. Such a disclosure has now occurred with the recent publication of her book "Fighting for Common Ground - How We Can Fix the Sta...

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