Here in the land of the fat and the home of the homeless, a new reason to hang my head. Europe is tougher than America. Geez. In Athens, Greece, the government does something they don't like, and they riot in the streets. In Spain, 100,000 people rocked the pavement this month. Portugal? Riot police had to clear protestors in Lisbon. The French ...

Hillary Clinton has gone through more reincarnations than Shirley MacLaine, who insists that when she was a Moorish girl in the ninth century, she had an affair with Charlemagne. Hillary has no such exotic tales in her past — Bubba is exotic enough — but she has gone through a number of roles for women who no longer stay home and bake c...

As a non-Catholic, I wrestled with an internal conflict over the birth control battle of the bishops. Part of me has been so outraged over this all-male effort to undermine women's reproductive rights that I can barely string together words that are appropriate for family newspapers. The other part of me has wondered whether my not being Catholic r...

Many families focus on Mother's Day and Father's Day during this season of the year. But for many moms and dads, it is a bittersweet recognition. They are parents of children with disabilities — children who will never be fully capable of caring for themselves, living independently, earning a living and managing their finances. For them, the...

When President Barack Obama appeared at Notre Dame in 2009 to accept an honorary law degree and deliver the university's commencement address, he did not dodge the fact that he favored legalized abortion and that Notre Dame — and the Catholic Church to which it belongs — does not. Obama went so far as to suggest that the wholesale stat...

Dear Annie: My husband's sister "Kelsey" filed for divorce a few months ago. Her soon-to-be ex-husband kept in touch. He told me that Kelsey had been cheating on him with the guy she is currently seeing. I didn't want to believe him, but in the past few weeks, I've discovered that Kelsey has been lying to her parents, her brother and me a...

Among the more controversial chapters in "Suicide of a Superpower," my book published last fall, was the one titled, "The End of White America." It dealt with the demographic decline of the white majority and what it portends for education, the U.S. economy, politics and national unity. That book and chapter proved the proximat...

We moderns seem determined to suppress all unhappiness with one exception: grief. The intense sadness following loss of a loved one still occupies a warm spot in our culture. We want that pain protected from the deadening analgesics of pharmaceuticals. That explains the American Psychiatric Association's decision to retreat from a plan to categori...

A New York Times article also published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette discussed a slowdown in the growth of health spending. Before 2009, health care spending invariably rose at 3 or 4 times the rate of inflation. But in 2009 and 2010, costs increased by only 4 percent and remained flat at 18 percent of our gross domestic product. Experts sugge...

As a child, I was a voracious reader, mostly of fiction. I would read during class, during lunch, during the bus ride. When I was reading, I was not part of my boring normal life, but part of a deeper, more compelling story. Fiction has the ability to transport the reader into a different world. The same holds true for movies and television shows....