February 2012 will mark the 40th anniversary of former President Richard Nixon's historic Cold War visit to China. Nixon's trip produced the Shanghai Communique, a diplomatic statement in which both the U.S. and a still very red Communist China agreed to establish a political relationship based on something more than ideological antagonism and frozen or unfinished wars (North Korea and Taiwan) that... Read more.

According to The New York Times, the American Constitution is losing popularity with people around the world. "The Constitution," writes Adam Liptak, "has seen better days ... its influence is waning." Liptak points out that in 1987, over 160 of the 170 countries on Earth had cribbed from the Constitution — but today, few countries do. Why? Liptak suggests, quoting Professor... Read more.

Our republic as our Founding Fathers created it is under assault from extremists outside our country and anti-constitutionalists inside our country. Combine that with the flailing American economy and global markets and you see that Western civilization is on the brink, as experts and all the GOP presidential candidates agree. President Barack Obama has tried and failed miserably to fix our economy,... Read more.

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has severed its ties with Planned Parenthood. As a result, hundreds of thousands of dollars — nearly $700,000 last year alone — no longer will fund breast cancer screenings and other breast-related services for low-income and uninsured women at 19 Planned Parenthood affiliates across the country. Poof! Gone. Komen made the decision in December,... Read more.

Once the presidential nomination process is settled — and Lord knows that day can't come fast enough — Republicans will get back to doing what they do best, getting on Barack Obama's case. Incredibly, though, they'll have to do it without one of their most potent arguments. The Republican candidate, after all, can't effectively attack what he supports. Today both leading contenders for... Read more.

As God's instrument, Moses parted the Red Sea. Well, it appears President Obama has a different idea. With a wave of his hand, he's going to reunite our bitterly divided political waters on the hottest of hot-button issues. Don't get me wrong; Obama's conscious effort to divide Americans on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and wealth for political purposes is alive and thriving. That's a separate... Read more.

Last week, my local twittersphere momentarily erupted with allegations that Denver's public school superintendent, Tom Boasberg, is sending his kids to a private school that eschews high-stakes testing. Boasberg, an icon of the national movement pushing high-stakes testing and undermining traditional public education, eventually defended himself by insisting that his kids attended that special school... Read more.

Two of three judges on a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel on Tuesday found Proposition 8 unconstitutional. Judge Stephen Reinhardt stipulated that the ruling skirted the larger issue of whether same-sex couples have a right to marry. That's a shame, because at least an equal-right-to-marry claim makes for a clean argument. Reinhardt praised himself for overturning Prop. 8 on "the narrowest... Read more.

I wonder if the National Football Commissioner Roger Goodell knows the information I'm about to tell you. If not, may I be the one to clue him in to the shocking criminal background of a guy named Gary who is prominently featured at NFL games ... including this year's Super Bowl? Around 1980, when Gary was in his mid-30s he was charged with having sex with an underage 14-year-old girl named Allison.... Read more.

Politically astute Republicans, including many social conservatives, see Mitt Romney as the strongest candidate to beat President Obama in November. The former Massachusetts governor may not be their kind of Republican, but any Republican would be better than Obama, in their opinion. The view that Romney would be Obama's most formidable foe is accurate — but only as of Monday, when former Utah... Read more.

My first marathon was New York in 1992. I trained with a group for months but had never gone a full 26.2 miles before the start of the race. Turns out that's something you ought to do. The New York marathon is a wonderful event — well planned, well laid out and with great crowds. We took a bus over to the start on Staten Island, where tens of thousands of runners gathered. After over an hour... Read more.

In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama used billionaire investor Warren Buffett's secretary, Debbie Bosanek, as a prop to illustrate the unfairness of our tax system. "Right now," he said as Bosanek sat near first lady Michelle Obama, "Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary." Commentators spent the next week speculating about what Obama meant.... Read more.

There's a very troubled company out there called U.S. Government Inc. It's teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. And it badly needs to be taken over and turned around. It probably even needs the services of a good private-equity firm, with plenty of experience and a reasonably good track record in downsizing, modernizing, shrinking staff and making substantial changes in management. Yes, layoffs will... Read more.

By now, you probably have seen the shocking video of 7-year-old Brittney Baxter fighting off a would-be kidnapper in the toy aisle of the Bremen, Ga., Wal-Mart. What you may not realize is that this is a scene you will be seeing forever — replayed on the news and then reimagined on "Law & Order" (though the show will change the name of the store, or maybe the guy will be kidnapping... Read more.

When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, back in the mid-'90s, Newt Gingrich was trying to take away her healthcare benefits. She had been a legal U.S. resident for many years, but Gingrich's "Contract with America" was bent on denying Medicare benefits to all legal immigrants who had not become U.S. citizens. I think about my mother often nowadays, especially when I see Gingrich coming... Read more.

In an ideal world, reforming America's broken health care system would have produced a single-payer system — a Medicare-like program for people of all ages. In the real world, however, the political and financial forces opposed to a single-payer system were too strong. What emerged, instead, was the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, a major advance over the current system, but... Read more.

Appearing alongside CIA Director David Petraeus before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said of Iran: "We don't believe they've actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon." Before the hearing, as James Fallows of The Atlantic reports, Clapper released his "Worldwide Threat Assessment."... Read more.

The United States and its allies planned to introduce tough new sanctions against the Government of Syria in the United Nations Security Council, but the government of Russia has said "Nyet!" Russia says it will not support international intervention in Syria, where pro-democracy protesters have been battling with the brutal regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad. With a Russian veto guaranteed,... Read more.

Elections are for suckers. Let's just dip our fingers in purple ink and pose for photos now that voting has the same significance for us as it had for those Iraqis who got conned into thinking they were participating in some grand democratic experiment. Our own elections — the ones our government has modeled for the world — are a hoax. What other word should we use to describe this year's... Read more.

You never want to let them see how much it hurts. You get hit by a pitch, you don't rub the spot. You get rocked by a punch, you try to throw a counter-punch. You lose three races in one night as a political candidate, and, well, you don't do what Mitt Romney did. Romney is known as an even-keel kind of guy. Doesn't get too high; doesn't get too low. But Tuesday he lost three states to Rick Santorum,... Read more.

When someone asks when the Republican Party abandoned its longstanding position as the party of family values, we will all be able to say that it was shortly after 8 p.m. Eastern Standard time on Jan. 19, 2012, in Charleston, S.C. When the invited audience of 2,300 Republicans stood up and applauded Newt Gingrich's angry and defiant response to the opening question from CNN's John King about allegations... Read more.

A number of years ago, at a time of heightened tensions with Iran, an Iranian-American classmate of mine when I lived in Tehran called me and asked, "What are the chances of airstrikes?" He was concerned about his mother, who lives in Isfahan, about an hour's drive from Iran's uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. That phone call has prompted continuing discussions between us on the subject,... Read more.