Our view on war on terror: National security team fails to inspire confidence Officials’ handling of Christmas Day attack looks like amateur hour. Ever since the botched Christmas Day plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, the Obama administration's national...

Opposing view: 'We need no lectures' Administration disrupts terrorists’ plots, takes fight to them abroad.By John Brennan Politics should never get in the way of national security. But too many in Washington are now misrepresenting the facts to score political...

Saints salve city's psyche The New Orleans Saints were underdogs going into Sunday's Super Bowl. That figures. Both the team and the city have been underdogs for a long time. The Saints, for most of their 43 seasons, were so...

We need two school systems Education in America could use a big dose of innovation. How about one public school system for employees, and another for entrepreneurs? By Robert Kiyosaki In the summer of 1932, presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

No good news for blacks in latest jobless numbers By DeWayne Wickham I hope this isn't what people mean by a "colorblind society." When the Department of Labor announced that the unemployment rate fell from 10% to 9.7% in January,...

Tea Party members must start offering solutions Harvey R. Greenberg - Dundee, N.Y. Whether the Tea Party movement hits or misses the mark depends on answers to questions such as these ("Tea Party activists take aim, but many miss target,"...

The reaction to Scott Brown's victory has been a lurch toward antibusiness rhetoric. The stock market doesn't like it.

'We're not handling any of these cases any different from the Bush administration.'

The Obama Administration is vindicating Bush antiterror policy.

The President wants a Republican foil.

Citizens United might break its political stranglehold.

Jamie Dimon is wrong. We shouldn't expect a crisis 'every five to seven years.'

Barack Obama and Joe Biden once had a Felix and Oscar air about them. But in recent months, Obama has found a way to use Biden’s skills, while Biden has found ways to be of use.

Those in the lower-income groups are in a much, much deeper hole than the general commentary on the recession would lead people to believe.

China has America about where it wants it. You can make your own calculation of President Obama’s leverage over Beijing — and it’s heading south.

Believe it or not, there are some potential benefits to the United States should Iran build a bomb.

President Obama is calling on NASA to develop “game-changing” technologies. For this to happen, the plan must be focused and adequately financed.

Antitrust regulation still suffers from an unwillingness to challenge “vertical integration” — as such is the case in the merger between Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

The automaker's Green Police spot drives home a disturbing notion about environmentalism and the future. Iwatched the Super Bowl in the chilled air of the GFISZ (that's Goldberg Family Ice Station Zebra). Here in Washington, we haven't seen this much snow since at least 1922. The blizzard of 2010 took out our electricity for a day. Digging out from "snowmaggedon" was nothing less than an Augean challenge, though my lower back is, alas, less than Herculean. Meanwhile, snow canceled my daughter's 7th birthday party Saturday and her school Monday. We're slated for another foot by Wednesday.

Two proposed initiatives would go a long way toward restoring the Golden State. Eight years ago, California was the world's fifth-largest economy and surging. Today, we're the eighth largest and falling.

Businesses are in business to make money. Benevolence is not the guiding principle. Several great Damon Runyon stories take place in a little speak-easy called the Gingham Shoppe run by a guy named Good Time Charley Bernstein. The running joke is that neither Good Time Charley nor any of his friends ever drink the whiskey he sells. That rotgut is strictly for customers. When Charley and his friends want a drink, they go someplace else.

Saab: Meghan Daum's column on Feb. 2 about Saab said that Kurt Vonnegut owned a Saab dealership in the 1970s. He owned the dealership in the 1950s.

When a website pointed out that 'Negro' was going to appear once more on the 2010 census, many blacks reacted with shock and distaste. They see it as a relic of the bad old days of segregation. America's Negro problem just won't quit. The Census Bureau has been using the term "Negro" as a racial identifier on its decennial forms since 1950, later joined -- though not supplanted -- by "black" and "African Am." But when the website thegrio.com recently pointed out that "Negro" was going to appear once more on the 2010 census, many black folks reacted with shock and pointed distaste. Bloggers and pundits condemned the term as a relic of the bad old days of segregation and Jim Crow that has no business in official records anymore.

Americans' distrust of government has deep roots. Let me get straight to the point: Americans' profound distrust of government is neurotic -- irrational, defensive and born of emotional trauma.

Every revolution sparks a counterrevolution. The French revolution in 1789 was followed by Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy. After the Russian revolution, the czar's forces regrouped and fought a bloody civil war.

More than 70 years ago, Toyota entered the auto business based on a simple, but powerful, principle: that Toyota would build the highest-quality, safest and most reliable automobiles in the world. The company has always put the needs of our customers first and made the constant improvement of our vehicles a top priority. That is why 80 percent of all Toyotas sold in the United States over the past 20 years are still on the road today.

Anyone sitting in a dank, fetid Haitian jail for any reason probably deserves at least a measure of sympathy, so in that sense I feel sorry for the Baptist missionaries from Idaho charged with kidnapping 33 "orphans" and trying to take them out of the country. But what the do-gooders allegedly did was not just misguided. It could be criminal, and Haitian authorities are right to hold them accountable.

From time to time, I come across Silda and Eliot Spitzer. He is the former New York governor who had to leave office because of a sex scandal, and she is the wife who was roundly criticized at the time (2008) for publicly standing by her man after he was accused of seeing a prostitute in Washington. The Spitzers remain a couple.

In all the recent reports, speeches and news conferences concerning the federal budget outlook -- including the administration's proposed budget for 2011 -- hardly anyone has posed these crucial questions: What should the federal government do and why; and who should pay? We ought to go back to first principles of defining a desirable role for government and abandon the expedient of assuming that anyone receiving a federal benefit is morally entitled to it simply because it's been received before.

Is a wounded Barack Obama withdrawing from the world?

This week's lesson: There is no Transit Fairy.

Mayor Richard Daley's new proposals to expand the powers of Chicago's inspector general are welcome and overdue. They could put City Hall and its culture of corruption on the grill as never before.

Maybe you didn't feel bad for Scott Lee Cohen on Sunday night when you saw him biting his lip and blubbering through his announcement that he was withdrawing as the Democratic Party's candidate for lieutenant governor.

The Illinois Supreme Court demonstrated last week that it takes the "supreme" in its name all too seriously, as it struck down with divine certainty one of the best things that the Illinois Legislature has done recently: tort reform. The court's rationalization for its odious decision amounts to little more than "because we can."

Cohen's ballot slot should go to a candidate who wants to eliminate this essentially useless state office and all the expenses and staff salaries allocated to it.

For decades now, America has been lost in space. Ever since the Apollo mission landed men on the moon in the 1960s, the nation has asked: OK, what's next?