editorials and opinion

Amid the maze of apartment buildings that comprised my childhood neighborhood you could walk one block south of where I lived, cross the street and head about 100 feet east to spend time with one of the community's most colorful and unusual residents -- a tree.

The European Union can't be accused of being dazzled by celebrity and star power in its choices for its first president and first foreign minister under the recently ratified Lisbon Treaty.

A group of Islamic nations, led by Algeria and Pakistan, is lobbying to bring before the U.N. General Assembly a proposed treaty banning mockery of religion, according to the Associated Press. The pact would, in effect, be a global anti-blasphemy treaty and an obvious and alarming threat to freedom of expression.

When Mac Taylor, the California Legislature's chief budget adviser, declared this week that the state budget enacted just four months ago is already billions of dollars upside down, no one in the Capitol should have been surprised.

At a time when our country is sick, it shouldn't surprise that one our sickest places is our nation's capital.

The poverty rate of Washington, DC, almost 20 percent, is one of the highest in the nation. Its child poverty rate is the nation's highest..

DC's public school system, with a graduation rate of less than 50 percent, is one of the worst in the country.

The government-funded -- but independent -- U.S. Preventive Service Task Force, made up of 16 physicians and public-health experts, did what it was supposed to, and indeed should be done routinely under any health-care-reform plan, a periodic examination and re-evaluation of current medical practice.

WASHINGTON - "Don't you say anything bad about Sarah Palin," admonished one of my sisters. "We love her. Be nice to her."

"What is this infatuation about Sarah Palin all about?!" said another sibling. "I can't understand it. She has no real solutions. All she does is criticize and look hot."

Here's what you do if you want an immediate demonstration of media bias in political coverage and to see trap doors open on the heads of leftists throughout the land as little birds step out singing, "Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo." You speak the name of Sarah Palin and let it be known she's traveling about the land saying stuff.

As the Senate weighs a 2,074-page healthcare "reform" bill, supporters of a government option for medical coverage consider this the finest federal initiative since the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet today's headlines show government severely bungling its current healthcare duties.

WASHINGTON - With apologies to James Whitcomb Riley: