It has been 10 years since I was assigned to help count a tiny bit of America for the Census Bureau. It was an intriguing and, I must confess, bizarre experience. And now it is time for the Census again — that massive federal undertaking that takes place every 10 years. It is an effort to count everyone in the country. I will be sitting on the sidelines this time, but it is a job ... [full story]

Q: I have been thinking about putting in a rain garden. Do you have any advice?   A: A rain garden is similar to other perennial flowerbeds that you might build — it just holds water longer. Rather than building a raised flowerbed by adding organic matter to get better drainage, a rain garden is a flowerbed built slightly lower so that water accumulates. Rain gardens provide several benefits to your landscape. They trap water that ... [full story]

The purpose of being a columnist is not to win friends. It is not to provoke silent nods of agreement. The goal is to strike a chord, hit a nerve — which is to say, at least sometimes, make people mad. Controversy is good, not bad. So you write what you think, and if people don't like it, they send in comments or write letters to the editor, which is generally considered a good thing ... [full story]

President Barack Obama earned kudos from the media when he said he screwed up in nominating Tom Daschle as secretary of health and human services despite Daschle's problem with paying taxes. Too bad the leadership of the New York Post didn't follow the president's lead by admitting that an editorial cartoon they ran Wednesday by Sean Delonas was offensive, careless and racist. It is clear that Delonas compared President Obama to a chimpanzee. In the ... [full story]

Barack Obama forced a bitter pill down the throats of Americans that the doctor did not order and patients do not want. Obama snuck into the stimulus bill a new system for rationing medical care, and he got Congress to ram it through the House and Senate without reading it. Maybe Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi thought no one would notice what they slipped into H.R.1 since rationing medical care has nothing to do ... [full story]

"The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating," said President Obama, as he announced deployment of 17,000 more U.S. troops. "I'm absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region, solely through military means." "(T)here is no military solution in Afghanistan," says Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Said U.S. Commander Gen. David McKiernan yesterday, U.S. and NATO forces are "stalemated." Such admissions by our military and political ... [full story]

WASHINGTON — The economy is stuck on "meltdown." The Cabinet still has vacancies. The ruling political party on Capitol Hill is obsessed with pork, and the mainstream media are fixated on Ottawa's Obama-mania. When nothing else seems to work, dial 911 at the Pentagon and call for those who get things done: soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines. And just to be different, send them on a stealth surge. That's what happened Tuesday, when Mr. ... [full story]

President Obama's massive mortgage-bailout plan is nothing more than a thinly disguised entitlement program that redistributes income from the responsible 92 percent of home-owning mortgage-holders who pay their bills on time to the irresponsible defaulters who bought more than they could ever afford. This is Obama's spread-the-wealth program in action. Team Obama is rewarding bad behavior. It is enlarging moral hazard. It is expanding its welfarist approach to economic policy. And with a huge expansion ... [full story]

Dear Elgin Baylor, I heard about your lawsuit against your last employer — whom you accuse of racism. I was a child who watched in awe and admiration when you starred with my hometown basketball team, the Los Angeles Lakers. You finished your first pro year with the then-Minneapolis Lakers fourth in the league in scoring, third in rebounding and eighth in assists, also scoring 55 points in a single game — then the third-highest ... [full story]

The dictionary defines prejudice as premature judgment: making a decision before becoming aware of the relevant facts of a case or event. Some forms of prejudice are fading; racism being the primary and obvious example. The backlash against prejudice is so intense it has spurred its opposite, the call toward tolerance. But for one sector, prejudice remains intact. It is perfectly acceptable to spew intolerance against Christians in general and Catholics in particular. But the ... [full story]