On Christmas Day, the career and life of the "hardest-working man in show business" ended. But his spirit lives on in the legions of fans that weathered rain and cold to bid him farewell. James Brown electrified a generation, an entertainer with so prolific a body of work and so distinctive a genre of style that entertainers for more than four decades have either borrowed from or have been inspired by him. From the time ... [full story]

When Cicero speaks, men say, "How well Cicero speaks." When Demosthenes speaks, men say, "Let us go fight Philip!" That ancient precept is still valid. If he is to win public support for plans to send even a few more brigades into Iraq, President Bush must prove more of a Demosthenes than a Cicero. His goal is to strike new fire in a weary public that wishes to be done with the whole Mesopotamian mess. ... [full story]

Opponents of faith-based prison programs are enabling terrorists, says Watergate felon Charles Colson Those opposed to faith-based prison projects are blind to the threat of terrorism in the "homeland" from former inmates who have converted to Islam while in America's prisons, Charles Colson, one of President Richard Nixon's key operatives during the Watergate years, recently charged in one of his BreakPoint commentaries. Stung by a federal district court judge's decision that his InnerChange Freedom Initiative, ... [full story]

I was advised in a recent spam email that I could “Bea an NoRmal man/woman a viagru n sleep am-biann.”  Another online pharmacy wants me to “party n lunstaa nor xanacks” or treat Attention Deficit with “the piackiup of best rittylin.”Whether I need lunstaa for insomnia, xanacks for addled nerves or viagru for erectile dysfunction (unlikely in my case), these drugs are easily purchased from Internet distributors who can’t even spell the names of the ... [full story]

Marketing policy of the book publishing industry now calls for a catchy title followed by an explanatory subtitle. "The Tyranny of Tolerance" was published this month with the subtitle: "A Sitting Judge Breaks the Code of Silence to Expose the Liberal Judicial Assault." This sitting state court judge, Robert H. Dierker Jr., speaks from firsthand experience with some of the cases he discusses. Before becoming a judge 20 years ago, he represented the city of ... [full story]

Some people are apoplectic that Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the nation's first Muslim elected to Congress, would take the oath of office by swearing on the Koran. The rhetoric is piling up like Denver snow, with some pundits calling it the first thread toward the unraveling of our nation as we now know it; a warning shot toward the eventual "Islamization" of America. At least one columnist has argued that if Ellison wants to be ... [full story]

An independent commission on education I serve on recently concluded that the U.S. educational system needs a major overhaul by 2021 to properly equip future workers to cope with a rapidly globalizing marketplace. In the report entitled "Tough Choices or Tough Times," the so-called New Commission on Skills in the Workplace proposes cutting high school short at 10th grade for qualified students, investing the savings into increasing teachers' salaries and creating more preschool programs, among ... [full story]

For most of its 200-plus years, the Congress of the United States could have been mistaken for a gathering of undertakers or certified public accountants. Mostly men in dark suits, they were presided over by such gray eminents as Speakers Dennis Hastert and Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. A few years back, the somewhat scrawny John McCormack was likened by Time magazine to "an exhausted monk." This order of things is changing before our very eyes. ... [full story]

On the wall of my home office is a poster that proclaims me as "The Official U.S. Blabbermouth." The poster was presented to me at a party a few days before being sworn in as the first White House director of communications. Most prominent among the signatures on the poster of government officials and newspersons is that of Jerry Ford, then the Republican minority leader of the House of Representatives. Ford was that type of ... [full story]

Another defense secretary is sworn into office. His brief acceptance remarks contain just one solid promise. "I will go to Iraq," he says. Most Americans - indeed, 72 percent of us by the last polling count - may have hoped to hear something more than this from the new guy. Going on four embattled years, now, Iraq has suffered from no lack of U.S. visitations. It has hosted an endless succession of diplomatic personnel, private ... [full story]

Alan Simpson, a Republican who represented Wyoming in the United States Senate from 1979 to 1997, was one of 10 members of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel established at the urging of Congress to provide an independent analysis of the war in Iraq and to recommend possible strategic changes in U.S. involvement in the war. The panel presented its report to President Bush, the Congress and the public earlier in December. He also ... [full story]

President George W. Bush pardoned 16 criminals including five drug dealers at Christmastime, but so far has refused to pardon the two U.S. Border Patrol agents who were trying to defend Americans against drug smugglers. It makes us wonder which side the self-proclaimed "compassionate" president is on. Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean were guarding the Mexican border near El Paso, Texas, on Feb. 17, 2005, when they intercepted a van carrying 743 ... [full story]

Fifty years behind the pulpit and 30 years in the political spotlight have not slowed the Reverend Jerry Falwell After 50 years behind the pulpit at the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and nearly 30 years in the political spotlight, the Rev. Jerry Falwell has a lot to be proud of. While he hasn't achieved the iconic status of the Rev. Billy Graham, and his books have not sold the millions of copies ... [full story]