Most candidates use the same speaking style, starting with the organization of their speeches into distinct sections in which they talk about one or a few related issues. Each section will handle the issues using similar rhetorical and syntactical devices:…

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” is what Humphrey Bogart’s character says when his long-lost love, played by Ingrid Bergman, walks into a bar in “Casablanca.” I have a…

There’s a scary series of ads on broadcast and cable television lately that warn us that the federal government is about to make it more expensive to get financial planning, make it impossible for people to use the trusted financial…

When Senator Robert Menendez says that the Obama Administration should have held out for a better deal with Iran, he forgets that every day of negotiation without a deal was one more day that Iran could work on gaining a…

Reading “Robot Weapons: What’s the Harm?” by Jerry Kaplan, who supposedly is a university teacher of the ethics of artificial intelligence, made me wonder what the heck does the term “ethics of artificial intelligence” mean? I would think that artificial…

It was hard not to come away from the first Republican debate with the disorientating feeling that you had just seen week one of “American Idol: Republican Presidential Edition.” The similarities between the Republican pre-primary presidential campaign and a reality…

Unequal treatment of African-Americans by Tampa police has not received much national publicity, probably because, unlike Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, Waller County and Arlington, Texas, Cincinnati, Charlotte and elsewhere, there have been no reported killings in Tampa. But the situation…

Watching the Republican debate last night made me feel like a westerner spending a lot of time with the Inuit Indians in the frozen Northwest and not understanding the difference between the various colors in the snow that they keep…

Bret Stephens, a frequent opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal has essentially freed politicians of both parties to say anything they like—no matter how outrageous, offensive or unfactual—knowing they will not have made the most embarrassing statement of the…

The Democratic Party would do well to strip the religious references and theological discussions from Pope Francis’s recent papal encyclical on the environment and place what’s left into its 2016 platform. Unfortunately, many Democrats may find Francis’ program too radical…