With offensive slurs and threats thrown around, Friday’s election of a House speaker was another example of a lack of civility in America. But our first president, George Washington didn’t have the best of dispositions either. He had a reputation for “tumultuous passions that accompany greatness,” Gouverneur Morris, one of the Founding Fathers, noted of Washington. The Latin word civilis...

Let me say at the outset that I’m not going to win friends or influence many people with this commentary. Football . . . is a beautiful game. With the unexpected death of Pittsburgh Steelers Franco Harris last month, the media refreshed all our memories of “The Immaculate Reception,” the play that not only defined Harris but remains one of...

In a TIME magazine essay, Michelle Obama talks about a question she is frequently asked: “What do you mean when you say, ‘When they go low, we go high?’” Mrs. Obama explained that she and the former president are “committed and recommitted to the idea of going high many times . . . Hate crimes, trans rights, gay rights, voting...

On any given day, I can drive around the small town where I live and easily see two-dozen or more individuals on cell phones. Some are on a call, some texting, tweeting, Facebooking, or just plain surfing. All of us appear to be spliced to our phones. I’ll come back to this later. Elon Musk is the man who gave...

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”— Lincoln Too many have become slaves to fear and prejudice losing the best parts of themselves to an ideology of lies and hate. I was in the process of writing about the media’s continuing obsession with reporting every word and action about Donald Trump and the...

Note: On assignment, but I’ll be back! No high-fives. No victory laps. No champagne room. You’re not out of the woods, yet. Watching Democratic leadership win back the Senate, you’d think they had won the Super Bowl. They didn’t. What we all won was a return to democracy, and a keen sense that most Americans don’t want to hand over...

“A-well-a everybody’s heard about the bird! Bird bird bird, b-bird’s the word A-well-a bird, bird, bird, bird is the word . . . ”—The Trashmen, 1963   What do you do if you’re the richest billionaire on the planet who has built the premier electric car company on the planet, and has invested billions in SpaceX to eventually go to...

How much toxicity can American democracy take before it collapses? Here’s pro-life conservative pundit Dana Loesch speaking about the scandal surrounding former pro-football player, anti-abortion advocate, and Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker after Walker denied allegedly paying for an abortion for his girlfriend. “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the...

Attending a Padres/Dodgers game in San Diego, I’m sitting next to a die-hard Padres fan. Despite my lifelong Dodger fever, we shared laughs, baseball stories and favorite teams: he loved the Yankees; I loved the Red Sox. What makes baseball so compelling is that while both sides want to win, they play on the same field, follow the same rules,...

Is there any Rubicon, despicable, illegal or otherwise, that Trump could cross that would change the hearts and minds of loyalists? Fox pundit Sean Hannity asked former president Donald Trump about Top Secret, classified documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago. This was Trump’s response: “If you’re the president of the United States you can declassify just by saying it’s...