Viewpoint

I, too, sing America.

Google executive Eric Schmidt offered some seemingly simple advice in his commencement address at Boston University last weekend: “Take one hour a day and turn that thing off.”

Novelist John Grisham could hardly spin a more provocative fiction: The president and his surrogates mount an aggressive campaign to intimidate the chief justice of the United States, implying ruin and ridicule should he fail to vote in a pivotal case according to the ruling political party’s wishes.

When will it end? The academic scandal at UNC is bad and we hope system president Tom Ross and chancellor Holden Thorp will rid our flagship university of classes that are little more than a sham. But this is only a first step to restoring integrity.

These days, the sound of the digital scythe being whetted makes me cast more lingering looks at the paper and cardboard relics on my bookshelves. At none more, since the announcement in March of their imminent extinction, than the familiar brown and gold, oddly titled volumes of my 1958 Encyclopaedia Britannica: HYDROZ to JEREM, MARYB to MUSHE, SARS to SORC.

He cut out the generals. He cut out the secretary of defense. He cut out the secretary of state. And in the end, he produced a schizophrenic policy that will almost certainly go down as the greatest foreign-policy debacle of his administration.

From an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Tuesday:

So Americans Elect wasn’t a subterfuge for Michael Bloomberg, Colin Powell or Jon Huntsman after all.

After many years of darkness the DNC said “Let there be light” – and there is on I-485, I-77 and I-277.

As the United States convened the NATO summit in Chicago last weekend, the fate of Afghanistan’s women was on my mind. This spring marks the 10th anniversary of the return of Afghanistan’s girls to the classroom. During the Taliban era, women were denied education. Women could not work, even when they were the sole providers for their families. Under the Taliban dictatorship, it was decreed that women should be neither seen nor heard.