The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Friday, Jan. 3:Last year, President Barack Obama scrambled to quell a fierce outcry from some religious groups over a mandate in the Affordable Care Act that health insurance cover contraceptives. The administration approved an ...

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio gave a kind of St. Crispin's Day speech for progressives at his New Year's Day inauguration ceremony. He evoked a city ravaged by a crisis of inequality. What Rudy Giuliani was to out-of-control crime, de Blasio wants to be to rampant inequality -- its scourge ...

Every pundit gets something wrong: Your RedBlueAmerica columnists are no exception. We’ve written about health care, gay rights, religious freedom, and every other imaginable topic this year. And since there are two of us, opposing each other most weeks, that doubles the chances of making a ...

Time has not deflated Edward Snowden's messianic sense of self-importance. Nor has living in an actual police state given the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower any greater appreciation of the actual freedoms that Americans enjoy.Insufferable is the first adjective evoked by Snowden's ...

For four and a half years, we have waited for a powerful and self-sustaining economic recovery. More than once it seemed imminent. Then, for various reasons, it vanished, and we returned to a plodding expansion with too much unemployment and too little confidence. Could 2014 be the year when ...

<strong>Whitt Flora</strong>Now that the American Medical Association has declared obesity a disease, it's time to consider our longstanding failure to address it responsibly.America's war on fat is entering its fourth decade and it's stunning that 98 percent of ...

If a liberal yells in Utah County and the responses are to tell her she's wrong and call her a communist, did her speaking make a difference?I'm wrestling with that question today, wondering if the last 18 months of writing things that would rile up the Daily Herald's largely conservative ...

Egypt today is a zero-sum game. We'd have preferred there be a democratic alternative. Unfortunately, there is none. The choice is binary: the country will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood or by the military.Perhaps it didn't have to be this way. Perhaps the military should have waited three ...

I am not opposed to guns.I am very much opposed to idiots with guns.The difference has been thrown into sharp relief this week (again) with two horrifying fatalities. On Sunday 3-year-old Damon Holbrook of Michigan shot himself in the head with a loaded handgun he found in a closet, left there ...

Jen Psaki, blameless State Department spokeswoman, explained that the hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but "a reduction in staff." This proved a problem because the Yemeni government had already announced (and denounced) the "evacuation" -- the word normal folks ...