BY SUSAN ESTRICH Last month, when reports surfaced that Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton and his wife, Rikki Klieman, were putting their house on the market, people in L.A. started getting nervous. The chief is in the second year of his second five-year term. It is the first time in the 20-plus years I’ve […]

BY JOE CONASON On Aug. 4, President Barack Obama celebrated the anniversary of his birth, an event that occurred 48 years ago in the state of Hawaii. This is an indisputable fact, as sane critics on the right, such as the editors of the National Review and the veteran pundit Patrick Buchanan, acknowledge. And yet […]

BY FROMA HARROP In an entertaining but silly political game, partisans score points by comparing statistics of so-called red states and blue states. Conservative Ross Douthat does that in a recent column, “Blue-State Blues.” Aroused, liberals came back with their own numbers, many of which did not prove much, either. Douthat holds that conservative red […]

BY SUSAN ESTRICH I know. The North Koreans are using President Bill Clinton’s visit for all their own reasons. Attention world: Here we are, our leader is alive, Bill Clinton is paying his due. They couldn’t be happier if they’d set the whole thing up. Which, of course, they did, by grabbing the journalists in […]

BY JIM HIGHTOWER When it comes to a healthy diet, I am not a purist. Too late for that because I grew up eating such culinary concoctions as toasted sandwiches constructed of Spam, white bread and that oddly orange, oddly spongy cheeselike stuff known as Velveeta. As an adult, I even have been irresponsible enough […]