"America refuses to address the pervasive evil of white cops killing black men, and I will not stand during a national anthem that honors the flag of such a country!"
That is the message Colin Kaepernick sent by "taking a knee" during the singing of "The Star Spangled Banner" before San Francisco '49s games in 2016. No NFL owner picked up his contract in 2017. But a few players began to copy Colin and to "take a knee."
If a U.S. president calls an adversary "Rocket Man ... on a mission to suicide," and warns his nation may be "totally destroyed," other ideas in his speech will tend to get lost.
"The Barbarian cannot make ... he can befog and destroy but ... he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true."
"Having cut a deal with Democrats for help with the debt ceiling, will Trump seek a deal with Democrats on amnesty for the 'Dreamers' in return for funding for border security?"
The answer to that question, raised in my column a week ago, is in. Last night, President Donald Trump cut a deal with "Chuck and Nancy" for amnesty for 800,000 recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program who came here illegally as youngsters, in return for Democratic votes for more money for border security.
Recently, a columnist-friend, Matt Kenney, sent me a 25-year-old newspaper with his chiding that my column had been given better play.
Both had run in The Orange County Register on June 30, 1991.
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, "At least he gets things done!"
By setting off a 100-kiloton bomb, after firing a missile over Japan, Kim Jong Un has gotten the world's attention.
Like 9/11, Hurricane Harvey brought us together.
In awe at the destruction 50 inches of rain did to East Texas and our fourth-largest city and in admiration as cable television showed countless hours of Texans humanely and heroically rescuing and aiding fellow Texans in the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.
Wednesday morning, Nov. 9, 2016, Republicans awoke to learn they had won the lottery. Donald Trump had won the presidency by carrying Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All three states had gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections.The GOP had won both houses of Congress. Party control of governorships and state legislatures rivaled the halcyon years of the 1920s.
Decades ago, a debate over what kind of nation America is roiled the conservative movement.
Neocons claimed America was an "ideological nation" a "creedal nation," dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal."
"I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," said Winston Churchill to cheers at the Lord Mayor's luncheon in London in November 1942.
True to his word, the great man did not begin the liquidation.
"They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee -- and what a leader! ... No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller."
When the Dodge Charger of 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr., plunged into that crowd of protesters Saturday, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, Fields put Charlottesville on the map of modernity alongside Ferguson.
"When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight," Samuel Johnson observed, "it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
That the Trump presidency is bedeviled is undeniable.
In crafting the platform in Cleveland on which Donald Trump would run, America Firsters inflicted a major defeat on the War Party.
Saturday, Kim Jong Un tested an ICBM of sufficient range to hit the U.S. mainland. He is now working on its accuracy, and a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop that missile that can survive re-entry.
Given the bravery he showed in stepping out front as the first senator to endorse Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions deserves better from his boss than the Twitter-trashing he has lately received.
"One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies," writes columnist David Ignatius.
"Iran must be free. The dictatorship must be destroyed. Containment is appeasement and appeasement is surrender."
