Current Affairs

Something you'd think a school principal would know: If you're going to call somebody a thief and a liar in a very public way, you'd better be right.

Mary Mapes has it all wrong when she insists that:

"no one has proved" documents discredited by Internet weblogs were not authentic . . .

. . . Mapes tells ABC News she is continuing to investigate the source of the controversial documents. But she insists she had no journalistic obligation to prove their authenticity before the "60 Minutes II" report.

"I don't think that's the standard," she says.

San Francisco residents must have a death wish. In a voter referendum this week, they voted overwhelmingly to ban handguns. Furthermore,

Residents would have to turn over handguns already in their possession by next April.

There are potential victims, and there are the people who want to prey on them. All this does is disarm the potential victims. That is insane.

If the war in Iraq has distracted you from the overall War on Terror, please read this. It's lengthy, but every word is worth it.

I tried to work up a modicum of the outrage some seem to feel at prionsers having an espresso machine, but it just wasn't in me. We want prisoners to come out with some idea of how to cope in the outside world, right? This is a way to get them ready to encounter a Starbucks on every corner.

Of all the institutions that have declined in America, volunteer firefighting has most represented what is best in us, so its problems say the most about what we've lost in the way we live today:

Are we becoming less polarized? Or maybe we really weren't that polarized to begin with:

But Fiorina argued in a book, "Culture War?", that the notion of a polarized America was a myth to begin with. The true polarization, he said, was always in the politicians - offering starkly different choices to voters - and in the media, eager to portray a conflict and more exposed to political junkies in New York and Washington.

Let's see. We've had people complaining for years and years about "pork-barrel spending." We've been talking for months about all the "pork" in the highway bill. There is a grassroots movement called "pork busters," joined in by many conservative members of Congress, dedicated to eliminating pork to help offset hurricane spending.

Chertoff makes a valid point about personal disaster preparedness being a matter of civic duty. If I have the ability to take care of myself but don't, and the people who need to take care of the truly helpless have to slow down and save my bacon first, I've been a bad neighbor, bad citizen and all-around selfish lout. I was somewhat amused by the elementary-schools official who balked at the idea of using students to help spread the word:

So we're still fighting the Vietnam War, even in our choice of movies. Military veterans pick Mel Gibson's "We Were Soldiers," which tends to emphasize the heroics and sacrifices of the armed forces, as the best Vietnam movie. The general public, on the other hand, choose "Apocalypse Now," which tends to emphasize -- well, the title sort of says it all.