Commentary, editorials and opinion, opinions

Another of President Barack Obama's initiatives may be in trouble. Legislators from states with a heavy NASA presence are beginning to push back against his plan to kill a Bush-era lunar-landing program.

Let's face it. Our country is in a slump. And it's up to us to do something about it.

In the past I've blamed Congress, the president, greed on Wall Street, wimpy regulators, nasty terrorists and climate change.

But a country's soul comes from its people. And, people, we're tired. Bone weary and frustrated, we need to get our mojo back.

In accord with the mnemonic "Spring Forward, Fall Back," this Sunday we set our clocks forward one hour. We lose an hour of sleep, but it is the law -- the Energy Policy Act of 2005, to be precise.

The effects of the recession haven't been altogether malign. The government says U.S. highway deaths last year were the lowest in more than half a century.

Hand it to the states. All but two of them saw that their K-12 math and English standards could maybe do with some possible upgrading, and so they got together and worked out some improvements they could either adopt or not.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could use a $100 bill to buy groceries and then deposit that same Benjamin in the bank to help pay your monthly credit card statement? Regular Americans would call this either magic or fraud. Washington Democrats call this "health care reform."

WASHINGTON - The nation's insurers may never be the same by the time Barack Obama is through tarring them as the bad boys of the nation's medical care problems. The president's latest gambit in his obsessive effort to "reform" health care at any cost seems to be to indict the insurance industry as the leading conspirator in runaway medical costs.

Someone has a plan to salvage Detroit: Change it from Motown to Mayberry. Seriously.

Mayor Dave Bing is proposing to abandon large swaths of the city, move the few people remaining to more functional neighborhoods, tear down the buildings left behind and let what's left become forests, pastures and farmland.

Colleen LaRose, a/k/a "JihadJane," was apparently discreet enough to keep secret from her live-in boyfriend her plans for a new career as a Muslim terrorist.

Kurt Gorman said he had no inkling of her religious conversion or her growing fanaticism right up until she abruptly moved out of their suburban Philadelphia apartment last August, taking his passport with her.

The governors and chief education officials of 48 states have agreed on uniform national standards for the teaching of math and English. The federal government is about to spend $350 million to develop uniform national tests to measure how well those standards are being met.