Miami Herald >  Opinion >  From Our Inbox

  • Obamacare delay good for restaurant, retail, hotel jobs

    The White House delayed for one year a requirement under the Affordable Care Act that small businesses provide health insurance to its employees.

  • Federal loans still a good deal for students

    Student loan rates doubled on Monday. This is not a disaster, despite what you’ve heard.

  • Why U.S. presidents love Africa

    This past Tuesday, President Barack Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, met in Tanzania. Their wives were appearing together at a Bush Institute event and the two husbands attended a ceremony honoring the Americans who were killed in a 1998 embassy bombing. It was the first time two American presidents have met on foreign soil to commemorate a terrorist attack. The meeting on a distant battlefield in the war against terrorists was a reminder of the scope and continuity of the presidency. Osama Bin Laden had ordered the 1998 attack, Bush had sought him, and Obama gave the orders to kill him. Both men struggled to hunt al-Qaida and its offshoots across the globe and at home. The similarities between their domestic spy programs have lately inspired their critics to morph their pictures into one. In a recent interview, Bush took credit for launching the PRISM program that Obama continued, then approvingly quoted his successor. “I think there needs to be a balance, and as the president explained, there is a proper balance.”

  • Justice Kennedy’s flawed reasoning on DOMA

    It certainly is crowded down here at the bottom of history’s dustbin. There’s very little breathing space, what with those of us who reject a woman’s right to destroy the child growing within her body, those who believe that religious principles deserve respect in the face of overbearing health-care mandates and those who consider starving someone to death because they’re in a so-called “vegetative state” to be a criminal act, not an act of mercy.

  • Mandela’s freedom and ours

    As Americans prepared to celebrate the nation’s independence, many around the world were standing vigil for a critically ill Nelson Mandela. The confluence was appropriate, for Mandela has symbolized the synergy between America’s democracy and liberation struggles around the world. When he visited Boston in 1990 after his release from 27 years in prison in South Africa, he praised “the pioneering and leading role of Massachusetts” for becoming the “conscience of American society” in the fight against apartheid. He said, “We are even more touched that it was here in Boston that your own independence movement got its birth.”

  • NSA’s hapless leaker

    Over the course of a few short weeks, Edward Snowden has transformed himself from an international man of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, single-handedly exposing the innermost workings of the National Security Agency, to the hapless leaker who came to dinner.

  • Still a good deal for students

    Student loan rates doubled on Monday. This is not a disaster, despite what you’ve heard.

  • A growing inequality

    In America, not all kinds of inequality are created equal.

  • The taming of NSA spook

    On March 24, 2009, the National Security Agency’s inspector general issued a 51-page draft report on the President’s Surveillance Program, the warrantless authority under which NSA had collected phone records and email since 2001. This year, the report, classified as top secret, was leaked to the Guardian by NSA defector Ed Snowden. On Thursday, the Guardian published it.

  • Why American women better off than most

    Think again: A look at prevailing assumptions about working women:

  • American fast food in China still tops

    SHANGHAI — Under the arches of the Zhongshan Park elevated railway station, there’s a joint where I’ve been catching quick lunches for years. I first went in, nearly a dozen years ago, because the sign over the door caught my attention: Zhen Gong Fu (“Real Kung Fu”), next to a cartoon picture of Hong Kong martial arts legend Bruce Lee in full flight, about to deal a lethal blow.

  • Five myths about the 1814 burning of Washington

    On Independence Day 199 years ago, there was little cause for revelry in Washington. With America on the brink of defeat in the War of 1812, some feared it would be the nation’s last July Fourth celebration. The British forces threatening to dismember the union would bring their own fireworks — setting the White House, the Capitol and other public buildings ablaze in August 1814. The burning of Washington has become the subject of much myth.

  • Speed is key to Egypt’s economic reform success

    Beneath Egypt’s political turmoil lie profound economic challenges that must be met by whoever governs Egypt.

  • The liberals have a long game too

    At first glance, the 7-1 vote in the Fisher affirmative action case decided by the Supreme Court is puzzling. While the decision about the University of Texas’ admissions policies was essentially a punt, putting off for another day the future constitutionality of affirmative action programs, two of the court’s liberals (Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Stephen Breyer) joined in an opinion that seemed to impose a very tough hurdle for any program’s constitutionality in the future. (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, and Justice Elena Kagan recused herself).

  • FBI's data mining needs scrutiny, too

    © 2013, Bloomberg News.

  • Barbara Shelly: To a late, gay uncle — we have come a long way

    The Kansas City Star

  • Mandela and Obama

    Gathering valedictory material on Nelson Mandela as he faded in a Pretoria hospital the other day, I came across a little book called Mandela’s Way. In this 2010 volume, Rick Stengel, the ghostwriter of Mandela’s autobiography, set out to extract “lessons on life, love and courage” he had learned from three years of immersion in Mandela’s life.

  • Postcards — the tweeting of yesteryear

    In this age of Instagram and Twitter, it is easy to forget how recently postcards were a principal way of sending images and short messages. Nothing about postal communication seems appropriate for that today: Someone once confessed to me that he hand-delivers postcards after he returns from a trip because they arrive more quickly that way.

  • Rove says Bush was skeptical of Voting Rights Act

    During a Q&A at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Karl Rove, the most prominent Republican strategist in the country, admitted that the Grand Old Party will be unlikely to reclaim the White House if it does not find a way to expand support among minority voters. But he also applauded the Supreme Court’s recent decision on voting rights in Shelby County v. Holder, which is expected to have a disproportionate impact on minority voter turnout in future elections.

  • The taming of the spook

    On March 24, 2009, the National Security Agency’s inspector general issued a 51-page draft report on the President’s Surveillance Program, the warrantless authority under which NSA had collected phone records and email since 2001. This year, the report, classified as top secret, was leaked to the Guardian by NSA defector Ed Snowden and the Guardian published it.

  • Deen’s racist wedding fantasy was once a reality

    Paula Deen is in trouble. Last month, in a deposition for a discrimination suit brought by an employee, the Food Network star blithely admitted to using racial slurs. Perhaps equally disturbing, she also said she had fantasized about throwing a slavery-themed wedding for her brother, an idea that came to her after eating at a restaurant with an all-black staff.

  • The real Whitey Bulger

    For two weeks, Whitey Bulger had been playing it cool at his trial in the courthouse named after his old neighbor Joe Moakley.

  • Five reasons to worry about U.S. debt

    To read the news, you’d think America’s fiscal problems are under control. After all, following four years of $1 trillion-plus deficits, this year’s will be “only” $642 billion. And Congress actually cut spending this year by letting the sequester happen.

  • Texas filibuster on abortion bill only the start

    In just 11 hours Tuesday, Texas lawmaker Wendy Davis went from relative obscurity to national fame as the symbol of resistance to harsh antiabortion laws. Davis, a Democrat from Fort Worth, filibustered a proposal that would place new restrictions on abortion clinics and ban the practice after 20 weeks.

  • A life sentence no child deserves

    A year ago this week, the Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama that it is unconstitutional to impose on a child a mandatory sentence of life without parole. The court stopped short of striking down all life-without-parole sentences for children but required that judges consider a child’s maturity, home environment, role in the crime, potential for rehabilitation and other key factors before ordering this harsh penalty.

Web Search powered byYAHOO!SEARCH
Search: Horoscopes | Comics & Games | Data Sleuth