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Joel Brinkley | Young South Koreans ignore past with North

May 25, 4:03 PM

Y Just down the hill from a South Korean Air Force helipad sits the air base barbershop. The front wall is floor-to-ceiling windows displaying shattered toilets in the men’s room and a gaping hole in the ceiling, wires and rebar still dangling.

Michael Gerson | Entitlement honesty makes Bob Kerrey a rare Democrat

May 24, 6:19 PM

W By endorsing Deb Fischer — the surprise winner of Nebraska’s Republican Senate primary — Sarah Palin let a competent candidate slip through her normal screening process. Fischer is no Sharron Angle or Christine O’Donnell — tea party favorites in 2010 who seemed to view accomplishment and deliberation as pernicious establishment vices. Fischer is a tough, effective, respected state legislator — and, in the few polls available so far, is leading her Democratic opponent, Bob Kerrey.

Yael T. Abouhalkah

Lewis Diuguid

Derek Donovan
Reader's Representative

E. Thomas McClanahan

Miriam Pepper

Mary Sanchez

Barbara Shelly

Stephen Winn

RECENT STAR OPINION COLUMNS

Kathleen Parker | The public trial of Justice Roberts

May 24, 6:18 PM

W Novelist John Grisham could hardly spin a more provocative fiction: The president and his surrogates mount an aggressive campaign to intimidate the chief justice of the United States, implying ruin and ridicule should he fail to vote in a pivotal case according to the ruling political party’s wishes.

George F. Will | Treating honest citizens like common criminals

May 23, 1:27 PM

TRuss Caswell, 68, is bewildered: “What country are we in?” He and his wife, Pat, are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language.

Robert Reich | Heading into a lousy job market, loaded with debt

May 22, 7:29 PM

Members of the class of 2012, I feel I owe it to you to tell you the truth about the pieces of parchment you’re picking up today.

Charles Krauthammer | Obama has trapped himself on gay marriage

May 21, 7:00 PM

There are two ways to defend gay marriage. Argument A is empathy: One is influenced by gay friends in committed relationships yearning for the fulfillment and acceptance that marriage conveys upon heterosexuals. That’s essentially the case President Barack Obama made when he first announced his change of views.

Leonard Pitts Jr. | She shot a ceiling, got 20 years

May 21, 6:59 PM

So the people got sick of it, all those criminals being coddled by all those bleeding-heart liberal judges with all their soft-headed concern for rights and rehabilitation. And a wave swept this country in the Reagan years that said, no mercy, no more.

Jonah Goldberg | The media are tipping their hand too early

May 18, 11:53 PM

The time is coming for Mitt Romney to get angry, very angry, with what is increasingly, quaintly called “the mainstream media.”

Kathleen Parker | A strange controversy over ads never aired

May 19, 12:14 AM

What a difference four years make.

Joel Brinkley | A snarling Putin heads back to the Kremlin

May 18, 7:21 PM

Now that Vladimir Putin is Russia’s president once again, the result of still another fraudulent election, we should expect ever more hostile relations with Moscow.

Michael Gerson | One crisis after another, and running out of time

May 17, 7:30 PM

Europe’s economic struggles are a consistent drag on American growth. A eurozone breakup, in chaos and acrimony, could be a Lehman-like shock of incalculable damage.

George Will | A tug of war between practical and pretentious

May 16, 5:46 PM

Prius, which is Latin for “to go before” or “lead the way,” is the perfect name for the car whose owners are confident they are leading the way for the benighted. “Prius preening,” an almost erotic pleasure, is, however, a perishable delight because the status derived from enlightened exclusivity evaporates if the hoi polloi crash the party.

Robert Reich | Why our financial system cannot yet be trusted

May 15, 7:20 PM

Republicans have no problem intruding on the most personal and most intimate decisions any of us makes. But they don’t want the government to intrude on big business or Wall Street. They have it upside down.

Charles Krauthammer | In an eerie echo of 1967, a fractious Israel unites

May 15, 4:53 PM

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu forfeited September elections that would have given him four more years in power. He chose instead to form a national coalition that guarantees 18 months of stability — 18 months during which, if the world does not act to stop Iran, Israel will.

Leonard Pitts Jr. | After ‘debt to society,’ then what?

May 14, 6:52 PM

I promised Russell I would ask you something.

Kathleen Parker | The evolution, the bully and the distractions

May 13, 5:23 PM

This past week’s news cycle has produced two narratives: One, Barack Obama is an evolutionary, 21st-century hero who supports equality for all. Two, Mitt Romney is a gay-bashing bully mired in the previous century, who also supports a war on women and, oh yeah, hates dogs. Let’s parse, shall we?

Jonah Goldberg | The ‘money primary’ pulls Obama to the left

May 12, 5:25 PM

Primaries force party bosses, activists and strategists to test their messaging, update their databases and, most especially, get the party’s fundraising apparatus going. Nearly everything we’ve seen from President Barack Obama in the last five months has been an attempt to re-create the institutional benefits of a primary season without having an actual opponent.

Joel Brinkley | Austerity is no answer to ailing world economies

May 12, 5:27 PM

The Obama administration argues that its stimulus spending in 2009 and 2010 staved off an even more serious economic contraction. While that seems logical, the assertion is unprovable. But imagine where the United States would be today if instead the president had imposed a harsh austerity plan.

Michael Gerson | GOP will have to change as the culture changes

May 10, 6:07 PM

President Barack Obama’s choice on gay marriage is a bet on the political future. Republicans and conservatives will be forced to make some adjustments over time.

George F. Will | Obamacare’s thoughtless damage to a key industry

May 9, 4:34 PM

B Bill Hewlett and David Packard, tinkering in a California garage, began what became Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and a friend built a computer in the California garage that became Apple’s birthplace. Bill Cook had no garage, so he launched Cook Medical in a spare bedroom in an apartment.

Robert Reich | Lengthy slump is breeding ‘tinderbox societies’

May 8, 7:02 PM

It’s a combustible concoction wherever it occurs: Increasing productivity, widening inequality and rising unemployment create tinderbox societies. History tells us public anger and frustration can ignite in two very different ways.

Leonard Pitts Jr. | Trayvons was killed by a stereotype

May 8, 6:22 PM

The dirty little secret of the Martin killing is that Zimmerman could easily have been black. True, a black Zimmerman probably would not have been sent home by prosecutors who declined to press charges, but otherwise, yes. It is entirely possible. Why not? Blacks watch the same TV news as anyone else. We internalize the same message. We drink the same poison.