I don't mean to be unpatriotic or disrespectful to Thomas Jefferson, God forbid, and the other signers of the Declaration of Independence. And far be it from me to challenge the inspiration of the words at the beginning of the Declaration that most of us memorized as young school children:

Sometimes a private citizen, someone who has never run for office but has a vision and a political idea, someone who is both stubborn and insightful, can change the course of political history.

Thomas Paine is an example of one such person. His words and ideas literally helped changed...

The positive media and bipartisan praise of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's leadership at the State Department -- she is called a "superstar" by the top Republican on the House panel that oversees State and has an approval rating of 80 percent -- misses an important point:...

By now, most people have heard -- negatively -- about the 2006 case Ricci v. DeStefano, in which 18 New Haven firefighters (17 white and one Hispanic) were not promoted after passing the required tests because there were no blacks whose test scores were high enough to qualify them for...

I thought President Obama's speech in Cairo, Egypt, was eloquent, historic, and could well be regarded as one of the most important foreign policy speech ever made by any U.S. president.

Some American Jews do not like Mr. Obama in his speech publicly calling out Prime...

Suppose a black female nurse is seriously injured during her work at a hospital and is forced to take a medical leave of absence. When she returns almost a year later, she reapplies for new jobs but doesn't get any offers of comparable salary and seniority. For one of the...

I began having second thoughts about last week's column urging the indictment of former Vice President Dick Cheney for approving the use of water-boarding and other forms of illegal torture shortly after it was published and posted last Monday morning -- days before the Obama- Cheney back-to-back speeches last Thursday.

I have written many times in this space that I oppose any criminal prosecution of prior-administration officials on torture or other issues relating to the Iraq War and the war on terrorism, especially those CIA interrogators who relied in good faith on the instructions of policymakers and the legal opinions...

It was the second night of Passover, in spring 2007. Jack and Joanne Kemp were with us at our Seder table.

The story of the Jews' escape from slavery in Egypt is told, year-after-year, in a small book called the Haggadah, recited for centuries in one form or another...

"We are not losing blue states and shrinking as a party because we are not conservative enough. If we pursue a party that has no place for someone who agrees with me 70 percent of the time, that is based on an ideological purity test rather than a coalition test,...

I was planning to write today's column assessing President Obama's first 100 days. But in the middle of writing that column on a quiet Saturday afternoon (I was going to give him an A minus -- surprise!), my phone rang and it was former President Bill Clinton, whom I first...

On the issue of the release of the interrogation memos and the decision not to prosecute the interrogators, once again President Obama has shown the courage to do the right thing while angering some elements on both the left and the right.

The latter decision on non-prosecution was based on...

A very wise Republican friend of mine, star pollster Frank Luntz, has made it a science to convince politicians of the supposedly self-evident proposition that words count.

New Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu is known in Israel and throughout the world as a man of the right. He...

This is what I wrote in this space on Jan. 9.

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"Sen. Ted Stevens: An Innocent Man

"Just the headline of this piece alone, I'll bet, shocks a number of people.

"Most people assume, or have concluded, that Sen. Ted Stevens is guilty. After all, didn't a D.C. grand...

When he ran first ran for office as a young African American, some of the black political establishment accused him of not being "black enough."

When he graduated from a prestigious law school, he chose to do community organizing in an inner city neighborhood where too many black men were...

Full disclosure: I am reviewing the book written by my oldest son, Seth Davis, "When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball," published by Times Books on the 30th anniversary of the 1979 NCAA college basketball national championship game between Indiana State University, led by Larry Bird, and Michigan...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/09/davis-nycs-joel-klein-putting-children-first/

http://pundits.thehill.com/2009/03/09/public-education-nyc%e2%80%99s-joel-klein-putting-children-first/

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Let's start with full disclosure: I have known Joel Klein for nearly 30 years and consider him to be one of the smartest, most grounded, most public-spirited people I have ever known -- right up there with the other two old friends I would include in...

This post first appeared in the Washington Post.

On Tuesday night, President Obama walked down the aisle of the House of Representatives, en route to deliver his first speech to a joint session of Congress, shaking hands of Republican and Democratic members.

He saw Sen....

February 25, 2009

Dear Readers of my blog:

Once in awhile I get messages from friends and readers that contain such wisdom and insight I even consider they have more wisdom and insight than my own blog columns!

This one below, by California entrepreneur and wunderkind Auren Hoffman, is...

This story was originally published in the Washington Post and on The Hill's Pundits Blog.

Please note: Lanny Davis is a volunteer with the Israel Project, an American nonprofit group that tries to get out facts about Israel to the...