Failure to understand or act on intelligence goes a long way toward explaining the attacks of September 11, 2001. On this 10th anniversary of those events, we seem, once again, not to grasp the import of the information being provided by our intelligence services. Lee Hamilton, former co-chairman of 9/11...

Pretend for a moment that you are Gabrielle Giffords, about whom we are at last being told the truth. After 6 months of inpatient treatment, the best that money can buy, you can't speak fluently and must rely upon facial expressions and hand gestures to make up for words that...

The Mississippi is flooding.

Sunday a tornado ripped through Joplin, Missouri, destroying whole neighborhoods. Last month tornadoes left tens of thousands homeless, and in March we were riveted by images with hundreds of thousands displaced by the earthquake and then tsunami in Japan.

History -- and the scenes flooding our...

Osama bin Laden is dead but the Taliban is not. Despite nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan, the Taliban has still not been defeated completely. We cannot afford further losses of human life and treasure, but neither can we afford to withdraw unless America's basic security requirements are met....

We all hope never to endure having our minds slowly diminished and devoured by dementia, but the odds of that are worse than you might know. In fact, there's about a 40% chance that your brain will self-destruct while you're in your 80s. Your chances of developing dementia...

Our schools are turning millions of normal children into dropouts and failures. This isn't because of a few bad teachers or principals, but because the natural learning behaviors of children are routinely penalized instead of praised. Initiatives like "No Child Left Behind" and "The Race To The Top" won't change...

Sex and Stress: Male Vs. Female Political and Domestic Strategies

Neuroscience research confirms that when stressed, men tend toward 'fight or flight' reactions, while women prefer to talk -- and that men take more risks, while women are generally more cautious. However, neither the mechanisms underlying these findings, nor their...

January was 40th anniversary of that much vilified institution, the no-fault divorce. It is time to re-evaluate how divorce affects families, and particularly children. The California law took effect on Jan. 1, 1970, and was followed by a wave of marital separations that continues to this day -- and also...

Normally we think of the costs of war in terms of dollars spent and body bags delivered to loved ones. However, this perspective overlooks the enormous financial and social burdens of veterans' long term disabilities such as those caused by traumatic brain injury (TBI), which is both under diagnosed and...

Why do so many of our fellow citizens ignore the facts and actual issues in the current health care debate, and instead blindly insist that the health care reform proposals are a terrible danger to us all? At recent town halls and other meetings, the Democrats' bills have been described...

George Sodini, who committed suicide after killing 3 women and injuring 9 others on August 4 at an LA Fitness gym in Collier Township, Pennsylvania, has been described as "hate filled," "Gal-hating" and a "madman, and "possibly psychotic." None of these terms accurately represent the feelings expressed...

A heated debate about "racial profiling" was the immediate response to the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard University by Sergeant Crowley for disorderly conduct on his own front porch. It became, within moments of publication, an intense argument about the whether or not racial profiling had...

David Vitter, Mark Sanford, Chip Pickering, John Ensign, Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig, Henry Hyde, Rob Livingston, Mark Foley: all are Family Values politicians and former leaders in excoriating Bill Clinton and others for sexual misbehavior who have been caught with their pants down.

As soon as their own peccadilloes...

It is hard to imagine four more successful, intelligent, and tough - or to use the press description, 'steely' - women than Hillary Clinton, Jenny Sanford, Elizabeth Edwards, and Silda Spitzer. In addition to their accomplishments, these four women have another point in common: their husbands have all been involved...