I am starting to feel sorry for Mitt Romney. On an international tour of three countries, he made news in two of them by dissing the London Olympics and infuriating the Palestinians. The poor guy – for months, people have complained that he never says what he really believes. Now he’s in trouble for too boldly saying what he actually thinks.

First, during an interview with NBC News anchorman Brian Williams, Romney had this to say about prospects of success for the London Games: “It’s hard to know just how well it will turn out. There are a few things that were disconcerting: the stories about the private security firm not having enough people, supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials -- that obviously is not something which is encouraging.”

Well, the queen’s government was disconcerted enough about the failure of the security contractor to provide enough guards that an extra 1,200 British troops were called in to help. Nevertheless,...

The Summer Olympic Games in London kick off today with the opening ceremony extravaganza, march of athletes, lighting of the flame and security and surveillance so pervasive it would make Britain’s great prophet of dystopia, George Orwell, cringe in fearful recognition. 

Great Britain, with its own home-grown Petri dish of Islamic radicalism and history of terrorist incidents, is taking no chances. Forty years after the terrorist attack at the Olympics in Munich, the rule is: better stiflingly safe than sorry. As a result, London has become a virtual police state with security cameras scanning a vast area of the city, many streets closed and thousands of security personnel on guard monitoring each wayward tourist to see if suicide bombs are strapped underneath some of those souvenir T-shirts. 

Tuesday, when the security contractor responsible for providing guards for the Games admitted it failed to train enough rent-a-cops, the British government called up an additional 1,200...

In the days following the Aurora theater massacre, gun sales in Colorado shot through the roof. But all the arms and ammo moving across gun shop counters are not being purchased in anticipation of another anonymous misfit springing out of nowhere with guns blazing. Instead, people are stocking their home armories to get ahead of new gun control laws that might restrict access to firearms.

It seems not to make any difference to these people that there is zero chance that any new restrictions will be imposed, or that none are being seriously pondered by anyone who could make it happen, or that any law that might conceivably get through the solid bulwark of the gun lobby would not do anything significant to inhibit the right to keep and bear arms.

Nevertheless, Colorado guns sales jumped by 43% over last week. From the time of the Friday shooting to the end of the weekend, 2,887 people were approved to buy firearms through state background checks. This gun rush was not happening in Colorado...

The charisma, sense of history and giddy hope that propelled Barack Obama’s run in 2008 seem long gone, but even the faded memory of those days still has more dazzle than Mitt Romney’s dull campaign of pandering and negativity. The fact that the president seems to be holding a narrow lead in the presidential race is testimony to the stilted shallowness of Romney’s candidacy.

Obama really should be in big trouble. The economy continues to limp along with more gloom than sunshine on the horizon. His landmark legislative achievement, the healthcare act, is misunderstood and controversial. His foreign policy successes do not count for much in a time when Americans are looking inward. His greatest accomplishment – keeping the American economy from going over a cliff back in 2009 – cannot be easily appreciated, since, when calamity is avoided, it is hard to explain to restive voters just how much worse it could have been.

The most passionate voters are on the...

James Holmes, the alleged shooter in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre, was lucky to be living in the U.S.A. People who want to kill people find guns are very handy and, thanks to America's gun lobby, they can buy them easily in this country, along with all the ammunition needed to get the job done.

If the alleged gunman had been living in Norway, a place with much stricter gun regulations, he would have had to work harder to amass an arsenal. Still, there is the inconvenient fact for liberals that Norway's tougher laws did not deter right-wing racist Anders Breivik from gunning down 69 young people at a leftist youth camp last summer.

So, as much as I am variously amused and appalled by paranoid gun enthusiasts who see black helicopters and totalitarian oppression in even the most modest efforts to regulate guns and ammo, they are probably right to argue that tough gun laws will not stop these aberrant killings that emerge from a darkness no one can penetrate. As former FBI...

This has been a week in which someone at the Republican National Committee must have said, "Send in the clowns!" Michele Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh and lesser jesters in the GOP circus were just a few fake noses and a seltzer bottle short of performances worthy of Ringling Bros.

Bachmann was the premier buffoon. The Minnesota congresswoman alleged that a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Huma Abedin, may be a spy for the Muslim Brotherhood. Savvy readers will recall that Abedin is the wife of ex-New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, the twit who got caught tweeting photos of his nether regions. Abedin may have shown bad judgment in choosing a mate, but there is no evidence she is a radical Islamist.

On Wednesday, Sen. John McCain rose to Abedin's defense on the floor of the Senate, not naming Bachmann, but clearly aiming fire in her direction. "When anyone, not least a member of Congress, launches specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of...

Mitt Romney’s income tax returns may contain some surprises that he does not want the world to know about, but they are hardly his only secrets. His biggest secret, the question he has not answered through the entire campaign, the one that bothers conservatives even more than it irks liberals, is this: Does he believe in anything besides Mormonism and money?

He won in the Republican primaries because he did not hesitate to do whatever it took to destroy his opponents. Now, his campaign aides are saying, off the record, there is no limit to what they will do to beat Barack Obama. The Romney campaign will attack him for the shady friends he may have kept back in Chicago. They will ding him for smoking pot in high school. And, as demonstrated this week by one of Romney’s surrogates, former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu, they will try to cast doubt on whether the president is a true American. 

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The one thing Romney did not do in the primaries...

Reporting from Havre, Mont. – At the end of a scorching 100-degree day last week, I sat in a circle of horsemen in a camp near Beaver Creek in the Bear Paw Mountains. Perched at a picnic table across from me, rancher Larry Kinsella was relating a story about the vicissitudes of ranching life.

Kinsella said he had been trying to herd on horseback a troublesome cow one day recently, but the belligerent bovine kept eluding him. Up and down hills, in and out of the trees and thicket, the chase went on for hours. Finally, with the help of his wife, Judy, he cornered the elusive critter and got her tied to his pickup by two or three ropes. Before he could load the cow into a trailer, though, she rammed the side of the truck. 

The $900 cow had caused about $2,000 of damage to the vehicle, thereby turning a profitable retrieval of livestock into a serious loss on machinery. Such are the economics of ranching.

Kinsella said he was done battling with the cantankerous cow and would haul her...

I was at a party recently where a young father was getting a lot of attention as he spooned baby food into the mouth of his 6-month-old son. Several men were gathered around, enjoying the antics of the baby boy, who giggled with every bite.

Only a few feet away a young mother was breastfeeding her infant.

Both parents were doing the same thing – feeding their children – but the woman was getting the job done in a more intimate way. No one appeared to be shocked or disturbed, but neither was there a cluster of people gathering around her as they were with the man and his kid. Everyone was allowing the mother a realm of privacy in a busy room.

It seems as if people should be able to do the same for nursing moms in public places like shopping malls, but every now and then, there is a new story about a breastfeeding mother running afoul of security guards, mall managers, voyeuristic louts or prim busybodies who are shocked by such behavior.

A couple of websites I’ve come...

In the midst of a broiling summer that is burning up crops and killing people, a lot of Americans, including most of the leaders of one of our two major political parties, do not think climate change is a problem. Like ostriches with their heads stuck in the tar sands, they want to go on fracking like there's no tomorrow.

The dubious good news is that there is far more oil and natural gas in North America than anyone knew until very recently. If fully utilized, it could end America's dependence on oil from the Middle East. The significant bad news is that most of it is not easy to reach. That means we can't just drill a well and bring the stuff to the surface.

A relatively new technology called hydro-fracking is being employed to get at the stuff. Fracking involves pumping huge amounts of water and chemicals into the earth and forcing the oil and gas to the surface. The oil companies, as you might guess, say there is no harm done by this process. Environmentalists claim there is huge...

In the mid-1980s when I was a graduate student in England, my parents came to visit and my mother ended up getting a first-hand look at socialized medicine.

It was my dad and mom’s one-and-only trip to Europe -- a very big deal -- and I wanted to show them as much as I could. We crossed the English Channel to France and drove to see the cathedral at Chartres. The first night there, Mom slipped and sprained her ankle. By morning, she couldn’t walk and was in need of a doctor. We ended up at a hospital where, with no wait at all, she got X-rays and a friendly, highly competent female doctor checked her out and wrapped her leg. 

As we were leaving, my mother asked where she should pay the bill. This was hard to translate -- and not just because of the gap between French and English. The hospital staff tried to explain that there was no charge. My mom did not think that was right. She felt responsible. She wanted to pay. After a bit of back and forth, it began to dawn on her that...