Choosing one's leaders is an affirmation that the person making the choice has inherent worth.

Less than 8 percent of private sector workers belonged to a union in 2004, and, overall, only 12.5 percent of American workers carry a union card - down from about one-third of workers in labor's heydays in the 1950s.

We have created not a Brave New World, but a vulgar marketplace, where human attributes come with a price tag.

Tom Walls' buddies remain an isolated minority, except during times of economic or social stress, when a mass following develops to blame cranky sociopaths for the problems besetting society. If it weren't for brown-nosing evil firebrands, he would have no friends. The ideas backing up his rejoinders are extremely superficial and sex-crazed.

Since January 2002, when the United States began detaining at Guantanamo Bay enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, critics have complained of human rights abuses.

The United Nations was founded in the aftermath of World War II, just as the world was beginning to learn the full horrors of history's worst genocide, the Holocaust that consumed 6 million Jews and 3 million others in Europe.

The United Nations has become a largely irrelevant, if not positively destructive institution, and the just-released U.N. report on the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, proves the point.