Ronald Reagan, of course, was a Republican governor of California who went through a painful defeat in the 1976 presidential race before winning four years later

Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign raises a series of fascinating questions, the most perplexing of all being why an international star of his stature would ever want to run in the first place

If we wait for the entertainment industry to change its fundamental values, we may be waiting a long time. But we don't have to wait another day to scale back our own private consumption of television.

The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards.

For many of the most powerful people in the entertainment business, hostility to organized religion goes so deep and burns so intensely that they insist on expressing that hostility, even at the risk of financial disaster.

The left-leaning thinking that dominates the movie business follows a common liberal instinct to deny the spiritual dimension to every problem, thereby profoundly compounding the difficulties.

Savvy observers occasionally note television's resemblance to the weather: Everybody loves to complain about it, but nobody can do anything to fix it.