The day before President Obama delivered his State of the Union Address last week, the New York Times reported that "aides said he would accept responsibility, though not necessarily blame" for failing to deliver on campaign promises. If you accept responsibility for something bad, aren't you accepting blame by definition?

A walk to school. A lunch break. A trip to the library. None of these should be risky ventures in the life of a public school student.

Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial "minder" whom I'll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism.

'This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," President Obama declared on Saturday. "This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money. ... I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest."

The inevitable grumbling about the use of unattributed quotations in Game Change, the engrossing new campaign book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, has been accompanied by a grudging general admission that nobody cited in these pages has so far complained of being misrepresented.

You can't help but notice the white ice on the shore -- glossy slick -- or the way this city's skyscrapers kiss the clouds on a winter's day.

As the nation marks the first anniversary of Barack Obama's ascendance to the presidency, we will once again be subjected to endless discussion about the significance of the nation's first non-white president. For many African Americans, this may be a time to again celebrate the achievement of one of their own. As a person of color, I would like to offer a word of advice on why it might be best to table such inclinations.

Scott Roeder, whose trial began this week in Wichita, Kan., wanted to argue that killing the abortion doctor George Tiller was necessary to prevent a greater evil: the murder of unborn children. Because that is not how the law views what Tiller did for a living, it is not surprising that the judge would not let Roeder present a "necessity" defense.

Time to state the obvious: Never before in the history of our country have there been more outlets for really stupid people with a lot to say. Blogs, Twitter, radio shows, talk shows, news shows -- a million and one blowhards pile on to the same story du jour, and our confederacy of dunces is dumber and louder than ever. We're a cacophony of phonies, rushing to judgment, vomiting witty and caustic bons mots while the cameras roll and the clocks tick, gumming up the Internets with our thoughtless reaction pieces. (Ahem.)

Last week brought us news of the death, at 93, of Tsutomu Yamaguchi. I had been following his career for some time.

What's the difference between Barack Obama's anti-terrorism policies and George W. Bush's?

Every debate over expanded government surveillance power is invariably framed as one of "security vs. privacy and civil liberties" -- as though it's a given that increasing the government's surveillance authorities will "make us safer." But it has long been clear that the opposite is true.