Commentary, editorials and opinion, opinions

For a look at the state of America's youth, there's probably no better resource than the U.S. military, which examines thousands of them every year to fill its recruitment goals.

Legalize drugs, advocates say, and you'll, decrease drug use, virtually empty our prisons, end the violence between cartels in Mexico and move toward a more humane society in which abuse is treated as an illness, not a crime.

II remember it well. My husband had just had serious surgery, and I was asked to leave the hospital to write about congressional hearings on the flu vaccine shortage.

Grumbling, I was informed by an editor that a national flu vaccine shortage was nothing to sneeze at and getting to the whys and wherefores was essential.

A funny thing happened on the way to Iran's annual celebration -- this year was the 30th anniversary of its takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. As usual, a pro-government crowd trooped to the site of the old embassy and dutifully chanted,"Death to America" and burned a few U.S. flags.

SAN FRANCISCO - H.R. 3692, the monstrous healthcare reform bill that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D Calif., unleashed last week, comprises 1,990 pages of dense, nearly impenetrable prose. This legislation is precisely 10 sheets shy of four reams of paper.

Bill Moyers commented on his PBS program that when President Barack Obama came into office, people remarked, "This is a Rooseveltian moment."

James K. Galbraith, the son of the famous economist and a formidable academic in his own right, responded, "The public certainly wanted a Rooseveltian moment," but he added, Obama's situation "is much more like Herbert Hoover's."

THIS COLUMN UPDATED WITH INFO ON HOW MILITARY FAMILIES CAN GET GATE PASSES

Welcoming members of the military home hasn't changed much over the last century, although now they invariably arrive by commercial jet instead of a train or troop ship.

The legacy of the '09 off-presidential year elections is still to be determined as politicians, pundits and partisans debate whether Tuesday's gubernatorial massacre of Democratic candidates in Virginia and New Jersey was a backlash against President Barack Obama's governance or not.

It is safe to say that the right-wing talkers and pundits who are hailing Republican gubernatorial victories in increasingly Democratic Virginia and very Democratic New Jersey as heralding the end of the Age of Obama could not pick Bob McDonnell and Chris Cristie, the respective victors in those contests, out of a police line up.

Winston Churchill paid tribute to the young fighter pilots who staved off Nazi Germany's aerial assault on England during the Battle of Britain with characteristic eloquence: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."