By JAY AMBROSE, Scripps Howard News Service

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.

Even though they may remind you immediately of the worst racists you have known, bigoted bashers of religion often get away with it no matter how shallow, uncomprehending, unfair, overly generalizing, nasty-minded or obviously hostile their attitudes are.

First read

President Barack Obama should pick a mentor, a model, someone whose example he can follow, and he should do it quickly, before things get worse. Here is who: Mitch Daniels, the conservative, Republican governor of Indiana. What Obama has been getting wrong, he has been getting right. Obama can learn from him.

So there is President Barack Obama, giving a speech to a bunch of Democrats, and he is saying "y'all" do this and "y'all" should consider that, and pretty soon I am asking myself, how did he become habituated to saying "y'all?" In his youth in Indonesia and Hawaii? From his Kansas grandparents? At Harvard Law School?

The Columbia Journalism School has just put out a report calling for more government help to resuscitate local reporting, and, with near perfect timing, the Obama administration has been showing why this is a terrible idea.

One way or another, the Obama administration is trying to shut up its critics, and if that requires plopping First Amendment free-speech guarantees into a six-foot grave and covering the principles up with mud, so be it.

What do you do if you are president of the United States and your country is on an unsustainable, economically disastrous trajectory of vastly increased debt and long-term expenditures taking ever greater percentages of the money needed to keep businesses and jobs going?

Where I live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, we just had one of the coolest, wettest summers in memory, and we've already had snow this fall. I looked at the thermometer the other day, seeing it was just 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and said to my wife, "This darned global warming is going to be the death of us yet."

It almost seems an understatement to say that Norman Borlaug, dead at 95, was one of the greatest men of his time. Through his plant breeding techniques, he saved more lives than anyone in human history, maybe a billion, and you would think there would be universal applause. Only there is not.

Jimmy Carter time and again blames the Middle East's only true democracy, Israel, for the woes in that region while providing excuses for Arab terrorists, and there we have it. This Sunday school-teaching Baptist is an anti-Semite, a hater of Jews, someone whose political views on the subject of Arab-Israeli peace are most persuasively informed by his deep-seated bigotry.