Two hundred years ago, on Feb. 7, 1824, President James Monroe invited Revolutionary War hero Gen. Lafayette to the United States. Earlier, Lafayette had expressed his wish to visit this country for the first time since he had left it…
Surrender There have been calls for Hamas, or at least Hamas leadership, to surrender. Jerome Marcus so argued in a Wall St. Journal op-ed on October 23. President Biden urged surrender in a Washington Post op-ed on November 19 and…
Jerome R. Daly, the helicopter pilot who became a Catholic priest, flew 2,000 hours in three tours. He earned 80 (this is not a typo) citations for bravery, including the Silver Star, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, two Bronze Stars for…
I published an appreciation of my father, Ivan D. Thunder, on these pages on November 1, 2010, three days after he had passed at age 97. He was a native of California and I called him “our California redwood,” straight…
Augustus Welby Pugin (1812–1852) is in the news these days in the United Kingdom because he designed the iconic London Clock Tower, popularly known as “Big Ben,” whose scaffolding has now come down after five years to reopen this spring….
Before the Korean War ended, the United States publicized Operation Moolah to the enemy: a $100,000 reward (equivalent to $1 million in 2022), and asylum, for the first North Korean pilot who defected and brought with him an intact MiG-15….
I went to Virginia Beach a couple weeks ago to escape the forecasted heavy snow and ice and power outages in central Virginia. It was only going to rain in Virginia Beach. I arrived late on a Saturday. Sunday it…
sounding: noun, the act of measuring the depths or the heights Packing the Court Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refuse to say if they will pack the court, in the sense of the phrase used for 90 years since FDR’s…
In reviewing the circumstances of the shutdown of the country’s colleges and universities 50 years ago this month and today’s circumstances due to the coronavirus, some things are the same and some things are different. First, let’s take a look…