The Buffalo News : Opinion

WASHINGTON — A year ago President Obama strolled confidently into the garden of good and evil, bit deeply into the apple and created the mess he and congressional Democrats are in now concerning health insurance reform.

WASHINGTON — The U. S. Coast Guard needs a guardian angel either in the White House or in Congress.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Charles E. Schumer’s hunch about President George W. Bush’s appointees to the U. S. Supreme Court was right on the money.

We’re calling it “30 in 30”—and what it means is that, starting Monday, Buffalo News readers will find a month’s worth of new features in their daily paper. (The features will be print-edition only, not online.)

For News Albany correspondent Tom Precious, Monday was a low point. “Mark it down,” he told me in gloomy tones during an afternoon phone call. “Today is the end of journalism.”

If you ask one News reader, putting Jerry Sullivan’s column on the front page recently was a spectacularly bone-headed decision.

WASHINGTON—If your impression of an Afghan woman is of a shapeless, frightened form engulfed in yards of heat-trapping fabric, you haven’t met Shafiqa Quraishi.

Thank you, “Jihad Jane,” for making a point about racial profiling that I’ve been trying to make for years: You can’t judge a potential terrorist by his complexion — or, in this case, her complexion.

We all know the importance of educating girls (and boys, too) in poor Muslim countries. So it is exciting to come across a successful educational model developed by an unusual Afghan educator to teach poor minority children.

The late Tom Blake, a colorful son of South Buffalo who in 1972 co-founded the St. Patrick’s Day Luncheon at the Buffalo Irish Center, used to observe that the annual event had morphed into something akin to a political convention.

Too much going on for one Politics Column, but here’s what we can fit in:

Some news and notes on the local and statewide political scene: