Once upon a time, Democrats were concerned with infringements on civil liberties, when the president abusing power was someone they opposed and when the deaths of Americans bothered them.

Elizabeth Taylor reportedly said, “You find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal.” Of course, she was in Hollywood, perhaps the only place where loyalty means less than it does in Washington, D.C.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has become the face of the push for reform. He wrote an op-ed in this week’s Wall Street Journal inviting public input on the issue. Here are mine.

To call the Tsarnaev family a “piece of work” is an insult to work.

Progressives can’t help themselves. When a normal person hears of a tragedy, they feel the natural range of emotions – fear, anger, sympathy, etc. But progressives are not normal humans.

When the massacre in Newtown occurred, it received wall-to-wall coverage, as well it should have. We’d never seen anything like this before – a mentally ill gunman shooting tiny children and their teachers in an elementary school. It shocked the senses and dominated the national conversation – as well it should have.

Last week I wrote about the battle for words and need to reclaim the language. We have to make sure words have meaning, no matter who how offensive a tiny slice of people find some of them.

What constitutes news? What does the word even mean anymore? Words have gone from having specific meanings to being malleable tools used to advance a progressive agenda.

The best thing President Obama ever did for his financial security was run for public office. A man of relatively moderate means who was able to afford his home in a wealthy Chicago neighborhood only because he got “help” from his good friend and convicted felon Tony Rezko, is now a multi-multi-millionaire.

First, they came for the smokers. No one would argue smoking is good for you. But it’s legal; growing tobacco is even subsidized by the government. Yet, when governments started limiting the right of people to smoke in places public and private, non-smokers did nothing.

Circular firing squads are about as helpful as they sound, yet they are something at which some Republicans excel. I do my best to avoid engaging in them. To paraphrase President Reagan, my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy. But sometimes my 80 percent friends do something 100 percent stupid, and pretending they didn’t could cause more damage than calling them out on it.

Welcome to Thunder Dome.

It’s one thing for a politician to “massage” the truth ... it happens all the time. But it’s quite another for one to so brazenly repeat an easily disprovable lie.

Turns out the New York Times is worried about the future of the Republican Party. So concerned, in fact, it has dedicated more than 6,000 words in this week’s magazine to explore, as the title puts it, “Can The Republicans Be Saved From Obsolescence?”

Infighting continued amongst conservatives and Republicans this week. Karl Rove angered Tea Partiers by implying they don’t know how to pick candidates. Majority Leader Eric Cantor told anyone who would listen Republicans need to learn to craft their message better for a broader audience. Every conservative group and politician is scrambling to find a way to appeal to various groups of Americans in a way that will “work” to win them votes. It reeks of desperation…and it’s nothing new.

Some things are easy to mock, such as Al Gore – Pope Gorus IV of the Holy Church of Global Warming – selling his Current TV for hundreds of millions of oil dollars.

You have to give progressives credit. They’re nothing if not thorough. When an opportunity to limit the Second Amendment presented itself in the Sandy Hook massacre, regardless how tasteless it was to exploit that opportunity, they went full bore toward their goal.

Who hasn’t laughed at the revelation that Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o had a “fake” girlfriend? I meant to spend five minutes on the subject on my radio show and ended up doing an hour.

There’s an epidemic in this country, something that has or will affect all of us in our lives. And the government needs to act to protect us from those who may do us harm. This plague is particularly felt in schools. The children must be made safe.

Sometimes there is so much stupid going on in the world that you have to just stop and take stock of it all.