Barack Obama’s presidential campaign plans to strike at the heart of the Republican base by attempting to woo Evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics to his side.

Listening to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton repeat stories they claim to have been told by the poor and the unemployed, who are unable to pay for food and medicine and feel miserable about it, is enough to make one think we are living in a Third World dictatorship and not the United States of America. But victimhood and a “can’t do” spirit is what the Democratic Party has mostly been about since the Great Depression.

A self-identified African-American caller to a Washington, D.C., radio station characterized the recent anti-Hillary Clinton outburst by the white liberal Chicago priest, Michael Pfleger, as a “minstrel show.”

These days, people on “one side” of the political spectrum are not supposed to cooperate, much less have a personal relationship, with anyone on the “other side.” Siding with “the enemy” can get you branded a compromiser, a sellout, or fool.

With gas prices topping $4 a gallon in some regions of the country, now may not be the best time to say something positive about “big oil,” but here goes anyway.

While the Rev. Jeremiah Wright continues to play out in sound bites on cable TV and talk radio, it isn’t Wright who might be president. It is Barack Obama who wants that job.

[Editor’s note: For a different perspective on former President Carter’s trip to the Middle East, read the online comments by his son, Jeff Carter, a Peachtree City resident and participant in his father’s negotiations. The Web address is thecitizen.com/~citizen0/node/27663#comment-72184]

The Supreme Court has ruled 7-2 that the death penalty by lethal injection in Kentucky, which uses a cocktail of three drugs, is not a violation of the Constitution’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

We’ve heard about Barack Obama’s hope from his bestselling book “The Audacity of Hope.” Now we are getting a glimpse of his audacity.

Certain events imprint the mind with images time cannot erase. People of one generation recall where they were when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. People of another remember where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Pope Benedict XVI last week baptized a man into the Catholic Church. The man, Magdi Allam, had converted from another faith. There is nothing unusual about that. People convert from non-faith to faith, or from one religion to another, or within faiths to different denominations all the time. However, this conversion was different.

BOSTON - Following Sept. 11, 2001, a day of infamy on which nearly 3,000 died at the hands of terrorists, The New York Times began publishing the names and pictures of the dead. I made a deliberate effort to look at those pictures and to read the names and hometowns of each victim. I wanted to identify with them as much as possible.

I am a typical white person, as Barack Obama might say, and did say, about his white grandmother. Like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, I, too, have crossed the street to avoid a group of young black men who have a certain thug-in-the-hood look about them. Am I a racist? Only if Jesse Jackson is a racist. In fact, we are prudent.

In his several explanations and denunciations of his longtime pastor, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama asks us to believe that he never heard any of the sermons in which the Rev. Jeremiah Wright denounced and asked God to damn America.

The campaign manager for Sen. Barack Obama has a point. David Plouffe wants Hillary Clinton to release her income tax returns for the last several years and couple that with a speedier process for releasing papers from the Clinton White House years. That’s so voters will be able to judge whether Mrs. Clinton’s claims of experience are justified by what she says she did as a virtual “co-president.”

LOS ANGELES — As one group attempts to use California public schools as laboratories to assist children in “coming out” with their nontraditional sexual orientation, another is urging parents to come out from these schools and educate their children with their values at home or in private schools.

If you believe big media, the economy is in trouble. If you worry about job layoffs and your inability to pay bills, you may be thinking about voting for Democrats this fall, which is the point of the negative media coverage.

This just in: Ronald Reagan is dead and he’s not coming back. Now, can conservatives please move on?

Reagan always spoke about the future and its possibilities. Today’s conservatives, however, can’t seem to break with the past and the nostalgia for the Reagan years. Even in his letter to the American people in 1994 in which he revealed he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, Reagan wrote of his “eternal optimism” for the country’s future.

The aptly named Republican “retreat” last weekend at the ritzy Greenbrier resort in West Virginia should have included Democrats because Republicans are behaving just like them.

In the ‘90s, Judicial Watch, an organization that seeks to hold Democrats and Republicans accountable to the law, pursued members of the Clinton administration. Larry Klayman, the organization’s founder, filed several lawsuits to expose alleged cover-ups in Commerce Department trade missions and the suicide of White House aide Vincent Foster.

During his recent trip to Israel, President Bush visited several places that re-affirmed his faith, including Bethlehem and the Sea of Galilee. Then exhibiting far greater faith than believing Jesus could walk on water, he asserted that “peace” could be had between Israel, the Palestinians and her Arab neighbors.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Where there are large concentrations of Muslims in England, “no-go” zones are being established and, according to the Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, the Church of England’s Bishop of Rochester, non-Muslims who “trespass” in such neighborhoods risk attack.

Let’s have a show of hands by people who are fed up with the way politics is practiced in America. Activists, party operatives, media guest bookers interested in conflict, not resolution of problems and all fund-raisers, put your hands down. The rest of you pay attention.

Thanksgiving is supposed to be about gratitude and Christmas about ... what? Getting more stuff we don’t really need, but sometimes selfishly want?

One of the traits of a cult is its refusal to consider any evidence that might disprove the faith. And so it is doubtful the global warming cultists will be moved by 400 scientists, many of whom, according to the Washington Times, “are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis.”

Why should Major League Baseball (MLB) be immune to the cultural depravity that has touched every area of public life — from politics to religion, from corporate life to personal relationships?

Atheists are the only people who appear to have been offended by Mitt Romney’s speech about his Mormon faith. Judging by the reaction contained in some newspaper columns, editorials and letters to the editor, atheists are said to have felt “excluded” by Romney’s failure to acknowledge that tolerance of the anti-religious is part of America’s tradition.

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani was in Washington on Tuesday to raise money ... and to see me. In a nondescript office building two blocks from the White House, Giuliani answered a wide range of questions on domestic and foreign policy.

No one ever accused Patrick J. Buchanan of lacking conviction or of consulting a focus group before saying what he thinks.

Just as Thanksgiving and Christmas come around with predictable regularity, so, too, do Middle East peace summits arrive near the end of modern presidencies.