It's a great life. You risk your skin catching killers and the juries turn them loose so they can come back and shoot at you again. If you're honest you're poor your whole life and in the end you wind up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin star.

Lon Chaney, Jr., asking Marshal Will Kane played by Gary Cooper why he goes out into the street to get shot at. High Noon.

If there’s one thing that’s glaringly apparent in the GOP nomination process, it’s this – Mitt Romney is just not a very good candidate for office.

It shouldn’t be this way. Romney is very intelligent, attractive to the point it almost appears he was assembled by a crack team of human designers, and well spoken. Add to that the fact that he can afford the best campaign advisors money can by, and he truly should be a juggernaut of a candidate.

But here’s Romney’s flaw in a nutshell – he is unwilling and unable to own up to who he is and what he has done.

We're half a month into 2012. Novak Djokovic's streak is long gone and most of the top names are at the Australian Open. Even though Australia is not presently as big a tennis powerhouse as say, Russia, tradition has the AO as the first major of the year. While planning the first Grand Slam—winning all four majors in one year—Don Budge was advised to skip the Australian Championships. In 1938, Australia took several weeks to reach by steamship, and his friends warned that he was such an attraction that the Aussies would play him to death in preliminary tournaments. But Budge schemed to win all four majors before turning pro, and had to start down under—as did Maureen Connolly, Rod Laver (twice), Margaret Smith Court and Steffi Graf.

In the beginning, racial equality was not a progressive ideal. Early progressives rarely paid much attention to persecuted minorities such as blacks, Jews, American Indians, or Irish and Chinese immigrants. They focused instead on defending an oppressed majority--farmers and workers--from a predatory minority--industry titans and bankers.

When progressives in the early 20th century did address minority rights, their positions tended to reflect party affiliation rather than progressive ideology. In those days, race politics split at the party line with Republicans supporting racial equality and Democrats opposing. Class politics, on the other hand, produced internal divisions within each party.

As a result, Republican progressives tended to be concerned about racial oppression, while Democratic progressives ignored or even condoned it. When the moderately progressive Republican president Teddy Roosevelt shocked the nation by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, William Jennings Bryan, a radically progressive Democrat, publicly denounced him.