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"Mike Lupica is being blamed for the cancellation of “The Sports Reporters” after the show’s run of nearly 30 years on ESPN. The Daily News columnist was a panelist for many years on the Sunday morning show, on which he and other print reporters such as the Boston Globe’s Bob Ryan and the Detroit Free Press’ Mitch Albom discussed the week’s hot-button issues in sports. When longtime host John Saunders unexpectedly died at 61 in August, Lupica jumped at the chance to replace him. “He was a total diva,” one insider said. “He was abusive to people, and mean to...

She acts as if this is a traditional campaign against a traditional opponent. Run around with your hand out in August, start to make your run in September. But Trump is not a traditional opponent. This is not a traditional campaign. You know what the headlines are about Clinton these days, when they're not about more trouble with her emails? They are about how much money she is raising in places like the Hamptons. You know the last person who thought he could beat Trump with a great, big war chest of money? Jeb Bush.

Mike Lupica, the ESPN host and regular panelist on the network's Sunday "The Sports Reporters" program, wrote in a column that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin addressed "mean," "dumb," "angry," and phony patriots at the NRA convention last Friday in Houston, Texas. In a New York Daily News column published late Sunday evening, Lupica also called NRA attendees the "craziest and creepiest gun lovers on the planet" who are also "phonies" who think "they're patriots and brave defenders of the Second Amendment." Outraged that Palin rightfully called out those like Lupica who have shamelessly tried to exploit senseless tragedies like...

Sarah Palin showed up at the NRA convention the other day, which was merely perfect. She belonged there as much as anybody in the hall just because from the start, from the time John McCain picked her out of the chorus, Palin has most appealed to mean, dumb, angry crowds exactly like the one she found in Houston. Palin should have worn a prom dress, but on this occasion wore a T-shirt that read “Women Hunt.” In her case, that means hunting for attention. Or relevance. She wants to be a populist and a patriot, the way the phonies cheering...

Now here comes Condoleezza Rice, the latest from the Bush White House trying to rewrite history on Iraq, make it out to be some kind of triumph for all of them, make herself a hero of a war that cost this country so many young lives and so much money and so much prestige. So a war started under false pretenses becomes one given over to this kind of false past tense. George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and now Rice all panhandle for a better place in history, trying to make the Bush administration into something so...

Sarah Palin, the darling of a pro-life party that cheers Texas executions at presidential debates, has made an insanely lucrative career out of being famous, a Kardashian sister of American politics. This week she becomes even more famous because of a new book written about her by Joe McGinniss, who became famous for writing a book called "The Selling of the President 1968." One of the stars of that book was Roger Ailes, who runs Fox News, where Palin has been a pinup girl since the last campaign, even if there was never a chance she was going to run...

So here comes the second coming of George W. Bush out of the governor's mansion in Texas, Rick (Dubya) Perry. Or maybe just call him W2. Perry is taller, has much better hair, seems to believe he has an even better pipeline to God than Bush did. And he comes out of Paint Creek, Tex., different from the Texas town that gave us Bush, the one we also know as Yale University. Whether Dubya Perry is holier than Michele Bachmann, the new President of Ames, Iowa, remains to be seen. For now, though, Perry and Bachmann are the headliners of...

This time the pictures, the demonstrations about democracy and freedom, are from Tahrir Square in Cairo. This time the opposition leader is a brave, learned man named Mohamed ElBaradei, standing up over these past few days the way the heroes always do in these moments. He has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in his distinguished life and served as the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. And in the runup to George Bush's war in Iraq, ElBaradei stood up there, too, telling Bush and Dick Cheney that he did not believe Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of...

Now Sarah Palin comes right out and says it, that she really is thinking about running for President in 2012. She says it in the same starry-eyed way kids talk about growing up to be astronauts, but actually seems to believe it, that somehow she can go from being this kind of pinup girl for her Tea Party friends to the White House. Now there are many, many ways Sarah Palin could help this country. Running for President will never be one of them. You listen to her long enough and actually feel yourself getting dimmer by the minute, like...

That is only a sidebar to what happened on Friday, with an Olympic bid from Chicago that President Obama shouldn't have gone near. This wasn't the President's fight. For a smart guy, he does some dumb things sometimes. We can talk about winners and losers all we want to now that it is over. The biggest winners of all are the people of Chicago, because their city doesn't have to plunge itself into debt to host the Olympics. This is the kind of winner New York was despite Michael Bloomberg's insane quest to get the 2012 Games, which eventually -...

The woman went to an airplane hangar in Belgrade, Mont., the other day, prepared to actually listen to President Obama talk about health care reform in America. She has watched, the way the rest of us have watched, as the debate about health care has turned into a sideshow and in some cases even more of a freak show than Glenn Beck's. Now she wanted to see for herself, along with more than 1,000 others, if it would happen this way in Montana. This is what she said about the event when it was over: "Yes, there were a few...

New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica has decided, in white liberal-guilt fashion, to defend a former Army general against the savage attacks by two partisan Republicans who dare criticize a black so-called Republican. Lupica asserts that since neither Rush Limbaugh nor Dick Cheney has served in the military (and military issues aren't even the topic here), they have no right to challenge Colin Powell on anything, let alone what it is to be a Republican.

As Barack Obama moves up on the completely arbitrary observance of his first 100 days in office, if you're part of the 69% of people who, according to a new Washington Post poll, approve of the way he's running the country, you're wrong! This is what you are told by commentators on what used to be state-run television, on right-wing radio and by what is laughingly called the Republican leadership in Congress: Obama doesn't know what's good for the country and neither do you. You are told constantly that the minority on the other side is way more important than...

At least Dick Cheney, as wrong a guy as we've ever had this close to the presidency, goes out in character, thinking that he and George W. Bush were right about everything. The problem is that Cheney's character now sounds as weird and unhinged as Jack Nicholson's in "A Few Good Men." There was Cheney on the Fox television network Sunday, always more a home to him than Yankee Stadium is to Derek Jeter, defending the last days of a dying administration and a dying Republican empire, defending Bush and Iraq and Donald Rumsfeld, defending Guantanamo and torture and surveillance...

As everybody knows by now, the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, is so indispensable at a time of financial crisis that he had to get enough hacks in the City Council - led by chief hack Christine Quinn - to overturn the city's law on term limits so he could run for a third term. It is Bloomberg's position that of all the people who want to be the mayor next year, only he, Bloomberg, can save New York from certain disaster.

Talk today about Sgt. Liam Madden, a kid from Vermont who joined the Marines after high school and ended up in Anbar Province, who says that you can be a good Marine and a good American and still want our war in Iraq to stop. Talk proudly about Madden of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, who took a petition, signed by more than 1,000 just like him, to Congress yesterday, who just by walking up the steps of the Cannon House Office Building did more than big Democrats such as Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are doing...