Year: 2013

I don’t know what I was thinking: In 1973, when I was 11, I flushed an apple core down the toilet, an action I would come to regret. As it went, my father had remodeled our basement into a family room. He installed the inexpensive pine paneling common to the times. He also built a […]

Barack Obama’s appointments of Susan Rice as national security adviser and Samantha Power as ambassador to the United Nations have naturally triggered speculation about changes in foreign policy. Rice and Power have been proponents of humanitarian military intervention, a course that Obama followed, gingerly, in Libya — “leading from behind,” as one of his aides […]

Few members of the United States Congress are willing to risk their careers to state the truth to the American people. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota is one, but unfortunately she has announced she is calling it quits after four terms in the House. In the ten years I’ve known him, Iowa’s Steve King has never […]

Washington, D.C., is in the grip of scandals, the economy is stumbling and a host of other challenges are weighing me down – which is why I prefer to dwell on more obscure subjects, such as a battle raging behind the scenes over the 2020 Olympics. According to the Toronto Star, the International Olympic Committee […]

Liberals believe in creating institutions to solve problems. Conservatives believe the individual is better at solving problems. A 3 year-old deaf boy in Lincoln, Nebraska is being bullied by public school officials to change his name because the hand sign for Hunter Spanjer looks like a weapon. The Grand Island school district has a policy […]

SAN JOSE, Calif. — “Nobody’s listening to your phone calls,” President Obama proclaimed at a Friday event that was supposed to be about California’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act. But that morning, the New York Times had reported that surveillance programs begun under President George W. Bush had been clearly “embraced and even expanded […]

Jay Leno told his studio audience the other night that President Obama should forget his plans to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and instead close the IRS. The applause was instantaneous and the laughs were loud and genuine. Most ordinary Americans would have whooped and hollered in favor of Leno’s idea long before […]