Year: 2013

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” That’s the full text of the First Amendment. But (with […]

A sagacious Bible scholar told me how important it was for the Israelites to look back and remember what God had done for them in the past because it gave them the strength to persevere through difficult times. Sometimes we need to look back, too, and remember what we have to be grateful for in […]

Despite a tough couple of weeks, President Obama’s job approval ratings are holding up fairly well. As I write this, 47 percent of voters nationwide offer their approval. That’s little changed from attitudes of late and essentially the same as the president enjoyed during most of his first term in office. But if you dig […]

While the world’s economies jockey one another for the lead in the currency devaluation derby, it’s worth considering the value of the prize they are seeking. They believe a weak currency opens the door to trade dominance, by allowing manufacturers to undercut foreign rivals, and to economic growth, by fighting deflation. On the other side […]

At first I thought the IRS scandal was leaked to distract from the Benghazi scandal. But that didn’t make sense because the IRS scandal is a more obvious abuse of power than the White House lying about the murder of four Americans in Libya. Before I had resolved which scandal was distracting from which, we […]

Government is now so huge, powerful and callous that citizens risk becoming proverbial serfs without the freedoms guaranteed by the Founders. Is that perennial fear an exaggeration? Survey the current news. We have just learned that the Internal Revenue Service before the 2012 election predicated its tax-exempt policies on politics. It inordinately denied tax exemption […]

How does President Barack Obama, a man of such keen intelligence, with such promise to “change” America, find himself in so much serious trouble? From the IRS targeting conservatives to the continued confusion over what happened at Benghazi to provoking a battle with The Associated Press by subpoenaing phone records that could involve as many […]

California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom likes to be out front on issues. As San Francisco mayor, he approved same-sex marriages in City Hall even though they weren’t legal. He pushed for a first-of-its-kind ban on city pharmacies selling cigarettes. Likewise, he signed the Special City’s first-in-the-nation ban on groceries giving away plastic bags. Newsom has […]

President Obama gave two commencement addresses in one to graduates of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., last weekend. It would be easy for this conservative to critique the political and social elements of his speech. Instead, I choose to focus on the inspirational part. The president struck the right note at the historically all-male college. […]

For all the complaining the left has done about those shadowy outside political groups subverting the democratic process, we recently learned that no one has the means to undercut freedom of expression quite like an enthusiastic government agency. Appropriately, nearly everyone in Washington is professing and/or pretending to be outraged that the Internal Revenue Service […]

Would you like to have a “skinny” health insurance policy? Probably not. But if you’re employed by a large company, you may get one, thanks to Obamacare. That’s the conclusion of Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Mathews. They report that insurance brokers are pitching and selling “low-benefit” policies across the country. […]

CHURCHVILLE, VA–Prince Charles recently made his most outspoken criticism yet of the world’s failure to reduce CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, British families have seen no global warming trend in 16 years, while their electric bills have doubled to support expensive and unreliable wind turbines. Is Prince Charles now too “green” to be king of Britain? Until […]

Something which has become apparent is that bias is unacceptable in America — unless it is conservatives being discriminated against, and then clearly its open season. In the midst of the attack of the IRS upon Tea Party non-profit organizations comes the: cover story in The New Yorker: about “Citizen Koch,” a documentary about money in politics […]