Year: 2013

Remember when President Obama used to warn Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to stop his mass killing and step down? Muammar Gadhafi’s dictatorship had then just collapsed under Western bombing. The murders of Americans in Benghazi and the subsequent postwar tribal mess in Libya were still in the future. In those heady days of 2011, the rage […]

Three young Cleveland girls missing and presumed dead turned up alive and in good health. A hero of the story is a neighbor, Charles Ramsey, a black man who helped free the girls from the home in which they were apparently imprisoned for some 10 years. Among other things, Ramsey said: “I knew something was […]

In 1998 when President Clinton signed the bipartisan Internet Tax Freedom Act, which prohibited state and local taxation of Internet access and Internet-only services, the purpose was to promote the commercial potential of the Internet, especially for start-ups and small businesses. Congress extended the bill three times, the latest until 2014. Now there’s the Marketplace […]

Markets work. But sometimes they take time. That’s the uncomfortable lesson that proprietors of America’s colleges and universities are learning. For many years, market forces didn’t seem to apply to them. There was a widespread societal consensus that a college education was a good economic investment. Politicians gave lip service to the idea that everyone […]

It’s on. As the White House grapples with a growing backlash over its Libya lies and lapses, President Obama’s apologists are gearing up for battle. Put on your hip-waders. Grab those tar buckets. Get ready for Operation Smear Benghazi Whistleblowers. Capitol Hill hearings this Wednesday on the deadly 9/11 consulate attack by jihadists will feature […]

Forty-three million Americans moved from one state to another between 1995 and 2010 — about one-seventh of Americans. It’s good that we can move! Moving provides one of the few limits on the megalomania of state bureaucrats. Americans have moved away from high-taxed, heavily regulated states to lower-taxed, less-regulated states. Most don’t think of it […]

If there is ever a contest for words that substitute for thought, “diversity” should be recognized as the undisputed world champion. You don’t need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodize about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as […]

One definition given for insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; it might also be a definition of stupidity. Let’s look at some cities where large percentages of black Americans live under poor conditions. Experiencing a violent crime rate of 2,137 per 100,000 of the population, Detroit is […]

Americans can stand pretty much anything but not being lied to by their president. When Bill Clinton lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, his personal favorability ratings dropped twenty points and never recovered for the duration of his presidency. As the Benghazi hearings unfold, it will become more and more clear that President Obama […]

At an investment conference last week, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson created a huge mess for himself. He glibly speculated that maybe because economist John Maynard Keynes was a childless, “effete” homosexual, he embraced a doctrine that favored immediate economic gratification. Keynes’ bon mot “in the long run, we are all dead” takes on new meaning […]

Last week, President Obama traveled to Ohio to speak at the Ohio State University commencement. There, he trotted out his new favorite line of attack against Second Amendment advocates: He said it is unpatriotic to believe in the possibility of government tyranny. Why? According to Obama, the Founding Fathers created our government. The American dream […]

PARIS — As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets with his Russian counterparts this week in Moscow to discuss Syria, much of the world is wondering what America’s endgame is. But what if we are already witnessing it? What if America’s ultimate exit strategy for the Syrian conflict is to have it grind on […]