Year: 2014

In the film “Obvious Child,” Jenny Slate plays Donna Stern, a stand-up comedian who specializes in making jokes about her private parts, with the occasional foray into fart humor. She is about to go onstage. Her friend offers her some encouragement: “You are going to kill it out there!” Donna replies: “I actually have an […]

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, once infamously stated. He never bothered to spell out the unspoken corollary to that appalling statement: And if there is no serious crisis available, manufacture one. The American left has followed that pattern for generations. The […]

PARIS — Billionaire Hungarian-American oligarch George Soros is an extremely concerned humanitarian who can be counted on to put his considerable bank balance where his concerns are. Lately, those concerns have included Ukraine and other former Soviet satellite states; Syria; immigration rights in America; the U.S. banking system; and the Great Lakes region of Africa, […]

On page 563 of his latest biography, “John Quincy Adams: American Visionary,” author Fred Kaplan (biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Gore Vidal among others) cites this insight of the sixth president: “Christianity had, all in all, he believed, been a civilizing force, ‘checking and controlling the anti-social passions of man.’” That […]

Could the flood of underage, would-be immigrants over the southern border be “Obama’s Katrina” as Susan Page of USA Today warned? No, it’s worse. Even the most virulent George W. Bush denigrator would not suggest that the former president actually created the hurricane. This president, by contrast, bears a heavy responsibility for creating the deluge […]

Wars, plane crashes, mass murder — it’s easy to report news that happens suddenly. Reporters do a good job covering that. But we do a bad job telling you about what’s really changing in the world, because we miss the stories that happen slowly. These are usually the more important stories. Recently, President Barack Obama […]

Back in the heyday of the British Empire, a man from one of the colonies addressed a London audience. “Please do not do any more good in my country,” he said. “We have suffered too much already from all the good that you have done.” That is essentially the message of an outstanding new book […]

Most everyone knows about America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence. But did you know that on July 6 a year earlier, Congress initiated a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms? It’s true. According to History, on July 6, 1775, just a day after our Founding Fathers issued their Olive Branch Petition to […]

Do we conservatives really mean it when we say that we need to promote our ideas in the popular culture through books, movies and other media? If so, we need to support people like Dinesh D’Souza and his latest movie and book, “America: Imagine the World Without Her.” I saw the movie, and I loved […]