Year: 2014

All politics is local. So Republican politicians with national ambitions better pay attention to what grassroots parents are saying and doing about the federal education racket known as Common Core. In bellwether Indiana this week, anti-Common Core activists won a pair of pivotal electoral victories against GOP Gov. Mike Pence. Pence’s attempt to mollify critics […]

The notion that something can simultaneously be wrong and constitutional really seems to bother a lot of people. Consider the Supreme Court’s recent decision on public prayer. In Greece v. Galloway the court ruled, 5-4, that the little town of Greece, New York, could have predominantly Christian clergy deliver prayers at the beginning of city […]

Are we moving toward an America in which only one worldview is socially — and, God forbid, legally — acceptable? Are the proponents of “tolerance” truly as intolerant and tyrannical as they seem to be? It’s not just the political and cultural left’s increasingly totalitarian mindset in demanding that only its views be permitted that […]

“Two, four, six, eight. Stop the violence. Stop the rape,” so chanted a group of Ohio University students calling themselves “f—rapeculture” at a protest a couple of years ago. Rape culture activists have become a fixture on campuses throughout the country, and now, 55 colleges — including Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley — are under federal […]

Pop culture is a better indicator of the public mood than political talking points, so it’s interesting to see how two top-rated and long-running CBS television dramas have recently dealt with the issue of inequality. They suggest it’s a real issue, but not in the way politicians talk about it. “Bones” features a brilliant but […]

  Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a disaster of a declining population, corruption, authoritarianism, a warped economy and a high rate of alcoholism.   Why, then, would Putin want to ruin additional territory in Crimea and Ukraine the way that he has wrecked most of Russia?   Doesn’t Russia have enough land for its diminishing population? […]

In 1920, a bond salesman walked into Joseph Yenowsky’s Waterbury, Conn., clothing store. Yenowsky was a tough sell. During their lengthy conversation, Yenowsky told the salesman he thought Vladimir Lenin, the Russian Bolshevik leader, was “the brainiest man” in the world. The bond salesmen turned Yenowsky in to the police for sedition. Yenowsky got six […]

In 1996 California voters passed Proposition 209, which prohibited discrimination or preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity or sex in admissions to public college and universities. But the moment 209 passed, UCLA, according to a new book, set about figuring ways around it. “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at […]

“It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress,” Monica Lewinsky, now 40, writes in a Vanity Fair essay due for digital release today. All I can say is: You go, girl. The 1998 revelation of L’Affaire Lewinsky and its fallout should have made one thing clear to American women. Forget “You’ve come […]

  Ever since the Supreme Court ruled organized prayer and Bible study in public schools unconstitutional in the early 1960s, conservative Christians have been trying to re-enter the secular arena.   Take Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). The case, The New York Times wrote last year, “…challenged a 1968 Pennsylvania law that reimbursed religious schools for […]

On Monday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie dodged a political bullet when the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the National Rifle Association’s challenge to his state’s highly restrictive gun law. The justices’ decision not to hear the case Drake v. Jerejian leaves Second Amendment law in disarray. Federal appeals courts around the nation […]