Year: 2014

Some pundits are saying that President Obama has been floundering in his response to the ISIS crisis because public opinion polls show most Americans don’t want another war. In all my 84 years, I cannot recall a time when most Americans wanted war. That is something we should be proud of. But wars are not […]

Last week, Hillary Clinton returned to Iowa for the first time since her 2008 presidential campaign loss, saying, “I’m back.” She continued: “It’s true. I’ve been thinking about it,” referring to another run in 2016. But the truth is that even many of her esteemed liberal cronies think it’s a bad idea. I know that […]

Well, the wild and crazy 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is at it again, this time ruling that in a conflict between bullies and the First Amendment, bullies win. The court let stand a previous ruling by a three-judge panel of the court that school officials of Live Oak High School can prohibit American […]

A recent article on the Wall Street Journal’s blog draws attention to the high cost of producing a single penny – 1.6 cents each, to be exact. They blame this unsustainable price on the high cost of zinc, which makes up 97.5% of every American penny. The online publication Quartz ran with this story, giving it […]

President Obama declared in his recent address to the nation that “ISIL is not Islamic.” But how does he know? On what basis did the president of the United States declare the a group of Muslims that calls itself “Islamic State” “not Islamic”? Has he studied Islam and Islamic history and concluded that ISIL, Boko […]

The attention span of most Americans is seemingly shorter than the time it takes to read this sentence. The vast information age has overwhelmed our senses. Patience and knowledge is a virtue but quickly becoming a relic of the past; too often simple answers are accepted as fact. In our modern-day haste, the thought of […]

In the fairy tale “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” Ali Baba, a poor woodcutter, is in the forest when he hears a group of robbers approaching on horseback. Afraid, he climbs a tree and hears one of the men say, “open sesame.” A door opens in a rock and the men go in, the […]

What should we do about immigration policy? It’s a question many are asking, and some useful perspective comes from an article in Foreign Affairs by British-born, California-based historian Gregory Clark, unhelpfully titled, “The American Dream Is an Illusion. The dream to which Clark refers is the idea, promoted by Emma Lazarus’s poem at the Statue […]

Last week, the House and Senate voted to rubber stamp President Obama’s war plans for the Middle East. Both bodies, on a bipartisan basis, authorized the US to begin openly training and arming the rebels who have been fighting for three years to overthrow the Assad government in Syria. Although the Syrian government has also […]