Category: Column

Hillary Clinton has laid out her game plan for winning back the White House for herself and her husband next year. Let’s hope Republicans were paying attention. She apparently decided it won’t be enough to rely on the 66 million people who voted twice for Barack Obama, many of whom are disillusioned by the failure […]

Seventy-one years ago, the British, Canadians and Americans landed on the Normandy beaches to open a second ground front against Nazi Germany. Operation Overlord — the Allied invasion of Western Europe — proved the largest amphibious operation in military history, dwarfing even Xerxes’ Persian invasion of Greece in 480 B.C. Brilliant planning, overwhelming naval support, […]

Barack Obama, for his own education, never set foot in a public school. When he was 10 years of age, his mother shipped him back from Indonesia to his grandparents in Hawaii so that young Barack could get a first-class American education. He entered Punahou, the expensive and most prestigious prep school in the islands. […]

My high school colors were green and white. At graduation the boys wore green robes and the girls wore white. No one considered the girls inferior because of the color of their robes. Today, we live in different times. My alma mater, Walter Johnson High School in Montgomery County, Md., is one of several schools […]

What do the Confederate flag, the words “Respect Choice” and the message “Choose Life” have in common? DMVs in many states are arbitrarily banning them from license plates. Texas officials nixed after an African-American pastor labeled it a symbol of oppression at a public hearing, even while nine other states allow it. New York officials […]

If I got a dollar each time the federal or state government promised that new regulations of the health care market would reduce the cost of health care — and it subsequently failed to deliver on that promise — I would be a rich woman. The Affordable Care Act is the most recent example of […]

Did Denny Hastert really fall from grace with that indictment that brought him to federal court on Tuesday? As I waited for him to perform his perp-walk, that rite of shaming that white-collar criminals endure, and later when waiting for his barely audible whispers before the judge, I considered this so-called fall from grace. That’s […]

It’s increasingly difficult to tell the difference between Teach for America — whose leaders are at the forefront of inflammatory anti-police protests in Baltimore, Ferguson, and now McKinney, Texas — and left-wing activist groups such as Organizing for Action (President Obama’s partisan community organizing army). Guess what, taxpayers? You’re paying for it! Wendy Kopp founded […]

It is well known that I don’t think much of the ability of government officials to correctly forecast much of anything. Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have made famously clueless predictions with respect to stock and housing bubbles, and rank and file Fed economists have consistently overestimated the strength of the economy ever since their forecasts […]

Millions go to SeaWorld to learn more about sea life and get closer to killer whales. But fewer go now because the documentary “Blackfish” exposed what one reporter called “the darker side” of SeaWorld. The movie, which CNN bought and ran over and over, tells how greedy businessmen take baby whales from their mothers and […]

Last summer’s Ferguson, Missouri, disturbances revealed that while blacks were 67 percent of its population, only three members of its 53-officer police force were black. Some might conclude that such a statistic is evidence of hiring discrimination. That’s a possibility, but we might ask what percentage of blacks met hiring qualifications on the civil service […]

This week, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed a significant drop in the number of Americans identifying as conservative, and a significant rise in the number of Americans identifying as liberal. As the Journal described, “For the first time since 2010, conservatives are no longer a plurality: 38 percent identify as moderates, compared with […]

After the pro-Western government of China was forced to flee to the island of Taiwan in 1949, when the Communists took over mainland China, bitter recriminations in Washington led to the question: “Who lost China?” China was, of course, never ours to lose, though it might be legitimate to ask if a different American policy […]

Don’t you find it a bit odd that two glaringly contradictory narratives surround Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency — inevitability and “she’s in trouble”? I’ve never been convinced, as I’ve written before, of Hillary’s inevitability. In fact, I rarely believe the media or members of the establishment of either party when they anoint any […]

“Despite everything,” the often interesting analyst Jamelle Bouie writes in Slate — “everything” includes “the email controversy, foreign donors and the Clinton Foundation” — “Hillary is in good shape.” Good enough to leave her party “still positioned for victory.” Bouie is writing in response to the ABC News/Washington Post and CNN/ORC polls released last week, […]

A fundamental difference between the left and right concerns how each assesses public policies. The right asks, “Does it do good?” The left asks a different question. One example is the minimum wage. In 1987, The New York Times editorialized against any minimum wage. The title of the editorial said it all — “The Right […]

An advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration has recommended approval of a drug created to raise a woman’s libido. It’s called flibanserin, but it is popularly known as “female Viagra.”   The 18-6 committee vote does not guarantee the FDA will give final approval to the drug (it has been rejected twice before), […]

If you look at the track record of the interventionists, you might think they would pause before taking on more projects. Each of their past projects has ended in disaster, yet still they press on. Last week the website Zero Hedge posted a report about hacked emails between billionaire George Soros and Ukrainian President Poroshenko. […]

Mainstream media has expended much ink over the size and varying quality of the Republican presidential field, and in some respects this is correct. There are a lot of Republicans running, and some are less ready for primetime than others. That happens every election cycle. Less questioned and less covered is the weakness of the […]

The revenge of the status quo is brutish. “If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it,” humorist Art Buchwald once observed. Those words never seemed truer than at the “Uber Turns Five” celebration at its San Francisco digs Wednesday. In the disruption economy, five years […]

“ObamaCare is being challenged at the Supreme Court again? What now?” “Ah, yes, you speak of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which the then-Democrat-controlled Congress passed on a party-line vote back in 2009. It’s been the subject of lots of confusion and lawsuits ever since.” “I thought the Supreme Court ruled on ObamaCare […]

Get this: Conservatives give better graduation speeches than their more liberal-minded counterparts. After reviewing two commencement-speech anthologies – “The World is Waiting For You,” which features 18 speeches by liberals, and “Remembering Who We Are,” which showcases 30 conservative speeches – Washington Post blogger and book critic Carlos Lozada gives five reasons why conservatives do […]

At a moment when many on the left are desperately trying to conjure up enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton’s bid to become the first woman president, others on the left want to turn the word “woman” into a term of exclusion and oppression. This is just one of the more amusing ironies on display as what […]

Before defending Abercrombie & Fitch, please know I regard the company as a bottom-feeding, scum-sucking retailer of sex to impressionable prepubescent girls. They have as much a right to exist as people have the right to ban their children from entering their gates of sordid gluttony. That said, this lawsuit against Abercrombie & Fitch is […]

Parts of the U.S. Patriot Act expired on Sunday. You may not have noticed, but the terrorists did. At least that’s what CIA Director John Brennan said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “I think terrorist elements have watched very carefully what has happened here in the United States,” Brennan warned. Presumably Brennan means that while […]

In Progressive World, there are at least four stages of legally becoming an adult. On Tuesday, the California Senate voted to raise the age when young people can buy cigarettes, from 18 to 21. The Hawaii Legislature has passed similar legislation. A companion California bill would mandate that e-cigarettes fall under the same restrictions as […]

In the past few weeks we’ve learned that Josh Dugger was a child molester, former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was a child molester and the Methodist Church in the UK has apologized for 2,000 cases of abuse dating back to 1950. Child molesters can be found in the highest reaches of politics. Molesters […]

Last week, the Nebraska legislature voted to do away with the death penalty. I think that was a mistake. But that’s a conversation for another day. Instead, I want to talk about a lesson we might take from the decision. Charles Murray (my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute) has written a book, “By The […]