Category: Column

One of the most outrageous but least reported ongoing scandals in Washington is that the House and Senate have both falsely certified themselves as small businesses in order to fund health insurance for themselves and their staff with taxpayer dollars, sidestepping provisions of Obamacare. Senator David Vitter (La.) recently tried to subpoena the documents in […]

If a person happens to point out that Baltimore’s criminally inept government has been run exclusively by Democrats since 1967 (with one Republican mayor since 1947) and features not a single city councilor who isn’t a liberal, he may be called a lazy apparatchik. Because not everything, you see, is reducible to mere party politics. […]

For the last 20 years, give or take another 50, one of the most cherished baubles of Beltway conventional wisdom has been that the Republican Party has moved too far to the right. We’ll come back to that in a moment. Another beloved trinket in the nest of notions that make up elite groupthink is […]

The sad scenes playing out in Baltimore are made sadder by the fact that more such incidents are likely over the coming years. That’s because the problems in Baltimore did not begin with the arrest and death of Freddie Gray. Tensions have been building for a very long time. Other cities from coast to coast […]

Another Thrilling Episode of Blacks Behaving Badly. My brother texted me in Florida reporting from Baltimore, our hometown. He said the thugs have gotten crazy and need to be dealt with. My nephew who is a video journalist said it was appalling witnessing local black ministers arguing over street corners for their group of protesters, […]

The present four-year California drought is not novel — even if President Barack Obama and California Gov. Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells — like those of 1929-34, 1976-77 and 1987-92 — more […]

In 2-1/2 hours of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked the right question: whether it is appropriate for the Court to discard a definition of marriage that “has been with us for millennia,” adding, “it’s very difficult for the court to say, ‘Oh, well, we know better.’ ” Kennedy, […]

Hours after residents of Baltimore, Maryland, set the city aflame, President Barack Obama took to the Rose Garden to explain in professorial style just why America, under his administration, keeps watching young black men loot buildings and attack police officers. “We have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with […]

Americans watched the fires burning in Baltimore, and the police retreating, the mayor there already having given the thugs all the space they needed to destroy. I figure that’s when you felt it. Whether you live in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago or any other large urban area, you felt it: This could happen here, […]

It’s never enough. American taxpayers have surrendered billions and billions and billions of dollars to the social-justice-spender-in-chief. But it’s never, ever enough. The latest paroxysm of urban violence, looting, and recriminations in Baltimore prompted President Obama on Tuesday to trot out his frayed Blame The Callous, Tight-Fisted Republicans card. After dispensing with an obligatory wrist-slap […]

I took a camera to Times Square this week and asked people, “What creates jobs?” Most had no answer. One said, “stimulus!” What? Government creates jobs? No! I suppose it’s natural that people think government creates jobs because politicians always say that. “We’ve now created more than 10 million,” said President Obama. But that just […]

A false choice dominates Republican thinking: Move to the center to get independents even though it offends your base and your principles, or you run to the right, lose swing voters and pray that the higher turnout will help you win. But that dichotomy applies only to social issues like abortion or gay marriage where […]

PARIS — Hillary Clinton isn’t just a Democratic candidate for president of the United States; she’s co-president of the breakaway Republic of Clintonstan. As Clinton said herself in the early ’90s when her husband was running for president: “If you vote for my husband, you get me. It’s a two-for-one, blue plate special.” A lot […]

Contrary to what has been reported in The New York Times and elsewhere, the Clinton Foundation never agreed to stop raising money from foreign governments while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Taking money from foreign governments should be off limits. It risks the appearance that American foreign policy is up for sale. During Clinton’s […]

I once had a boss who gave me some great advice, not just for managing people but for judging politicians: You forgive mistakes; you punish patterns. Everybody screws up. But if someone won’t learn from his mistakes and try to correct his behavior, then he either doesn’t think it was a mistake, he just doesn’t […]

We all make mistakes and some of us learn from them. What is even better is to learn from other people’s mistakes, where they pay for those mistakes while we learn free of charge. Many Americans who say that we should learn from other people, especially Europeans, mean that we should imitate what they did. […]

Whenever I have received a call from a listener to my radio show challenging Israel’s legitimacy, I have asked these people if they ever called a radio show to challenge any other country’s legitimacy. In particular, I ask, have they ever questioned the legitimacy of Pakistan? The answer, of course, is always “no.” In fact, […]

In January, Robert F. McDonnell, 71st governor of Virginia, was sentenced to two years in prison followed by two years of supervised release after his conviction on 11 counts of public corruption. He, and especially his wife, behaved badly. But it’s worth taking a closer look at what was considered criminal in McDonnell’s case, because, […]

When future historians analyze the decline of America they need look no further than the trivialities increasingly occupying our time and concerns instead of substantive matters seriously threatening our existence. The latest in a long list of examples is the two-hour ABC special last Friday devoted to former Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner and his coming […]

Like spring, bipartisanship is busting out all over. Even more so maybe: Washington in a time of alleged global warming is suffering through a chilly, wet springtime, but bipartisanship is sprouting up like gangbusters. Exhibit A is the Corker-Cardin legislation, passed unanimously in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, providing for limited congressional review of negotiations […]

You are going to hear a lot about money in politics in the coming year and a half. Not just the amounts of donations to various campaigns and Super PACs, but about the very concept of money in politics. It’s evil, they’ll say. It’s corrupting. But it’s not, not even a little. Hillary Clinton, laughably, […]

After I read the news report, I popped the wine cork and praised the science gods. Alcohol consumption helps us live longer. A new study, published in the journal “Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research” found that teetotalers are more likely to croak sooner than regular drinkers. If you don’t understand what a massive turn of […]

Because things are obviously not going well for the Democrat[ic] Party these days, I thought this former Democrat should do her part to help out and make a few suggestions. Read the First Amendment. It’s your friend.For now, America is still a free speech zone. Disagree with anyone you wish, but know that everyone else […]

It was sort of inevitable that on his first day of campaigning as an announced candidate for president earlier this month, Rand Paul would be asked whether he supported a ban on abortions in cases of rape or incest. Reporters have been asking Republican candidates that question ever since 2012, when the Missouri Republican Senate […]

Near the end of a recent New York Times article detailing the imaginary populist roots of Hillary Clinton — the original Elizabeth Warren, her people would have you believe — the reader crashes into this implausible scene: “In a meeting with economists this year, Mrs. Clinton intensely studied a chart that showed income inequality in […]