Category: Column

I love the Thanksgiving holiday weekend as much as anyone. It’s great to have family visit and take some time to talk and visit and just be together. There’s the added bonus that comes from a warm glow of nostalgia lingering from long-ago Thanksgiving dinners at Nana and Grampa’s. Hopefully, Laura and I are creating […]

There is a humane, transparent, truthful — and constitutional — way to address illegal immigration. Unfortunately, President Obama’s unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal immigration law is none of those things.   Obama said he had to move now because of a dawdling Congress. He forgot to mention that there were Democratic […]

If Thomas Jefferson could be faulted for one thing in composing the Declaration of Independence, it might be his inclusion of the words “the pursuit of happiness” in the text. Happiness is a vapor that cannot be grasped; a temporary feeling based on transitory circumstances akin to the euphoria of a full-on sugar rush. Happiness […]

Of all the wild talk coming out of Ferguson and the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer — and all that angry and predictable noise emanating from race hustlers like Al Sharpton — there are two things I just can’t shake.   One involves Louis Head, Brown’s stepfather. Head […]

On November 4, voters fired the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, replacing it with a GOP majority that campaigned against Obamacare and big spending. But the Democrats who lost are still running the show. These lame ducks lack the moral authority to govern. They shouldn’t be allowed to do any more than the bare […]

This Thanksgiving, I give thanks for something our forebears gave us: property rights. People associate property rights with greed and selfishness, but they are keys to our prosperity. Things go wrong when resources are held in common. Before the Pilgrims were able to hold the first Thanksgiving, they nearly starved. Although they had inherited ideas […]

Jonathan Gruber, MIT economist and paid architect of Obamacare, has shocked and disgusted many Americans. In 2013, he explained to a University of Pennsylvania audience: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure (the Congressional Budget Office) did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the […]

Obama’s amnesty for illegal immigrants will produce a disaster of unparalleled magnitude when the Obamacare employer mandate kicks in. Those granted amnesty will not be eligible for Obamacare. Amnesty will merely keep them safe from deportation. It won’t make them legal. And Obamacare can only go to citizens and legal noncitizens living in the U.S. […]

In December 2001, I wrote my first column urging President George W. Bush to commute the sentence of Clarence Aaron, a federal drug offender who, at age 24 in 1993, was sentenced to life without parole for a first-time nonviolent drug conviction. Aaron has been part of my holiday season every year since Bush left […]

On Monday night, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch announced that Officer Darren Wilson, who is white, would not be indicted in the shooting death of black 18-year-old Michael Brown. McCulloch explained the falsehoods permeating the original media accounts of the shooting; he explained that Brown had, by all available physical and credible witness […]

We have two major parties in the nation now: the Republican Party and the Banana Republic Party, otherwise known as Democrats. The difference between them is over the rule of law. When President Obama appointed judges without Senate approval, made environmental law without Congress and rewrote his health law two dozen times, Republicans protested that […]

PARIS — Less than 10 days before Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced his resignation, he addressed a memo to senior defense leaders. “While we have been engaged in two large land mass wars over the last 13 years, potential adversaries have been modernizing their militaries, developing and proliferating disruptive capabilities across the spectrum of […]

Jonathan Gruber’s several videotaped remarks about the gross deceptions that got ObamaCare passed in Congress should tell us a lot about the Obama administration. And the way that the mainstream media hesitated for days to even mention what Professor Gruber said, while they obsessed over unsubstantiated charges against Bill Cosby, should tell us a lot […]

Last spring, you may remember, the French economist Thomas Piketty was all the rage in certain enlightened circles. His book “Capital” shot up to the No. 1 spot on bestseller lists, and many economists praised his statistics showing increased income and wealth inequality. Piketty argued that, absent a world war, returns to capital will exceed […]

During the 2012 campaign, President Obama often resorted to his favorite substitute for thinking: ridicule. Before enthusiastic audiences (who were assured his reelection would spell a thriving economy and a revived middle class), the president would mock Republicans by suggesting that “they have the same prescription they’ve had for the past 30 years. … Take […]

Whatever we do, let’s not allow ourselves to be distracted from the continuing nightmare of Obamacare by the other nightmare of President Obama’s latest abuse of power in furtherance of a terrible policy decision — this time on immigration. I would be remiss if I didn’t provide my periodic update on the Affordable Care Act, […]

When President Barack Obama chose former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel to serve as his third secretary of defense, most Republicans were not amused. Obama was able to claim that his pick was an example of his reaching across the aisle, when in fact, most Beltway Repubs viewed Hagel with distrust. Yes, Hagel is a Vietnam […]

As we await protests and riots scheduled for Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere if a grand jury in Missouri does not indict the white officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager, a little moral clarity is called for. For decades now, we have been told that there is a black-white divide in America. […]

For most of my career in international investing, I had always placed a great deal of faith in Switzerland’s financial markets. In recent years, however, as the Swiss government has sought to hitch its wagon to the flailing euro currency and kowtow increasingly to U.S.-based financial requirements, this faith has been shaken. But this week […]

It will not shock readers to hear that quite often legislation on Capitol Hill is not as advertised. When Congress wants to do something particularly objectionable, they tend give it a fine-sounding name. The PATRIOT Act is perhaps the best-known example. The legislation had been drafted well before 9/11 but was going nowhere. Then the […]

Addressing the nation last Thursday, President Obama sought to justify his misreading of the Constitution by unilaterally granting legal protection to 5 million illegal immigrants. In this, he reminded me of what Richard Nixon told David Frost in a 1977 interview. The exchange is worth recalling: “FROST: So what in a sense you’re saying is […]