Category: Column

From the moment the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, burst upon the national consciousness, people all across the nation have tried to fit the storyline into their own preconceived notions. Broadly speaking, most black Americans see a story of racism and overly aggressive policing. “The Whole Damn System is Guilty,” read a sign carried by a […]

Bad actors around the globe keep getting confused about the calendar, and it falls to the Obama administration to set them straight. The Russians, Secretary of State John Kerry protested back in March, have forgotten what century we’re living in: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country […]

Violence following the recent fatal shooting of an unarmed robbery suspect in Ferguson, Missouri, has tragically followed a predictable script. On average, more than 6,000 African-Americans are killed by gun violence each year. That startling figure is nearly equal to all of the U.S. combat fatalities incurred in both Afghanistan and Iraq over some 13 […]

Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson is neither Mark Fuhrman nor Barney Fife. Based on what has been presented so far in the media, not even an O.J. Simpson juror would find Wilson guilty of murder. Many simply have chosen to believe that teenager Michael Brown was “executed” or “shot several times in the back” […]

The Los Angeles Ethics Commission voted unanimously last week to ask the City Council to consider “financial incentives, such as a lottery system,” to draw voters to the polls. You just know that if the city embraces this new low, then it will spread like a cancer across the land. The City of Angels has […]

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — U.S. airstrikes that have helped Iraqi and Kurdish forces recapture a strategic dam and halt, at least temporarily, the advance of ISIS terrorists on the Kurdish capital of Erbil are a welcome pushback against a relentless enemy that for a time seemed invincible. But it may be of no more strategic […]

America tells stories to itself in images, funny ones, sad ones, selfies we send out over our phones with snarky comments. But lately, the ones that get the most traction are the angry ones. They seize us like hands around our throats. And that’s what the images from Ferguson, Mo., feel like to me, hands […]

The most poisonous “-ism” now infecting Ferguson, Missouri, is not virulent racism. It’s viral narcissism. Over the past two weeks, the impoverished St. Louis County suburb has become a magnet for self-absorbed publicity seekers of all colors and agendas. Perhaps the most repulsive species on display in Ferguson is the Journalisto Vanitatis. This breed of […]

Libertarians warned for years that government is force, that government always grows and that America’s police have become too much like an occupying army. We get accused of being paranoid, but we look less paranoid after heavily armed police in Ferguson, Missouri, tear gassed peaceful protesters, arrested journalists and stopped some journalists from entering the […]

According to College Board, average tuition and fees for the 2013-14 school year totaled $30,094 at private colleges, $8,893 for in-state residents at public colleges and $22,203 for out-of-state residents. Many schools, such as Columbia University and George Washington University, charge yearly tuition and fees close to $50,000. Faced with the increasing costs of higher […]

Most Americans want government off their back. A whopping 59 percent say they’d like to send a “leave me alone” message to Washington, whereas only 32 percent say their message is “lend me a hand.” People are fed up with government’s bossing them around. This, according to an Aug. 14 Fox News poll of registered […]

On Monday, Rasmussen released a poll of Americans regarding the guilt or innocence of Officer Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot unarmed 18-year-old black man Michael Brown six times in Ferguson, Missouri. Those polls show that 57 percent of black adults think that Wilson should be found guilty of murder; 56 percent of whites, […]

A cyberattack on Community Health Systems Inc., a private hospital network, in April and June resulted in the theft of non-medical data of 4.5 million Americans, including names, addresses, birthdates, phone numbers and Social Security numbers, according to a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The attacks were attributed to Chinese hackers. There’s justification for […]

The events in Ferguson, Missouri, have launched a familiar spectacle: the race to be wrong first. Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African-American man, was shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. The Washington Post had more on the story about what one witness called an “execution-style slaying”: “Lawyer Freeman Bosley Jr. said Dorian Johnson, a friend […]

Random thoughts on the passing scene: I don’t know why we are spending our hard-earned money paying taxes to support a criminal justice system, when issues of guilt and innocence are being determined on television — and even punishment is being meted out by CNN’s showing the home and address of the policeman accused in […]

Pundits and news agencies have questioned the validity of reports that the Islamic State is beheading children in its conquest of Syria and Iraq. But there is one fact that can’t be contested: The Sunni-dominated al-Qaida splinter group is on a war rampage using some of the most heinous and barbaric means to exterminate anyone […]

Political junkies will remember how former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was being groomed to run for president in 2012 before he made his foolish statement that the next president should “call a truce on the so-called social issues.” Americans do not want a leader who is unable or unwilling to articulate and lead on important […]

I hope and pray that my Democratic friends are outraged by yet another criminalization of political differences with the bogus criminal indictment of Texas Gov. Rick Perry. What is this all about, you ask — in case you haven’t heard? Well, a grand jury indicted Perry on Friday on first-degree felony charges for allegedly abusing […]

When Al-Jazeera bought Current TV for $500 million in January 2013, former Vice President Al Gore, who co-founded Current, praised the deal. Both Al-Jazeera, a network owned by Qatar’s oil-rich royal family, and his far-left Current TV, Gore said, were founded “to give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to […]

The Ferguson, Missouri police department released convenience store surveillance tape that showed Michael Brown allegedly stealing some cigars minutes before he was shot by a police officer. Aware that the release of this footage might look like posthumous character assassination of the shooting victim, Captain Ronald Johnson of the Ferguson police explained that the tape […]

Just about everyone noticed Hillary Clinton’s scathing comments on President Obama’s foreign policy in her interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. But almost no one has noticed where Clinton hasn’t been seen. That’s on the campaign trail or at fundraisers for Democrats running for the Senate. Obama hasn’t been on the campaign trail much either, […]

It was in a college theater class that I learned about a genre called “Theater of the Absurd.” These were plays written mostly by European playwrights between the 1940s and 1960s, as well as a certain style that flowed from their work. What reminded me of this is now “playing” in Ferguson, Missouri, following the […]

Investopedia defines a “zero sum game” as “a situation in which one person’s gain is equivalent to another’s loss, so the net change in wealth or benefit is zero.” If a political leader wielding power sees the world as a zero sum game — gains to one must mean a loss to another — it […]

On Thursday, I started a column about the problems of the political right, but there are too many to cover in one column, so here we are again. Again, this qualifier: I recognize there are major differences between the various factions of the political right — social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, national security conservatives, Tea Partiers, […]

Get this: Low expectations are the key to happiness.: That was one of the findings of a happiness study recently conducted by researchers at University College London.: Researchers used a magnetic resonance imaging machine to monitor brain activity as they guided subjects through a series of activities, such as gambling, and asked them how happy they were […]

Obama has failed to help defeat islamists in Syria, leading to the growth of The Islamic State (The Radical Islamist Murderers Formerly Known as ISIS) and fails to define a foreign policy for the U.S. This according to Hillary Clinton, who spoke to well-known foreign affairs reporter Jeffrey Goldberg in the liberal publication The Atlantic.The […]