Category: Column

The bodies of 298 passengers and crew of Malaysia Air Flight 17, 80 of them children, lie unburied in a Ukrainian field while Vladimir Putin’s men fire their weapons into the air to keep international investigators from approaching the site. Yes, “Putin’s men.” Calling them “Russian separatists” unnecessarily dignifies them. They are supplied, armed and […]

“Why do you think President Obama’s job rating is falling, even though the economy is recovering?” the interviewer asked. It’s a fair question, even though the economy declined 2.9 percent in the first quarter, even though most jobs created in June were part-time, and even though labor force participation remains low. The fact is that […]

Just days after the tragic crash of a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, Western politicians and media joined together to gain the maximum propaganda value from the disaster. It had to be Russia; it had to be Putin, they said. President Obama held a press conference to claim – even before an investigation – […]

The anti-Semitic “tradition” of blaming Jews for the world’s problems mostly took a temporary back seat in light of the indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel by the terrorist group Hamas. Major newspaper editorials condemned Hamas, but their condemnation was hedged by calls for “restraint” on “both sides” and “proportionality” in Israel’s response to the attacks. […]

It is no accident that rhetoric about race has been ramping up at a time when racial politics can be the key determinant for control of the Senate this year. At least three states — North Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas — are red states with vulnerable Democrat Senators up for re-election that have large black […]

Growing up, I was — as I assume you were — inundated with lists of “the benefits of citizenship.” The list was long and capped, naturally, by the fact the United States was the best, strongest, freest nation on the planet. Being an American was a source of pride. But is it still? Do the […]

Boy, our political debate is getting crasser by the moment.: And so it is that the National Organization for Women has put the Little Sisters of the Poor, an international congregation of Roman Catholic nuns who have devoted their lives to caring for the elderly poor, on its “Dirty 100” list.:  NOW is upset that the […]

President Obama came to my tiny home state of Delaware on Thursday with a “new” initiative to repair deteriorating infrastructure around the country (and to repair his declining polling numbers).His announcement was a channeling of Captain Obvious: there are thousands of U.S. bridges and roads in disrepair and he’s going to fix them. As expected, […]

A — all bow — federal judge has ruled that California’s death penalty is unconstitutional because the state’s “dysfunctional administration” has meted out the punishment to more than 900 murderers but imposed it on “only 13” since 1978. That’s too arbitrary, wrote U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney of Santa Ana. Besides, “the slight possibility […]

Despite the media play Chicago gets, it isn’t the official “Murder Capital of the U.S.A.”That unhappy distinction – based on the murder rate per 100,000 people, not on the number of actual dead people on the streets – belongs to poor, under-populated Flint, Mich. Chicago gets the bad rap – and the attention of the […]

Liberals just aren’t very liberal these days. The word “liberal” comes from the Latin word meaning freedom, and in the 19th century, liberals in this country and abroad stood for free speech, free exercise of religion, free markets, free trade — for minimal state interference in people’s lives. In the 20th-century, New Dealers revised this […]

It was so brazen. Right there, over email, Lois Lerner warned her colleagues “Congress has asked for emails… so we need to be cautious about what we say in emails.” Then she asked whether the IRS’s instant messaging application was being archived, and was told that – contrary to law – archiving had been disabled. […]

So Barack Obama is again using one of the most contemptible phrases in American politics — “economic patriotism.” There are many credible reasons to despise this rhetorical construct. Patriotism, after all, is the attachment to one’s homeland, a nationalistic devotion to one’s country and the values that make it great. If a person not only […]

Between July 3rd and July 7th, 82 people were wounded and 16 killed by gunfire.If you think I’m talking about violence in Iraq, you’re wrong. : I’m talking about happenings in “Chiraq,” a new nickname for Chicago – my hometown. : This violence is an unfortunate way of life for many Chicagoans. Victims ranged from as young […]

Barack and Michelle Obama are quite the diversionary tag-team. He blames everyone else for his problems. She takes credit for progress on his behalf that he doesn’t deserve and distracts public attention from his avalanche of failures with endless feel-good photo-ops. While the shirker in chief golfed and grubbed for money at closed-door celebrity fundraisers […]

I don’t think Congress should begin impeachment proceedings against President Obama right now, but I also don’t think that considering the idea is “crazy talk.” The man has, in my view and that of many others, committed multitudinous impeachable offenses, and we need to strenuously object and bring it to the public’s attention every chance […]

The economic data that drives so much political debate is becoming increasingly less reliable in the digital era. That’s because new technology makes it hard to compare the 21st-century economy to anything that came before it. How, for example, do you compare the living standards of a middle-income American in the 1970s with a middle-income […]

You needn’t be clairvoyant to deduce what the Democratic Party wants to run on in 2016. It really doesn’t matter whether their nominee is Hillary Clinton or someone else. Democrats won’t be campaigning on the thriving economy under President Barack Obama, global stability under American leadership, the successful routing of al-Qaida or Obamacare. No, the […]

The summer of 2014 will go down in history as the season when America fell apart. Let’s take a tour of the disasters. Germany in 2008 enthusiastically hosted candidate Barack Obama for his so-called Victory Column speech. Now, Germans suddenly sound as if they are near-enemies of the U.S. Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly was furious […]

Attorney General Eric Holder, in a recent interview, reiterates the theme heard from the very beginning of President Barack Obama’s administration: opposition to Obama’s agenda equals racism. “There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me (and) directed at the president.” What is Holder’s proof — to the extent that […]

The star of a CNN film, “Documented,” journalist Jose Antonio Vargas went to Texas to bring attention to the 57,000 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the border illegally since October. On Tuesday, authorities detained Vargas at McAllen/Miller International Airport because his Philippine passport lacks a U.S. visa. Within hours, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released him. […]

It may be too soon to label it a trend and there is insufficient data to confirm it, but President Obama and his party may be losing their iron grip on their most loyal and enthusiastic voting bloc: African-Americans. Last Friday in Chicago, a group of black residents of the city’s South Side, staged a […]

They’ve blown it again, big time. They just can’t help themselves. During the Bush years, the open-borders movement won over bleeding hearts in the White House but alienated the American public with radical displays of La Raza (“The Race”) militancy, desecrated American flags and Che Guevara shirt-wearing, fist-thrusting marches across the country. Left-wing public relations […]

“Tea party members don’t think there’s a federal role in transportation!” complained Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, last week, near the site of a $5.8 million highway project. If only most tea party members were that radical. While Brown and other big-government folks worry that Republicans will cut spending, Republicans debate adding another $10.5 billion to […]

The U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 2012 losses because of personal identity theft totaled $24.7 billion (http://tinyurl.com/mdncmmw). The money losses from identity theft pale in comparison with the costs of paperwork, time and inconvenience imposed on the larger society in an effort to protect ourselves. According to LifeLock, while the laws […]

The contrast between the two women couldn’t be sharper. Hillary is the ultimate political insider, taking $20 million from Wall Street, including $5 million from Goldman Sachs. In two recent speeches to Goldman — at $200,000 a pop — Hillary spoke about why big banks shouldn’t be blamed for the financial crisis. “We’re all in […]