Category: Column

It’s the very symbol of patriotism — Old Glory, as William Driver, a 19th-century American sea captain, nicknamed it. But even as we close in on Independence Day, more and more people across the country are calling the American flag a threat and inappropriate home garnishing. A week ago, the landlord of a Texas man […]

Do you remember what President Obama initially said about the Internal Revenue Service scandal? Do you recall his professed outrage? Obama wanted us to know how furious he was. He said, “The misconduct that (the inspector general’s report) uncovered is inexcusable.” “It’s inexcusable,” he repeated, “and Americans are right to be angry about it, and […]

Government just doesn’t work very well. That’s the persuasive thesis of three important books published this year. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s “The Fourth Revolution” takes a historical and international (and British) perspective. They argue that the welfare state, a creation of early 20th-century Brits, has become clunky in comparison to recent reforms in Scandinavia […]

Given how much evil there is in the world; given how many signs of moral, intellectual and economic decline there are here in America; and given the increasing irrelevance of America to world events, it is fair to ask why the American Left is preoccupied with the name Washington “Redskins.” The Washington Redskins have been […]

President Obama appears to have forgotten — or ignored — why we have elections. One reason is to stop, or slow down, an agenda the public doesn’t like. When polls began reflecting buyer’s remorse about Mr. Obama in 2010, voters elected a Republican majority in the House of Representatives and might well have done the […]

The major media’s account of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case was typical of the way the case has been misreported from the start. The New York Times headline read, “Supreme Court Rejects Contraceptives Mandate for Some Corporations.” Politico led with “SCOTUS sides with Hobby Lobby on birth control.” Others were similar. […]

by Anna Maria Hoffman and Gabriella Hoffman It’s undeniable that today’s dating culture is a mess. In fact, dating norms have been perverted. What best explains this? Thanks to the rise of third-wave feminism, which advocates the blurring of biological differences of both sexes, our culture has largely influenced young women to take this kind […]

Stars are aligning for a big Republican victory this November — solidifying and expanding the GOP’s majority in the House and perhaps gaining one in the Senate. This is a best-case scenario, and any majority in the Senate would be a slim one. But the importance of removing Harry Reid as majority leader cannot be […]

Incumbent Republican Senator Thad Cochran’s successful game plan, which drove his run-off victory over Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel for Mississippi’s Republican Senate nomination, was unconventional. But most incredible was the success of this game plan — to reach out to liberal black churches and get Democrat black voters to turn out and vote for […]

Ring, ring.: “Hello, this is Tom.”: “Hello, Tom, this is the federal government. We are going to audit your taxes and want to see all of your records for 2011.”:  “Sorry, federal government, but my computer crashed in 2011. All of my emails, electronic receipts and financial records were lost.”: “We’re not buying that, Tom. Anybody with half […]

When I drove by Eddie Gabor’s old house, I was transported back more than 20 years – back to the wonderful Fourth of July outings my family once enjoyed there.:  Eddie Gabor was my grandmother’s longtime boyfriend and companion. For the last 20 years of her life, Eddie treated her like gold.: My grandmother had a […]

“Who the heck cares about a bunch of guys playing footsie with a little ball?”: “Ah, you speak of the World Cup. The fact is billions care. It’s the most-watched sporting event in the world. And the Wall Street Journal reports that Americans are increasingly developing a taste for the sport, at least when their own […]

When I think of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, I think of the decadeslong building of the new eastern span, the shameless political grandstanding for a project that ran $5 billion over budget — and the construction headaches that live on. Brian Maroney, Caltrans’ chief engineer for the bridge, sees something entirely different. He sees […]

Who’s that gray-haired old guy in the Oval Office? What happened to the hopeful young man who promised all those great things in 2008? What’s happened to America under Barack Obama? Our economy is still mired in a recession he still blames on George W. Bush. We’ve got 100 million able-bodied countrymen and women who […]

When President Obama announced an unprecedented effort by the EPA to strong-arm states into adopting cap-and-trade, he made the announcement not by focusing on the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but rather on the so-called co-benefits that closing coal plants will have on particulate matter, which is already tightly regulated. These purported co-benefits are […]

On Tuesday night, former Rep. Bob Beauprez beat a slate of Republicans, including, most notably, former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo. Mitt Romney and other hated/beloved GOP establishment types had endorsed Beauprez, who was clearly the most electable candidate available to face John Hickenlooper. More importantly, the state GOP did not want Tancredo’s tedious one-note campaign […]

The current situation in Iraq is a modern tragedy. But in more practical terms it is a very stark illustration of the folly of central planning and the limits of state power in the face of entrenched traditions and proven history. Although the parallels aren’t perfect, the rapid dissolution of the puppet Iraqi state can […]

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling against the president’s right to get around Congress by making recess appointments. This is frustrating to President Barack Obama at the moment and will undoubtedly aggravate some future Republican president. The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin wrote that this ruling will “make the government function less […]

An estimated 50,000 Iranian exiles and supporters from Europe and North America are here to remind the world that no cooperation with the brutal, expansionist regime in Tehran can possibly advance Western interests. This annual gathering of MeK (People’s Mujahedin of Iran), an Iranian resistance group, was already scheduled. But it might have been called […]

Three cheers for right-wing obstructionism. Can we have more, please, and louder? This week’s unanimous Supreme Court ruling on President Obama’s illegal recess appointments is a double smackdown. First, it’s a rebuke against arrogant White House power-grabbers who thought they could act with absolute impunity and interminable immunity. Second, the ruling is a reproach of […]

Paging Elizabeth Warren: This is your moment. In 2007, Democrats were delirious with rage about the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton, the “inevitable” presidential front-runner, had voted for the war and refused to apologize for it. Other leading candidates, including Joe Biden, John Edwards and Chris Dodd, voted for it too. This left a huge opening […]

More and more people are finally coming to the realization that President Obama is presiding over America’s decline, though there are differences of opinion as to whether he’s deliberately or even directly causing it. You have to admit that it’s outright bizarre and alarming that people are even having this discussion, yet many of us […]

It’s time to pass the hat for Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state has tried to distance herself from her weeks-ago assertion that after husband Bill left the White House, the couple were “dead broke.” She told PBS that the line was “inartful,” but only after she told a British paper that she does […]

People who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid known as global warming-climate change are not just “deniers”; we are guilty of a “nihilistic refusal” to address the issue. So says a Washington Post editorial commenting favorably on Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that allows the Environmental Protection Agency, under certain limits, to proceed under the Clean Air […]

So who lost Iraq? The blame game mostly fingers incompetent Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Or is Barack Obama culpable for pulling out all American troops monitoring the success of the 2007-08 surge? Some still blame George W. Bush for going into Iraq in 2003 in the first place to remove Saddam Hussein. One can […]

1) In 2011, President Barack Obama pronounced Iraq “self-reliant and democratic,” and “a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process.” In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden called Iraq “one of the great achievements of this administration.” Obama ignored pleas by top generals who […]

Imagine how much better off America’s veterans would be if the federal government spent more time delivering actual care and less time compiling tyrannical lists. The death-inducing secret waiting lists for patients are just the tip of the iceberg. Did you know, for example, that the VA keeps a database on “disgruntled” and “disruptive” vets […]

It’s hard to find truer words than those of Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu. In his recent ruling that California’s teacher tenure laws violate the California state constitution, Judge Treu stated such laws cause “the potential and/or unreasonable exposure of grossly ineffective teachers to all California students in general and to […]

In an exclusive interview, Raffaele Raia — the noted Italian soccer aficionado from Oliveto Citra, near Salerno — said America is missing only one thing to fully grasp World Cup soccer. “Until Americans live and die with it, as we Italians do, you won’t truly understand,” Raia said. “That means the World Cup not as […]