Category: Column

Each passing day is more incriminating for President Obama’s Obamacare, as the news is like a relentless prosecutor amassing evidence against a serial killer. Yet the more evidence that rolls in condemning the president’s “signature achievement” — wouldn’t you love to have that albatross hung around your epitaph? — the more entrenched Obama becomes, making […]

Federal prosecutors have announced they are seeking the death penalty for Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, murdered three people and wounded more than 260. In addition, they shot a Boston police officer to death. In keeping with what the citizens of progressive Massachusetts consider to be progressive values, the […]

Do Americans want another Clinton in the White House? As former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flirts with running in 2016, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., also a potential White House candidate, has put an interesting spin on Bill Clinton’s White House years. Democrats shouldn’t accuse the GOP of waging a “war on women,” he recently […]

Most people accept the notion that politicians don’t always tell the truth. Some lies are harmless enough; others more consequential. Lyndon Johnson skirted the truth when he promised during the 1964 presidential campaign not to send any more American troops to fight a land war in Southeast Asia. He knew then that American intervention would […]

Is Barack Obama trying to shift alliances in the Middle East away from traditional allies and toward Iran? Robert Kaplan, author and geopolitical analyst for the Stratford consulting firm, thinks so. In a realclearworld.com article, Kaplan argues that the Obama administration sees the recently elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani “as a potential Deng Xiaoping, someone […]

The president’s annual state of the union address is another example of how dysfunctional our government in Washington has become. Article 2, section 3 of the US Constitution says that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union….” The president is the chief executive of […]

Fifty years ago today, Feb. 9, 1964, the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. If you were alive at the time, odds are you watched it. If, like me, you weren’t, odds are higher you’ve heard about it. It, not Pearl Harbor, not the assassination of President Kennedy, was the first “universal moment” of […]

“Income Inequality” is the current marketing slogan for rallying voters to the Democratic Party. It just isn’t “fair” that some people make millions of dollars a year “doing nothing” while millions of people work hard and struggle every day to put food on the table and afford HBO. So, what’s unfair? Is it unfair that […]

In 2010, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi touted the Affordable Care Act as a bill “not only about the health security of America; it’s about jobs. In its life, it will create 4 million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately.” A newly released Congressional Budget Office analysis reported that Obamacare is expected to shrink the workforce by […]

In the darkest recesses of our minds we have always known that monsters exist. It is only when we are involuntarily thrust into an unfolding human tragedy that shocks our senses and devastates our hearts that we truly acknowledge their presence. Our collective eyes have been opened by the discovery of monsters lurking at Penn […]

While listening to the State of the Union (SOTU) address by the coolest president ever last week, I felt an odd chill go up my leg (because of the polar vortex) when I mused over why people loyally vote for and trust those who instinctively make things worse every time they try to fix something. […]

Get this: Americans are getting sick of McMansions. So says The Wall Street Journal in a recent report. Americans are favoring more historic designs, such as the arts-and-crafts houses their grandparents once lived in, over gargantuan suburban houses. A new style of housing developer is emerging to serve this demand. These developers are designing and […]

Canadian-born, teen heart throb Justin Bieber’s criminal misbehavior may indirectly hurt Congress’ push for comprehensive immigration reform. All systems for the White House’s coveted blanket amnesty are “go.” President Obama just touted his version of reform during his: Tuesday: State of the Union address. House Majority leader John Boehner released what he calls his “immigration principles.” Given […]

America succeeds because Americans fail and forgive. That’s the intriguing message — or part of it — of Megan McArdle’s new book “The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.” McArdle, a Bloomberg blogger and columnist, stands out among economic writers, and not just because she’s the only woman among […]

President Obama laid out his personal standard for approving the presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline in his global warming speech at Georgetown University on June 25, 2013. If the project increases global warming, he’ll veto it. Based on that standard, he should now approve the project – immediately.   “Allowing the Keystone pipeline […]

Obamacare will reduce American workforce participation by the equivalent of 2 million full-time jobs in 2017, according to a new report by the Congressional Budget Office. Work hours would be reduced by the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs in 2024, a tripling of the previous estimates. If you believe this report — and I’m not […]

What are you doing for Valentine’s Day? Bleeding-heart progressives across the country are raising money for “an evening of music, song and sharing love for recently released People’s Lawyer Lynne Stewart.” Warm fuzzies for one of the world’s most notorious terrorist helpers? I can’t think of a more stomach-turning way to mark the holiday. Thanks […]

“Job-lock!” It’s only February, but it’s already my favorite word — or phrase, I guess — of the year. (Who knows, by December it may be shortened to “joblock.”) It’s not euphonious or edgy, but it does offer insight into the unreality of the Democrats’ predicament. The Congressional Budget Office issued a politically explosive report […]

The Obama administration’s response to the Congressional Budget Office’s prediction that Obamacare will cause 2.5 million fewer Americans to work in the coming years is an opportunity for Republicans to seize the moral high ground on the issue of work. Rather than dispute the CBO’s analysis — which would have been awkward, as the White […]

President Obama must believe he’s politically untouchable at this point, given his seeming indifference to the multitude of scandals, failures and other outrages for which he is directly responsible. I intended to write this column solely on the devastating Congressional Budget Office report putting the final nail in the Obamacare coffin — or at least […]

Gold is the simplest of financial assets – you either own it or you don’t. Yet, at the same time, gold is also among the most private of assets. Once an individual locks his or her safe, that gold effectively disappears from the market at large. Unlike bank deposits or stocks, there is no way […]

The biggest threat to President Barack Obama’s health care law doesn’t come from Republicans in Congress but from people like Stacie Brown. As reported in The New York Times, Brown owns a pottery shop in Georgia and is eligible for some federal health insurance subsidies. However, she has consciously decided not to purchase health care […]

New Jersey governor Chris Christie deserves to be defended. The gravamen of the media’s case against Christie on Bridgegate seems to be that he is a “bully” — which I painstakingly gleaned from the fact that the governor is called a “bully” 1 million times a night on MSNBC and in hundreds of blog postings […]

Despite recent sporadic rain, California is still in the worst extended drought in its brief recorded history. If more storms do not arrive, the old canard that California could withstand two droughts — but never three — will be tested for the first time in memory. There is little snow in the state’s towering Sierra […]

Dylan Farrow, now 28 years old, is the adopted daughter of Oscar-winning director Woody Allen. In “An Open Letter From Dylan Farrow,” published in The New York Times, Dylan accuses her father of inappropriately touching her “for as long as I could remember.” She said: “When I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me […]

On my wife’s side, I have a very large family in Fairbanks, Alaska. Culturally, Fairbanks is a lot further from New York City (where I grew up) or Washington, D.C. (where I live now), than the several thousand miles on the map might suggest. Alaska wins a lot of comparisons, and not just the obvious […]

In a world where Woody Allen can get a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes at the same time his adopted daughter accuses him of sexually abusing her when she was a child (Allen has repeatedly denied it), and where a film “The Wolf of Wall Street” sets a record for use of the […]

The apparent heroin overdose death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman already has become a hockey puck in the war over the war on drugs. During a House subcommittee hearing on federal marijuana policy Tuesday, critics of the war on drugs hammered a White House drug official for putting too much emphasis on marijuana when Washington […]