Category: Column

I understand the arguments for the legalization of marijuana: It can generate tax revenue. It can reduce illegal supply and demand. It can strip power from cartels and lessen crime across and at our borders. And it isn’t so dangerous as other illegal drugs or alcohol. President Barack Obama even claimed one of those arguments […]

The Irish Stock Exchange Quotient (ISEQ), gained 33.6% in 2013. Close behind were the 28% jump in the Athens General Share Index, and the 21% rally in Spain’s IBEX 35 Index (IBEX). Factoring in the 4% rise of the euro over the calendar year and these returns look even better from American eyes. Europe was […]

President Obama’s policies continue to produce results that are the opposite of what he promises, yet he brazenly cites the abysmal state of: his: economy to announce — indignantly — that he will double down on his failures. Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven — notorious leftist professors who devised a sinister plot to overburden the American […]

Just about everyone agrees that 2013 was not a good year for President Obama. His job approval plummeted as the Obamacare rollout cratered. His oft-promised pivot to Asia was as much of a dud as his oft-promised pivot to the economy. But it must also be said that the Republican politicians who have been touted […]

In both personal and public life, you can know a great deal about a person or a group if you know what most bothers them — and what doesn’t bother them. A news item this past week made this point with glaring clarity. It reported a meeting that the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human […]

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry seeks forgiveness. On a recent program, she participated in discussion poking fun at Mitt Romney’s Christmas card, which featured him holding his new, adopted African-American black grandchild. : The race of the newest Romney was the key focus of the jokes. Days later, and after a firestorm of criticism, Harris-Perry tweeted an […]

Anyone in the news business will tell you that a side benefit is the diverse number of people one gets to meet. Jay Leno, who leaves “The Tonight Show” on: Feb 6: after a 22-year run (retire is not the right word in his case), is one such person. The circumstances surrounding our first meeting involved a […]

Senior advisor to President Obama, Valerie Jarrett, wrote for the White House blog and the Huffington Post that, “A Woman’s Health Care Decisions Should Be in Her Own Hands, Not Her Boss’s.” I couldn’t agree more. Odd then that the administration is trying to insert bosses, many of them against their deeply held religious beliefs, […]

We are a nation of laws, or at least we used to be. We have become a nation of subjects living at the mercy of the whims of progressive politicians willing to use government agencies, their positions and a complicit media to trample voter’s rights, silence opposition and impose an agenda voters rejected and reject […]

The Huffington Post is onto something. In a recent report, the website listed seven things that the iPhone, first released to the public only seven years ago, has made obsolete – though there are surely plenty more than seven. Up first, says the website: roadmaps. Thanks to Google Maps, which anyone can use on his […]

Why do people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright travel across America to exhort audiences to denigrate Tea Party Americans as racist? Because failing to personally discredit your fellow man with false witness means people might actually listen to his reasoned policies and thus disagree with yours. Recently in Wilmington, Delaware, the Reverend called the Tea Party […]

Being a Californian confers certain benefits. Foremost among them is the knowledge that even if you don’t surf, even if you don’t spend a lot of time at the beach, even if you never have been to a beach bonfire party, if you ever should feel the urge to shout “Surf’s up!” or toast marshmallows […]

On: February 2: of this year, thousands will gather at Met Life Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., to watch the Seattle Seahawks battle the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII. As the athletes take the field and the fans cheer, they will be oblivious to the tragedy unfolding around them in dark hotel rooms across East Rutherford. […]

Now that the truth has finally surfaced by way of the January 15, 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report, we see that al Qaeda affiliated networks were indeed responsible for the September 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The finding stands in stark contrast to the yarns fed to us by President Obama, former Secretary of […]

Despite six months of pushing for a blanket amnesty that began in June when the Senate bill passed its uncontrolled immigration bill, advocates can’t sell it to the public. Even after a nonstop effort headed by the immigration lobby that included demonstrations, sit-ins, marches, passionately written editorials and comic political theater that resulted in 8 […]

Last year, officials of a local Teamster union alleged in a state court lawsuit that Michigan’s new right-to-work law violates the state constitution’s prohibition on slavery. Teamsters Local 214 union lawyers claimed that nonmember workers who want to file a grievance with the company must pay a $150 fee because, even though they have chosen […]

The big health insurance companies played a high-stakes double game throughout the 2009 health care fight, funding attacks on the so-called public option – an explicitly government-run competitor – while otherwise supporting the central elements of the bill that ultimately passed: vast taxpayer-funded subsidies flowing to their potential customers and a mandate requiring every American […]

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, left-wing activist Steve Rosenthal sounds a lot like other wishful thinkers arriving at a comfortable partisan conclusion. America, he writes, is only a few years from a full-blown progressive electorate. “A close examination of U.S. attitudes in the past decade-plus,” Rosenthal contends, “reveals that the United States is steadily […]

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a politically entrenched synod of special interests. These fat cats do not represent the best interests of American entrepreneurs, American workers, American parents and students, or Americans of any race, class or age who believe in low taxes and limited government. The chamber’s business is the big business of […]

The Constitution is powerless against Satan. Earlier this month, the state of Oklahoma received a proposal from New York-based Satanists to build near the state Capitol a 7-foot-high statue of Baphomet, a goat-headed pagan idol. The Satanists’ letter boasted that, “The statue will also have a functional purpose as a chair where people of all […]

At a time when more and more Americans are coming to an awareness of how evil abortion is, President Barack Obama, the most fiercely pro-abortionist president in our history, is digging his heels in further. This week, he made his annual statement glorifying this hideous practice on the anniversary of the infernal 1973 Supreme Court […]

The conventional wisdom in Washington was succinctly expressed in a recent Washington Post article, “The GOP’s Uphill Path to 270 in 2016.” The Electoral College, claims Dan Balz, now gives the Democrats a decided advantage that will be hard for the GOP to overcome. He correctly noted that many formerly Republican-leaning states have shifted to […]

“I came from a place of struggle,” insisted Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis after The Dallas Morning News revealed that key details of the life story she had successfully shopped to the mainstream media were false. She wasn’t a 19-year-old mom when she was first divorced, but 21. She lived with her second husband in […]

One of the things that attracted me to the political left, as a young man, was a belief that leftists were for “the people.” Fortunately, I was also very interested in the history of ideas — and years of research in that field repeatedly brought out the inescapable fact that many leading thinkers on the […]

It is 41 years since the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision, effectively legalizing abortion everywhere in the United States. Ever since, it has been a source of controversy — and confusion. Some of that confusion is owed to the fact that the opinion was written by Justice Harry Blackmun, the only […]

Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator running for governor, became a liberal superhero last June when she filibustered a bill to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks. (This was the good filibuster, not that awful filibuster three months later by Ted Cruz — that was just grandstanding.) Apart from her enthusiasm for abortion (and you have […]

Since this year will mark the 50th anniversary of the “war on poverty,” we can expect many comments and commemorations of this landmark legislation in the development of the American welfare state. The actual signing of the “war on poverty” legislation took place in August 1964, so the 50th anniversary is some months away. But […]

For all hysteria over former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ new insider memoir of his tenure during the Bush and Obama administrations, the disclosures are more breaches of trust than earth-shattering revelations. Much of “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War” is the ordinary stuff of public service. What little gossip in the book that may […]