Category: Column

“Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you, Julia.” The Beatles That song was written about a combination of John Lennon’s mother and his budding relationship with Yoko Ono. This week, with the advent of a mythical “Julia,” the Obama campaign has given that line new meaning. So […]

“The Avengers” opened this weekend to the biggest film opening of all time — making over $200 million at the box office in a single weekend in cinemas in North America, and set to become one of only a handful of movies to gross $1 billion worldwide. Unknown to many is that these characters were […]

Washington Post editorial writer and liberal blogger Jonathan Capehart is puzzled. Why does the “non-issue” of Harvard Law professor and Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s Native American ancestry “require so much attention?” he asked last week. When Warren was teaching at Pennsylvania, Texas and Houston law schools, she identified herself as Indian — or, to […]

A Canadian couple of my acquaintance has just published a book provocatively titled The Locovore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet. A new review in Publisher’s Weekly calls it a “daring, bare-knuckled, frequently sarcastic defense of the status quo in Western industrial agribusiness. From the point of view of the well-off, well-fed North […]

President Barack Obama was entitled to a victory lap. In August 2007, then-Sen. Obama stuck out his neck when he said that there were terrorists holed up in the mountains of Pakistan and that he was willing to do something about it. “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and (Pakistani) President (Pervez) […]

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is an extremist — despite his claims on CNN this weekend that that the “extreme right wing” in the United States helped derailed a peace plan with the Palestinians. In 2008, Olmert sought a “full comprehensive peace between us and the Palestinians” — but thankfully the plan was never […]

According to the European Central Bank, the Italian banking industry now holds more government debt than the banks of any of the major European economies: nearly €324 billions worth of shaky bonds. The Spanish banking sector is also heavily overweight in government paper, at a new record high of €263 billion. This bond-buying spree was […]

Quick, hide under the covers. The nation’s storyteller, Barack Obama, unveiled a frightening new fable on the Internet intended to scare women away from supporting fiscal conservatives in November. But as is increasingly common with Obama’s social media propaganda initiatives, “The Life of Julia” immediately flopped. Why? Because 1) self-sufficient women voters aren’t as sheeple-ish […]

There was a silver lining for Jonah Goldberg in Piers Morgan’s ambush interview of him allegedly concerning his new book, “The Tyranny of Cliche’s.” Jonah couldn’t have written a better script to illustrate his book’s theme. Someone really should explain to Morgan that when a host invites a guest to discuss the guest’s book, the […]

The new frontier just keeps arriving. New York magazine reports NBC programming chief Robert Greenblatt has given the go-ahead for a new sitcom called “The New Normal.” NBC’s new normal is about two gay men who start a family using a surrogate. Greenblatt is apparently so enamored with the concept that he’s strongly considering having […]

President Barack Obama hates bullying. That’s why he took time out in the middle of a Congressional election cycle — in peak season, actually — to cut a video for a little-known group called the It Gets Better Project. The It Gets Better Project was designed to protect children, particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender […]

On no issue is the elite/American divide so great as on immigration. For decades, a majority of Americans have wanted to decrease immigration. Not just illegal immigration — all immigration. Nearly three times as many Americans support reducing immigration as want it to stay the same, according to Gallup polls. A grand total of 5 […]

We’ve had some unusual Cabinet secretaries in past administrations — Earl Butz, John Mitchell and James Watt come to mind — but never anything quite like the present bunch. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help pay for it, he wants the rich — the top 1 percent […]

It is something of a truism that whenever the federal government steps in, costs usually rise and efficiency declines. That is especially true when it comes to a college education, which President Obama promised during the 2008 campaign to make more affordable. “We’ve got to make sure every young person can afford to go to […]

“They do that because they were born that way.” If you say that about homosexuals, you are tolerant and realistic. If you say it about blacks, you are racist (unless you’re black yourself). If you say it about women, you may or may not be sexist, depending on who is manning (er, womanning) the feminist […]

It has been reported that the Obama campaign this year, as in 2008, has disabled or chosen not to use AVS in screening contributions made by credit card. That doesn’t sound very important. But it’s evidence of a modus operandi that strikes me as thuggish. AVS stands for Address Verification System. It’s the software that […]

My mentor, retired businessman Fred Smith, says: “You are the way you are because that’s the way you want to be. If you really wanted to be any different, you would be in the process of changing right now.” It probably will not surprise you when I say that I am in complete agreement with […]

Elizabeth Warren is the Harvard law professor running for Senate in Massachusetts as a Democratic populist-progressive champion. But don’t call her “Elizabeth Warren.” Call her “Pinocchio-hontas,” “Chief Full-of-Lies,” “Running Joke” or “Sacaja-whiner.” Warren has claimed questionable Native American minority status for years to reap career “diversity” benefits. Now, Cherokee leaders, campaign rival GOP Sen. Scott […]

The human brain is torn between simple intuition and the more complex hard work of figuring out the unintended consequences of any policy. Who doesn’t like thinking about trees and greenery and happy animals? Who doesn’t want to see steps taken to protect those things, all else being equal? But all else is not equal. […]

President Barack Obama and Wall Street occupiers, along with their allies in the mainstream media and on college campuses, have maintained an ongoing attack on high-income earners, people they call 1 percenters. Listening to their deceitful demagoguery, you would naturally think of them as 99 percenters, but you’d be dead-wrong. Last week, MSN Money posted […]

Plenty of Americans believe that the president’s rhetoric runs counter to facts, but actually, it’s the president’s own counterfactual arguments that matter most. Which is to say, nearly the entire case for President Barack Obama’s second term is based on not what has happened but what could, would or might under different circumstances. Things, as […]

A Russian source recently brought an obscure but disturbing article to my attention. Published last month by a little-known online journal called the Oriental Review, the piece, “Active Endeavour And Drug Trafficking,” proposed that not a single gram of heroin has been confiscated on the Mediterranean Sea since the inception of NATO’s Operation Active Endeavour, […]

The general-election campaign for president is not yet under way, but clearly, some in the media have entered the Utterly Ridiculous Zone. On CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” host Howard Kurtz hailed an “eye-opener: the candidate with the best coverage during the presidential primaries was Mitt Romney. And the worst? Barack Obama.” That’s not eye-opening. It’s a […]

Washington is full of nerds. I know. I speak nerd, not fluently mind you, at least not anymore. But I certainly know more than a few phrases memorized from a Berlitz nerd-to-English phrase book. I can talk Dungeons & Dragons (both D&D and AD&D). I know about the Golden Age of Comics (as in comic […]

This woman and I have been friends for a year. She’s a free spirit of sorts with zero boundaries. In the time I’ve known her, she’s been married and divorced and then engaged, and now that has ended. She always has another man on the side. (She did even when married and engaged.) She frequently […]

Labor unions, like the United Nations, are all too often judged by what they are envisioned as being — not by what they actually are or what they actually do. Many people, who do not look beyond the vision or the rhetoric to the reality, still think of labor unions as protectors of working people […]