Category: Column

You have to hand it to President Obama and his cabal of re-election strategists; they are masters of illusion. Their newly released Web video and its accompanying campaign slogan, “Forward,” are science fiction-level fantastical. We’re all familiar with Obama’s penchant for deflecting responsibility and blaming his policy failures on George W. Bush, but after more […]

Election Day 2012 will not be a presidential election. It will be a plebiscite. Americans will not only be voting for a president (and a House and a third of the Senate). They will be participating in a plebiscite on the definition of America. If Americans re-elect the Democrat, Barack Obama, they will have announced […]

Mitt Romney can’t get past the Seamus story. In 1983, Romney put the family dog in a carrier on the roof of his Chevy as his wife, their five sons and their luggage squeezed in to the station wagon for a vacation. The dog got diarrhea. Romney has not figured out how to put the […]

In the 1993 movie “Dave” the faux president (played by Kevin Kline) calls in his best friend (played by Charles Grodin) and they stay up all night balancing the federal budget, not by raising taxes, but by cutting unnecessary and wasteful spending. If only it were that easy. Most presidents have talked about cutting spending, […]

Some people enter the public consciousness willingly; others accidentally. But how one gets there has little to do with how one handles it once the national spotlight begins to shine. Some step up. Some melt like an ice sculpture on a hot summer day. Because the spotlight doesn’t turn you into something you’re not; it […]

Last week, Barack Obama delivered speeches at universities in Chapel Hill, N.C., Iowa City, Iowa, and Boulder, Colo. The trip was, press secretary Jay Carney assured us, official government business, not political campaigning. It’s part of a pattern. Neil Munro of the Daily Caller has counted 130 appearances by the president, vice president, their spouses, […]

Former San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Brown is appalled. He didn’t vote for Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, and he isn’t his biggest fan. But when he considers the prosecution of Mirkarimi for bruising his wife’s arm during a New Year’s Eve argument, he is appalled. People lose sight of what types of cases should be prosecuted, […]

Around this time of year, I sometimes hear from parents who have been appalled to learn that the child they sent away to college to become educated has instead been indoctrinated with the creed of the left. They often ask if I can suggest something to have their offspring read over the summer, in order […]

Sen. John Edwards was a dream presidential candidate for the media — a: populist, lefty lawyer with face and even hair for TV. (Especially: the hair.) The North Carolina senator was a self-made man who also made millions of dollars along the way and won the Democratic endorsement to be the vice presidential candidate in 2004. He […]

One of President Obama’s radical eco-bureaucrats has apologized for confirming an indelible truth: This White House treats politically incorrect private industries as public enemies who deserve regulatory death sentences. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Al Armendariz, an avowed greenie on leave from Southern Methodist University, gave a little-noticed speech in 2010 outlining his sadistic philosophy. “I […]

With the Supreme Court taking up Arizona’s “show me your papers” immigration law, we’re once again thrust into a useful debate over the role of the government and the obligations of the citizen — and non-citizen. Rather than come at it from the usual angle, I thought I’d try something different. If there were one […]

Every day, we get a new kick in the gut from the Obama administration. Most recently, Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz was caught on video articulating his view of the agency’s role in enforcing its regulations. Armendariz said: “It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages […]

It was a very special disco-themed episode of “Glee” on Fox the other night. A new character named Wade from a different high school shared that he was born in the wrong body. He was black, but he said he felt he was born white and decided to go out on stage at Regionals painted […]

The actual Republican Establishment —- political consultants, The Wall Street Journal, corporate America, former Bush advisers and television pundits — are exhorting Mitt Romney to flip-flop on his very non-Establishment position on illegal immigration. Both as governor of Massachusetts and as a presidential candidate, Romney has supported a fence on the border, E-Verify to ensure […]

Almost daily we read of America’s “waning power” and “inevitable decline,” as observers argue over the consequences of defense cuts and budget crises. Yet much of the new American “leading from behind” strategy is a matter of choice, not necessity. Apparently, both left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy and right-wing Jacksonians are tiring of spending […]

A well-regarded Republican strategist at a private gathering recently warned, “And just wait until they play that Mormon card.” By “they,” he meant the Obama campaign and its complicit media cheerleaders. Lawrence O’Donnell, only days later, gave his viewers a historical tutorial on the Mormon religion, darkly suggesting that we all should be afraid, very […]

“The war on terror is over,” or so claims an unnamed senior State Department official, as reported by National Journal’s Michael Hirsh in his recent article “The Post al-Qaida Era.” Really? Well, if the war is over, I must have missed the peace treaty signing ceremony. I also haven’t noticed a decline in incendiary rhetoric, […]

This week, President Barack Obama has been warning students that without his intervention, interest rates for a federal student loan program will double to 6.8 percent July 1. In the process, he’s been misquoting a Republican congresswoman. On Tuesday, he told students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that she has “very […]

The illegal immigration problem is going away. That’s the conclusion I draw from the latest report of the Pew Hispanic Center on Mexican immigration to the United States. Pew’s demographers have carefully combed through statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Homeland Security and the Mexican government, and have come up with […]

Who is Rashad Robinson? And why has his fringe, race-baiting organization been able to pressure several major corporations into abandoning a pro-limited-government legislative association — all for a few cheap social-justice brownie points? Conservative consumers need to get informed, get active and stand their ground against free speech-squelching progressive activists who have demonized the American […]

Instinct tells us to fear poison. If our ancestors were not cautious about what they put in their mouths, they would not have survived long enough to produce us. Unfortunately, a side effect of that cautious impulse is that whenever someone claims that some chemical — or food ingredient, like fat — is a menace, […]

The Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation does a yeoman’s job of keeping track of how much we’re paying in taxes and who’s paying what. It turns out that American taxpayers worked this year from Jan. 1 to April 17, 107 days, to earn enough money to pay their federal, state and local tax bills. That statistic […]

The Democratic PR machine has convinced the mainstream media that the Republicans have so alienated American women that a huge gender gap is looming, which will propel Obama into a second term in the White House. The data show how fatuous this claim is. Rasmussen’s polling — the best because he samples likely voters — […]

If the Obama administration expended as much creative energy saving taxpayers money as it does obscuring the costs of Obamacare, we’d probably have a program worth saving. But from day one, the health care law has been larded with double-counting gimmickry to conceal its $1 trillion price tag. It started by measuring eight years of […]

In your answer to “Dismayed,” the 32-year-old woman with a Ph.D. who was unimpressed by the men she was meeting, I was struck by how cold and calculating it all sounds: Women evolved to marry money and power; men look for eye candy to parade around on their arms. As a man who doesn’t bring […]

Once upon a time, it meant something for a reporter to be called a “Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.” The prestige of this designation is quickly eroding. The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes looked less like an excellence-in-media competition and more like an exercise in leftist self-affirmation. No prize established this more strongly than the coveted National Reporting prize […]