Category: Column

Are the French getting their Tea Party on? That’s what an outsider looking at the country’s first-round presidential voting results might have been led to believe. But, as with many things French, the reality is très compliquée. The weekend vote knocked out all but the two candidates long expected to square off in the May […]

Many of you remember the movie “Stand And Deliver,” the story of Jaime Escalante, an immigrant from Bolivia who taught at Garfield High School in inner-city Los Angeles. He accomplished remarkable results with students known to be especially difficult to teach. One story not depicted in the movie was the one about “the other Johnny.” […]

Jon Corzine left Goldman Sachs with a net worth far exceeding even that of Mitt Romney today. Many accounts of his tenure at Goldman suggest he “failed up” the corporate ladder. Pushed out of Goldman in a power struggle (sparked in part by his support for a government bailout of Long-Term Capital Management), he nonetheless […]

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the case against George Zimmerman for his shooting of Trayvon Martin, what has happened already is enough to turn the stomach of anyone who believes in either truth or justice. An amazing proportion of the media has given us a painful demonstration of the thinking — and lack of thinking […]

For many, the term “sheriff” conjures up images of the Old West. A few may consider a sheriff to have some form of outdated and obsolete political office. But for me and countless other patriots across our nation, a sheriff is the epitome of good and necessary county law enforcement. As documented on the Durham […]

Mitt Romney’s presidential run could turn out to be a test case to resolve the long-running debate inside the Republican Party as to whether the GOP presidential nominee should run as a conservative or more of a centrist. How often have we heard both Democratic and Republican political “experts” reciting the conventional wisdom that during […]

Does it break some unwritten rule for a columnist to bring his readers’ attention to his own book? If so, I ask your indulgence. But, after nearly a thousand columns and twelve years since my last book, I hope readers will forgive me for noting that today, April 24, 2012, HarperCollins is publishing the culmination […]

After Richard Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy and the California governor’s race two years later (when he uttered the immortal line to the media, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”) the former vice president knew he must reinvent himself to run for president again in 1968. Thus was […]

The smart thinking among savvy election lawyers and political insiders is that federal prosecutors will have a hard time proving that John Edwards broke campaign finance laws when he ran for president in 2008. Edwards has pleaded not guilty. Election lawyer Jerry Goldfeder captured this view when he said: “With the government having to prove […]

The theater of the absurd that is our presidential election keeps chugging along with all the vigor our economy doesn’t. One can’t blame Democrats for attempting distraction upon distraction, given the alternative of talking about President Obama’s record. After all, if it is indeed about the economy, stupid, the only votes there for Democrats are […]

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a comfortable retirement. As it happens, […]

The American Cancer Society, American Heart Association and American Lung Association wrote Proposition 29, the measure on the June 5 ballot in California to increase the state’s cigarette tax by $1, to $1.87 per pack. Lung Association President Jane Warner likes to emphasize the demarcation at play: She’s with the good guys, while the bad […]

Richard A. Grenell — a frequent contributor to PJ Media, where I am CEO — has been named “national security and foreign policy spokesman” for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Writes The Washington Post’s Election 2012 Blog: “Grenell brings foreign policy chops and more than a decade of political experience to the aggressive but […]

The New Jersey Miracle — the election of Chris Christie as governor — may be about to have a sequel in the very real chance that Republican State Senate leader Joe Kyrillos could upend Democratic incumbent Bob Menendez in the U.S. Senate race this year. Stranger things have happened. The latest statewide surveys all show […]

There is a reflexive desire among a certain species of moderate Republicans to be perceived as “civil” by liberal opponents who believe that the mere: existence: of free-market, limited-government conservatism is an indecent affront to humankind. All aboard the U.S.S. Lost Cause. This disastrous, bend-over bipartisanship is a hard habit to break. In 2008, Arizona Sen. John […]

It’s going to be bait and switch for as far as the eye can see. That’s how it looks now that the smoke has cleared after the recent “Mommy War” skirmish over Democratic operative Hilary Rosen’s comment that mother of five Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life.” There’s no need to […]

Ten years ago, perky actress Jennifer Love Hewitt tried to jump-start a music career with a song titled “Bare Naked.” Now she’s trying that attention-grabbing tactic again with a sleazy new Lifetime series called “The Client List.” She plays a massage therapist who turns tricks. That network has adopted a new slogan: “This is not […]

Dick Clark, who died Wednesday at 82, was called “America’s oldest teenager.” That’s not only because he looked so good late into life, but also because he carried with him the teen memories of those of us who grew up watching “American Bandstand” on glorious black-and-white, small-screen television sets. Every weekday afternoon, I would arrive […]

Liberals have leapt on the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida to push for the repeal of “stand your ground” laws and to demand tighter gun control. (MSNBC’S Karen Finney blamed “the same people who stymied gun regulation at every point.”) This would be like demanding more funding for the General Services Administration after […]

Administration meltdowns are hardly novel. In almost every presidency there comes a moment when sheer chaos takes hold, whether self-induced or as a result of an outside crisis. Vietnam had effectively destroyed Lyndon Johnson by 1967. Watergate unraveled the Richard Nixon administration, as the disgraced president resigned in the face of certain impeachment. Gerald Ford […]

Calling America’s criminal justice system “racist” is not confined to “civil rights leaders” like the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Then-Sen. Barack Obama, during the 2008 presidential campaign, said it, too. Blacks and whites, said Obama, “are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates (and) receive very different sentences … […]

The loudest rhetoric coming from President Obama lately has been about the Buffett Rule, which states that millionaires should pay 30% of their income in taxes. But now it comes out that he and Michelle only pay 20.2% of their income of about $800,000 in taxes! They flunk their own standard by ten points! How […]

There’s a scene in the movie “Pretty Woman” where the kindhearted hooker played by Julia Roberts asks her client, portrayed by Richard Gere: “Who do you want me to be?” Regardless of who she might really be, she realizes that it’s far less attractive than a tabula rasa onto which her client can project his […]

In the 1962 Howard Lindsay-Russel Crouse-Irving Berlin Broadway musical, “Mr. President,” one of the songs in the production is titled “The Secret Service,” which begins, “the Secret Service makes me nervous…” If allegations are true that at least 11 Secret Service agents and several members of the U.S. military consorted with prostitutes prior to President […]