Category: Column

Because of the nation’s and Supreme Court’s war over Obamacare this past week, I’m deferring until next week Part 2 of my article last week, “Not All Presidential Orders Are Created Equal,” to address this raging debate. Though I have concern that every American citizen has affordable health care, too, I have grave concerns about […]

In his excellent daily Web news summary, “The Transom,” Ben Domenech says that President Obama’s speech at the Portland Museum of Art on Saturday “is likely to be Obama’s campaign speech from here on out.” He’s probably correct, so let’s take a look, with an eye to whether it’s likely to work. Obama’s template is […]

Apparently, many liberals were disappointed in the administration’s performance before the Supreme Court. They felt that the government’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, did not respond effectively to the challenges of some of the conservative justices. The editor of Commentary, John Podhoretz, offered an explanation on his magazine’s blog. “American liberals,” he wrote, “know their […]

“Who killed the debt deal?” read The New York Times Magazine as it hyped its Sunday cover story as a “Washington whodunit.” Author Matt Bai explained that “some of Washington’s most connected Democrats and Republicans” didn’t know whose story to believe or what had been on the table after last summer’s “grand bargain” deficit reduction […]

The debate isn’t new, but as the country awaits the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, suppose the conversation switched from a health care system devoted primarily to caring for the sick to one that gives top priority to finding cures for disease? […]

“I don’t worry about the Constitution,” said Rep. Phil Hare, Democrat of Illinois, at a town hall meeting where voters questioned his support of the legislation that became Obamacare. You can find the clip on youtube.com, where it has 462,084 hits. That was before the 2010 election, in which Hare, running for a third term […]

Political activism has drawn the University of California into an academic death spiral. Too many professors believe their job is to “advance social justice” rather than teach the subject they were hired to teach. Groupthink has replaced lively debate. Institutions that were designed to stir intellectual curiosity aren’t challenging young minds. They’re churning out “ignorance.” […]

The core of Obamacare is obviously the requirement that everyone have health insurance. It is likely, given the nature of Justice Kennedy’s and Roberts’ questioning of the government attorneys defending the mandate, that it will be overturned by the Supreme Court. But we all must remember that there are other parts of Obamacare that are […]

While President Obama was busy lambasting Big Oil tax breaks on Thursday, yet another one of his environmental welfare recipients (the very kind he wants to redistribute oil subsidies to) was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Who needs to win the Mega Millions lottery? Start a pie-in-the-sky eco-boondoggle, and a half-billion-dollar jackpot ripe for […]

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likes the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act and other ingredients of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka “ObamaCare.” Why, she asked toward the end of three days of hearings, shouldn’t the court keep the good stuff in ObamaCare and just dump the unconstitutional bits? The court, she explained, […]

You can’t even casually surf the Internet on any given day without numerous reminders of just how radical President Obama is — and this is during an election year, when it should be in his political interest to mask his radicalism. Minding my own business, I happened on an article by Jacob Laksin on FrontPageMag.com, […]

Although we all know that death is inevitable, we are still seldom fully prepared for the death of someone who has been important in our lives. So it was with the recent death of Dr. Marie D. Gadsden, at the age of 92. Mrs. Gadsden’s only official connection with me was that she taught me […]

It’s more than a little shocking when someone makes a movie that deals harshly with abortion. This is Hollywood after all. Abortion is a feminist sacrament. The movie “October Baby” just debuted on 390 screens and registered in eighth place for the weekend, with an estimated $1.7 million gross. “October Baby” is a drama loosely […]

The facts of the Trayvon Martin case are still unclear. But that hasn’t stopped the all-knowing, all-seeing President Obama from voicing his opinion of the situation. “You know,” said Obama, “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. All of us have to do some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this […]

Even after the Duke lacrosse case, Texaco executives allegedly using the N-word in private meetings — which turned out to be “St. Nicholas” — the Tawana Brawley case, not to mention virtual hailstorms of racist graffiti and nooses materializing on college campuses, all of which invariably end up having been put there by the alleged […]

The world was reinvented in the 1970s by soaring oil prices and massive transfers of national wealth. It could be again if the price of petroleum crashes — a real possibility given the amazing estimates about the new gas and oil reserves on the North American continent. The Canadian tar sands, deepwater exploration in the […]

“Blacks are under attack,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, irresponsibly turning the Florida shooting death of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, at the hands of Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman into a barometer of black-white “race-relations.” President Barack Obama, three years past his inauguration as American’s first black president, weighed in, too. As […]

Right now, there isn’t enough known about the circumstances surrounding the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a black, by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old part-Hispanic, during his neighborhood watch tour in an Orlando, Fla., suburb. If evidence emerges that Zimmerman’s actions were not justified, he should be prosecuted and punished; however, there’s a larger issue […]

Politicians and presidents of both parties have occasionally suffered from open-mic syndrome, saying something when they thought the microphone was turned off they wished had not been made public. The latest to fall prey to that amplification of the mouth is President Obama. The president told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during their Monday meeting in […]

I hate to sound like a lawyer, but: There’s a big hole in San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee’s suspension of Ross Mirkarimi as sheriff. In written charges that launched an investigation by the city’s Ethics Commission on “official misconduct,” Lee asserted that during a New Year’s Eve argument, Mirkarimi grabbed his wife, Eliana Lopez, “with […]

“I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” So said John Kerry, in Huntington, W.V., on Tuesday, March 16, 2004, two weeks after he had clinched the Democratic presidential nomination by carrying every state but Vermont in the Super Tuesday primaries. Kerry was responding to an ad run by George […]

Now is the time for all good tea partiers to come to the aid of Wisconsin. Fiscally conservative leaders in the Badger State are under coordinated siege from Big Labor, the White House, the liberal media and the judiciary. The yearlong campaign of union thuggery, family harassment and intimidation of Republican donors and businesses is […]

Politicians say they “create jobs.” In fact, only the private sector generates the information needed to create real, productive jobs. Since this current post-recession job recovery is the slowest in 80 years, you’d think that even know-it-all politicians would want to sweep away the labyrinth of government regulations that hinders job creation. Successful job creators […]