Category: Column

The Republican presidential candidates, except for Ron Paul, haven’t been paying much attention to young voters in the primaries and caucuses so far. But any Republican nominee — which is to say probably Mitt Romney, or maybe Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum — had better be paying attention to them in the summer and fall. […]

The White House didn’t blow a dog whistle for deep-pocketed liberal donors on Monday. No, the administration whipped out a supersized vuvuzela. Blaring message: Let loose the campaign finance-bundling hounds of super PAC war! President Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, who served as White House deputy chief of staff for operations before assuming 2012 re-election […]

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness an unalienable right. This was a radical idea. For most of history, most people didn’t think much about pursuing happiness. They were too busy just trying to survive. Then came the liberal revolution based on the idea of individual freedom. Only then did […]

Let’s think about the kind of mess that we’re in. Federal 2010 Medicare and Medicaid expenditures totaled $800 billion. The projected annual growth of both programs is about 7 percent. Social Security expenditures are more than $700 billion a year. According to the 2009 Social Security and Medicare trustees reports, by 2030, 49 percent of […]

President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are entering negotiations over — or seeking ratification of — five treaties that could radically limit our national sovereignty and the reach of our democratic institutions. Particularly scary is that treaties, once signed and ratified, have the same status as constitutional law and cannot be altered or eclipsed by […]

Two of three judges on a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel on Tuesday found Proposition 8 unconstitutional. Judge Stephen Reinhardt stipulated that the ruling skirted the larger issue of whether same-sex couples have a right to marry. That’s a shame, because at least an equal-right-to-marry claim makes for a clean argument. Reinhardt praised […]

On Super Bowl Sunday, America was treated to the most expensive political commercial in history — brought to you by Chrysler — called “It’s Halftime in America.” In a series of vapid non sequiturs, Clint Eastwood’s gravelly voice pinned the promise of a city — no, a nation — to government dependency, claiming that “the […]

My commitment-phobic boyfriend of several years is also my neighbor. I resolved to make it work with him and then caught him on FriendFinder exchanging numerous messages with some woman in Tijuana. He claimed he was just being friendly. I asked if he’d correspond with a guy. He responded, “No. I’m not gay.” Humiliatingly, I’ve […]

I’m having a whirlwind romance with a man I met online on Thanksgiving. I moved across the country to live with him on December 20, and we’re now building a life together. The problem is I have a high IQ (137), and he’s very unintelligent and illogical. It’s hard to have a good conversation unless […]

Mitt Romney appears to have all the foreign-policy savvy of someone who once visited Euro Disney, and it’s freaking me out. Not to say that President Obama is any more knowledgeable on that front, but at least he seems aware of his limitations, outsourcing foreign leadership to the French, the Brits, Hillary Clinton and private […]

When I was a youngster in Yazoo City, Miss., twice each week — on Tuesday and Friday nights — I delivered the hometown newspaper. One night a week, I collected for the paper. The financial rewards were small but important. More important was the fact that I developed commitment and learned responsibility and how to […]

The governments in Russia and China very much want to uphold the principle that every now and then the state must crush people who want freedom. That is why they worked together to veto a fairly toothless United Nations resolution condemning the regime in Syria and calling for President Bashar Assad, the lipless murderer who […]

Governor Mitt Romney’s statement about not worrying about the poor has been treated as a gaffe in much of the media, and those in the Republican establishment who have been rushing toward endorsing his coronation as the GOP’s nominee for president — with 90 percent of the delegates still not yet chosen — have been […]

As a six-time undefeated middleweight world karate champion, I have a pretty good idea what makes a warrior. And there’s presently one particular presidential candidate in the political ring who wears those gloves better than the others. It’s one thing to enter a ring with a single opponent, but what if you had to enter […]

President Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer in an interview Sunday, “I deserve a second term.” Well, let’s see. He had the courage to tell the Supreme Court off for daring to defy him in its campaign finance law ruling. And he did it during his State of the Union speech, when they weren’t in a […]

Losing candidates usually congratulate the winner — first by telephone and then in front of their supporters. Not Newt Gingrich. When he loses, Gingrich doesn’t even bother to pretend to be a good sport. Already, insiders are calling Newt’s Saturday Las Vegas news conference the modern equivalent of Richard Nixon’s pronouncement “You won’t have Nixon […]

For 60 years the National Prayer Breakfast has been a nonpolitical event where speakers put aside their earthly biases and focus on a Higher Authority. Last Thursday, President Obama departed from that tradition to claim the endorsement of Jesus for raising taxes. It beat the endorsement of Mitt Romney by Donald Trump. In his remarks, […]

It’s unusual when a reporter sympathetic to a politician writes a story that makes his subject look bad. But Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker has now done this twice. The first time was in an article last April on Obama’s foreign policy in which he quoted a “top aide” (National Security Adviser Tom Donilon? […]

It says something about the brazen attitude of American politicians that Congress enacted a measure to create a program that was impossible to implement — and named it the CLASS Act. CLASS stands for Community Living Assistance Services and Support, a program that was supposed to offer voluntary long-term care insurance to workers who are […]

While Democrats mock Mitt Romney for his alleged lack of interest in the “very poor” and focus their political pitch on income inequality, one can’t help noticing the Obamas running around to $35,000-a-head fundraisers with the very rich and very famous in New York City and Hollywood. Michelle Obama kicked off February with an exclusive […]

There was quite a fuss this week over how ObamaCare will trample religious freedom by requiring religious hospitals, colleges and charities to provide insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization and the ”morning-after” abortion pill, all of which are opposed by the Catholic Church and the latter opposed by most protestant denominations. Romney stepped into the brouhaha […]

California has a huge state debt and Washington has a huge national debt. But that does not discourage either Governor Jerry Brown or President Barack Obama from wanting to launch a very costly high-speed rail system. Most of us might be a little skittish about spending money if we were teetering on the brink of […]

Congressman Jim Moran is an old white Democrat from Virginia who thinks he can judge whether we minority conservatives are acting sufficiently non-white enough. Moran’s an inveterate bully, a brawler, a crook and a bigot. And not one of his civility-preaching liberal colleagues has the courage to call him out. Responding on cable news to […]

Years ago a friend told me a story from her days living in South America. The movie “Wayne’s World” had come out, and she went to see it. She spoke English, but it was interesting to read the Spanish subtitles. For instance, early in the film, Wayne says: “Shyeah, and monkeys might fly out of […]

Obama’s latest homeowner mortgage relief plan is perfect for him: It both is consistent with his ideology — duh — and allows him to buy more votes with someone else’s money, all the while pretending there is in fact such a thing as a free lunch. The painfully superficial liberal approach to poverty gets old, […]

“Hell is paved with good intentions,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “not bad ones.” And Shaw never wrote about the unintended consequences of American campaign finance law or the Florida GOP primary, which provide ample proof that the more good-government types try to regulate money and politics the more convoluted campaign finance becomes. Mitt Romney won […]