Category: Column

Coward that I am, I’ve always been afraid to watch that old movie “Thelma and Louise.” What stopped me was that car, the one they drove off the cliff together while holding hands, that gorgeous turquoise 1966 Thunderbird convertible hurtling into oblivion. Such a sweet ride didn’t deserve ending up at the bottom of the […]

Creating something that people want is how one gets wealthy in a market economy. Sadly, there’s another way to get rich. It’s called cronyism, and it can make billions for the lucky businesses that get government support — whether their products are profitable or not. In the process, the taxpayers foot the bill. Taxpayer insurance […]

Question: Why aren’t liberal celebrities ever held accountable for stoking their unhinged fans’ violent threats and stupidity — the same way Republican candidates are called on to disavow every last remote and random act of bad behavior of their supporters? The double standards are as glaring as a glittering diva’s Harry Winston diamonds. I’m looking […]

Last week’s column on my lung surgery struck a nerve. Many of you wished me well. Others said I deserve to die. “He likes free markets?” sneered one Internet commenter. “In a truly free market, society wouldn’t subsidize the cost of his smoking. In a truly free market, he’d be dead.” No, I wouldn’t be […]

Last month, I celebrated the beginning of my 81st year of life. For nearly half that time, I have been writing a nationally syndicated column on many topics generating reader responses that go from supportive to quite ugly. So I thought a column making my vision, values and views explicit might settle some of the […]

Thinks look bleak right now for Ted Cruz. And for Donald Trump. Both will have to pass through a narrow needle to thread their way to the nomination. But one of them will do it. There will be no white knight, and John Kasich’s fantasies of a third or fourth ballot nomination are just that, […]

Middle-aged people laid off and unable to find work are taking another way out. They’re killing themselves. Suicide rates are soaring, according to federal data released last week. Especially in economically depressed states and job-starved regions like upstate New York. People in need of work are twice as likely to take their own lives as […]

PARIS — There’s a sense among the silent majority in nations around the world that immigration is virtually unstoppable. When people feel hopeless in a democracy, it means that something is broken. One need only look at the demographic petri dish known as France to see immigration-related dysfunction. Nations farther away from the front lines […]

Having devoured the meanings of the words “establishment” and “conservative” with some fava beans and a nice chianti, Donald Trump has spent the last several weeks cannibalizing yet another word that used to have meaning: democratic. Trump says that the delegate system is undemocratic; he says that caucuses that do not swing his way are […]

Someone slap a photo of Mike Pence on a milk carton. The Indiana governor may not have been abducted, but he’s certainly missing in action on the central question facing the Republican Party: Are you with Trump, or against him? Pence is hardly alone on the sidelines, of course. But the crowd of wet-fingered politicians […]

The sudden appearance of Donald Trump on the political horizon last year may have been surprising, but not nearly as surprising as seeing some conservatives supporting him. Does Trump have conservative principles? Does he have any principles at all, other than promoting Donald Trump? A smorgasbord of political positions — none of them indicating any […]

Donald Trump is trying to establish the narrative that he’s already won the Republican presidential nomination. If that’s true, why is his team trying to reinvent him? Trump had a big win in New York, and he’s likely to have another big day in other Northeastern states this week. But neither New York nor these […]

This month, Stanford University students voted on a campus resolution that would have their college require a course on Western civilization, as it did until the 1980s. Stanford students rejected the proposal 1,992 to 347. A columnist at the Stanford Daily explained why: Teaching Western civilization means “upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all […]

Thanks to Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D-Va.) 200,000 convicted felons in the state of Virginia may now register to vote. Writes The Washington Post, “The change applies to all felons who have completed their sentences and been released from supervised probation or parole. The Democratic governor’s decision particularly affects black residents of Virginia: 1 in 4 […]

Tuesday should be a very good day for Donald Trump. Voters in Connecticut, Maryland, Rhode Island, Delaware and Pennsylvania will take part in selecting 172 delegates to the Republican national convention. Trump is widely expected to win all five contests and win between 98 and 123 of the 172 delegates at stake. But, because such […]

Our country has fallen head first into the crapper when people from the left and right can’t see the problem with letting transgendered men and women use whatever bathroom, locker room and shower they wish. What the heck is wrong with us? There seems to be so very few left with the combination of courage […]

Purely as an act of political mischief, this Republican has toyed with the idea of voting in June for Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., in the race to fill Sen. Barbara Boxer’s seat. Under California’s “top two” primary rules, there’s the possibility that two Democrats could face each other in November. California Attorney General Kamala Harris, […]

Ethnicity still matters. That’s one lesson I draw from the results so far of this year’s Republican and Democratic primaries and caucuses. We’re encouraged to believe ethnicity doesn’t matter much anymore; only race does. This is the implicit assumption behind the analyses that divide the electorate into four racial categories: whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. […]

It’s 2016, right? I hope so because that’s the year I put on my check when I paid my taxes. That’s means we’re at around 6,000 years or so of recorded human history, right? Add to that that thousands of years unrecorded before that, and you realize people have been around here for a while. […]

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and former chairman of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, to replace Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court. The rest, as they say, is history. The Senate Judiciary Committee, under the […]

Short of buying a house, paying for college is the number one expense any American will incur in our lifetimes. And today some Ivy League and specialty universities can run well above what the average home might cost.   I have a personal friend whose son is attending one of these universities which cater to […]

A military parade may soon look less like a VE-Day parade down Times Square and more like a Mardi Gras parade in New Orlean sunless liberals in leadership stop using the U.S. military as a social engineering experiment. Let us not forget the same president who confused “corps” with “corpses” and exchanged a traitor for […]

Despite his big win in New York on Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has had a pretty bad week. But will it matter? It should — and just might. During an NBC “Today” show town hall Thursday, the host read a question from Twitter concerning Trump’s views on LGBT issues and how he plans […]

Home-state candidates notched up impressive victories in New York’s presidential primaries Tuesday. Donald Trump topped 50 percent for the first time — and handsomely, with 60 percent of Republican votes. And Hillary Clinton won 58 percent of Democratic votes in her adopted home state. Trump’s capture of 89 of New York’s 95 delegates gets him […]

A few years ago an article was posted entitled, “The Problem With Average Not Being Good Enough.”   The author, Brianna Wiest, attempted to explain the current human condition of many young people. Although she never explicitly stated it regarded young adults, I surmised it must be so being that she spoke of college and […]

What are political conventions for? If you’ve ever been to one, you might think the purpose is for attendees to schmooze, drink and drink some more. That holds true for both the delegates and the journalists who usually outnumber them by at least 3-to-1. But that’s not actually why political conventions exist. They’re sort of […]

Humans have been using euphemisms ever since Adam first “knew” Eve. In politics especially, obfuscating and twisting the meaning of words has been going on forever. But today’s debates aren’t only littered with rhetorical distortions; in some ways, many of Democrats’ most potent arguments are built on corrupt language. One word that’s really getting a […]

If it concerns sex in any way, you can be sure that our culture will fixate on it and manage to defy common sense with hyperventilating indignation. Same-sex marriage roiled the waters for decades, but now that the Supreme Court has big-footed that question, culture warriors are prowling for new realms of transgression to embrace. […]