Category: Column

The 2012 presidential election delivered a wake-up call to the Republican Party to improve communication with minorities. The realization that the American presidency can now be won with support of less than 40 percent of white voters — Obama won with just 39 percent — was a bombshell. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in […]

When he initially retired from the system in 2011, there were 173,000 inmates in the state’s prisons, California Secretary of Corrections and Rehabilitation Scott Kernan told The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board at a meeting in Sacramento on Thursday. While Kernan was running his consulting business, the number of inmates dropped dramatically. A panel of […]

Liberals are always attempting to lecture the rest of us about safety – especially the safety and wellbeing of the children. We must child proof our houses. Children mustn’t be allowed to play with small toys for fear of choking. We must purchase the correct car seat and kids must always have a proper bike […]

New Hampshire voters issued a rebuke to conventional party leaders when they voted by large margins for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in Tuesday’s primaries. But Sanders is not going to win the Democratic nomination, and it’s by no means certain Trump will be the Republican nominee. The results show that Hillary Clinton has a […]

Welcome to Infomercial America, or, if you prefer, the United States of Spam. Whenever political conspiracy theories break out into the open, pundits and intellectuals name-check the brilliant but flawed essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” by Richard Hofstadter. Under President George W. Bush, the “9/11 Truthers” were the poster boys and girls of […]

Envy is defined by Dictionary.com as “a feeling of discontent or covetousness with regard to another’s advantages, success, possessions, etc.” That perfectly characterizes the entire political philosophy of the Democratic progressive left. Listening to presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, I often hear the principles I grew up with and practiced being disregarded, even […]

Did one robotic moment in a single debate really bring down Marco Rubio in New Hampshire, probably finishing him off nationally? Unlikely. It’s difficult to believe that voters would turn on a candidate over one gaffe — yet, somehow, it can also make perfect sense in this cycle. Either way, let’s stop pretending 2016 voters […]

This is how the left works when they don’t get what they want. First they uncover, or magically discover, a failing at the individual, local or state level. Then after publically announcing the failure, they suggest that the failure should be changed. They advertise compliance with their “suggestions” as being voluntary. But compliance is only […]

Hillary Clinton is not a woman, and that’s a triumph for feminism and a problem for Hillary. Let me clarify. Yes, technically she is female. But when millions of Americans think of Hillary Clinton, they don’t think of her gender; they think of, well, Hillary Clinton. Some may think of her as a heroic liberal […]

If you read The New York Times “conservative” columnist David Brooks, you might better grasp the chasm between true and phony conservatives, between Reagan conservatives and establishment Republicans. In his piece “I Miss Barack Obama,” Brooks unwittingly humiliates himself in his latest paean to the president, just as when he revealed his perverse attraction to […]

It’s on to South Carolina. Yes, the presidential primary, which has been dragging on since the day after Obama was elected to his second term, is finally in full swing. All the candidates are jockeying for position – all the nonsense we’ve had to endure is finally coming into view. And now with the recent […]

There’s nothing like the warm, satisfying sound coming out of American presidential politics these days: The sound of Democratic and Republican establishments — what I call the Combine — being kicked by voters where it hurts. Right in the metaphors. Or, if that’s too vague, let’s just say the political establishments are getting it right […]

This past Tuesday, I had my first ride in an autonomous car. The anticipation for me was a bit like a kid waiting for Christmas. But when I shared my enthusiasm with friends and colleagues, many thought I was crazy. A few warned me to make sure my life insurance was paid in full before […]

The U.S. economy grew at an anemic rate of less than 1 percent in the last quarter of 2015. While the unemployment rate has dipped below 5 percent, the all-important labor force participation rate is at a historic low of just 62.7 percent. More than 90 million able-bodied adults are either not currently in the […]

This fight against radical Islam is also a fight (SET ITAL) within (END ITAL) Islam. Where, we constantly ask, are the voices of “moderation” who question the barbarity committed in the name of Islam? Consider Shams Bandar. Born in Saudi Arabia, this popular singer renounced her Saudi citizenship, lives in Europe and intends to become […]

In a day when the most innocuous thing can quickly become political, a Doritos Super Bowl commercial has upset some people who want abortion to be an unrestricted right. For those taking a bathroom break or watching “Downton Abbey” instead of the football game, here’s the scenario. A pregnant woman is receiving a sonogram in […]

If you have ever found yourself at the gas pump thinking, “I really wish it cost more to fill up,” then President Obama has just the idea for you. In his final budget request, he will include a call for an additional $10 in taxes per barrel of oil. This terrible idea would roll back […]

“There are too many people in America who don’t feel connected. They’ve got victories that no one celebrates with them. And they’ve got defeats, and pain sometimes, that they have to absorb themselves,” Ohio Gov. John Kasich said in a speech that celebrated his second-place showing in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday. It was a […]

Benning Wentworth is not a name you’ll run across in New Hampshire primary coverage. But he arguably did as much as anyone else to establish the political culture — or cultures — of America’s first-in-the-nation primary state. Wentworth was governor of New Hampshire from 1741 to 1766, the longest-serving colonial governor, and with his father […]

On January 29th, Japan’s central bank governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, announced that the Bank of Japan would introduce a Negative Interest Rate Policy, or NIRP, on bank reserve deposits held in excess of the minimum requisite. The European Central Bank, and central banks in Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden have already partially blazed this mysterious trail. The […]

As the results of New Hampshire’s primary were coming in Tuesday night, some commentators on Twitter were jubilant about the “disruption”: that is, the victories of an inane socialist demagogue and a foul-mouthed nationalist demagogue and what they represented to the “establishment.” Yes, mobs are disruptive. Madame Defarge enjoyed a good shakeup herself. Sen. Bernie […]

While a TSA agent pawed my hair bun this weekend, presumably on high alert for improvised explosive bobby pins, I pondered the latest news on the Somalia airplane terror attack. Intelligence officials released video footage of airport employees in Mogadishu handing a laptop to a jihadist suspect before he boarded Daallo Airlines Airbus Flight D3159 […]

Politicians tailor their messages to different audiences. Facing New Hampshire’s primary, Ted Cruz talked more about “free-market principles” and a “commitment to the Constitution” and said “no one personality can right the wrongs done by Washington.” Politico ran the headline “Ted Cruz, born-again libertarian.” I’m skeptical. Campaigning in Iowa, Cruz had emphasized religion and social […]

George Orwell said, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Gore Vidal elaborated on that insight, saying, “As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate.” And John Milton predicted, “When language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is […]

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is falling apart. Bernie Sanders soared in New Hampshire and now two polls have him tying her nationally. It’s a disaster. Now she’s called in the B-team: The cynical, paranoid, and wacky twins — Sidney Blumenthal and David Brock — to bail her out. And here comes the elderly, diminished and livid […]

On Monday, grassroots Republican favorite Donald Trump repeated the phrase when an audience member called Ted Cruz a “p—-.” He came to this conclusion after determining that Cruz wasn’t sufficiently gung-ho about waterboarding possible terrorists. Asked to define conservatism at the last Republican debate, Trump stated, “I think it’s a person who doesn’t want to […]

PARIS — Some of the people running for the U.S. presidency sound as if they’ve been watching too many tough-guy Hollywood action and science-fiction movies. During the New Hampshire Republican primary debate on Saturday, candidates were asked about the satellite that North Korea had launched into orbit just hours earlier. The launch has since been […]

It has been said it simply wasn’t Marco Rubio’s night on Saturday. It’s been said he stumbled and was tripped up causing him to revert back to a canned and practiced statement about how Obama has known all along what he wanted to do after he was elected. Rubio repeatedly insisted that Obama is not […]