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 […]

President Barack Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, doesn’t like the term “drug war.” He argues that none of the smart guys in law enforcement uses it. Instead, the smart guys talk about middle-of-the-road strategies that emphasize treatment over incarceration — as did both Presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush — while they also advocate […]

Some 20 million Americans in primaries and caucuses will take part in selecting the Republican presidential nominee. One person will choose the vice presidential nominee. This has long struck me as absurd: One person choosing someone who, as a result, might become president for as long as 10 years. But just about everyone in politics […]

Stop the presses: Big-spending Democrats are finally up in arms over a federal boondoggle. Details of the U.S. General Services Administration bacchanalia get worse by the day. We’ve graduated from overpriced breakfasts in Vegas, friends-and-family junkets galore and in-house videos mocking their own profligacy to extravagant bonuses, alleged kickbacks, obstructionism and bribes. But the scandal […]

We spend too much time waiting for orders — and money — from Washington. The collapse of the housing bubble gave politicians a license to do what they wanted to do all along: spend. The usual checks on extravagance, weak as they are, were washed away. Budgets? We’ll worry about that later. Inflation? We’ll worry […]

It’s difficult to be a good economist and simultaneously be perceived as compassionate. To be a good economist, one has to deal with reality. To appear compassionate, often one has to avoid unpleasant questions, use “caring” terminology and view reality as optional. Affordable housing and health care costs are terms with considerable emotional appeal that […]

With most current presidential polls of likely voters showing 9-10 percent undecided, the question of where the undecided votes go becomes of paramount importance. To answer this question, I compared the final Gallup Polls with the actual results in every race in which an incumbent president was opposing an insurgent since 1964. This included the […]