August 9, 2015

Former Saddam officers form the core of a rampant ISIS horde

If there was ever any reasonable doubt about the morality of removing Saddam Hussein in 2003, it should have vanished with the revelation, last week, that between 100 and 160 former Baathist military and security officials of the Iraqi regime hold hi...

July 12, 2015

Shameless Iran cheating while talking

Iran seems to have perfected the art of shamelessness.  It's been widely reported that Iran has been blessed with a near straight flush of concessions from John Kerry and the other P5+1 powers in the Vienna talks supposedly designed to preve...

July 4, 2015

The Taliban rising

Maybe NATO's withdrawal to its Afghanistan bases six months ago was a little premature.  In what increasingly looks like a modern-day Tet Offensive, the Taliban have been moving from their rural strongholds and attacking larger cities in key...

July 2, 2015

The GOP Congress refuses to use the power it has

Instead of wailing and bemoaning the imperial edicts issued this past week by the Supreme Court on Obamacare, housing discrimination, and gay marriage, the Republican-controlled Congress would do better to exercise its constitutional authority and fi...

June 30, 2015

Iranian nuclear negotiations do not include solving older mysteries

It is one thing for the P5+1 nations to negotiate with Iran about its known, declared nuclear energy programs.  The six nations agree (at least in theory) that it’s imperative to stop Iran from converting its uranium enrichment activities ...

June 27, 2015

Obama's pivot to Asia does nothing to counter growing Chinese provocations

Stymied of influence in the Middle East, the Obama administration has now decided to "pivot" its foreign policy emphasis to the Pacific Rim.  Historically, America has kept the peace and the shipping lanes open in Asia by the strength ...

June 26, 2015

The Iran nuclear talks could not be going better...for Iran

It seems that there is no limit to how far the administration will go to get a deal with the Islamic Republic on nukes.  June 30 is supposed to be the deadline for talks between the P5+1 nations and Iran on its nuclear program, but both sides cl...

June 21, 2015

U.S. drone strike in Yemen kills the head of AQAP

In a significant blow to al-Qaeda, a U.S. drone strike last week vaporized the leader of its Yemen affiliate, AQAP, Nasir al-Wahishi, in the al-Qaeda port city of Mukalla.  That’s right: al-Qaeda has its own seaport now, which it took over...

June 16, 2015

Nigeria's Boko Haram, on the run, is still a villainous horde

It seems that the Nigeria-based Islamic terrorist army Boko Haram has some violent life left in it after all.  This week, near its forest stronghold of Sambisa, Boko Haram terrorists drove through six farming villages and inflicted death and may...

June 16, 2015

Airstrike underscores the need for more intelligence resources in Libya

Over the weekend, the U.S. Air Force sent two F-15 fighters to drop “multiple” 500-pound bombs on the Libyan lair of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the sinister one-eyed head of an al-Qaeda-affiliated group known as the “Signed in Blood Battal...

June 13, 2015

Greece: A lesson in socialist failure

Greece has become an object lesson in how not to run an economy.  This week, the International Monetary Fund packed up and left its negotiations with far-left Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras over his absolute intransigence on the issue of ne...

June 12, 2015

Can you trust other countries to store your data? You might have to.

President Obama is trying to win “fast track” authority from Congress to negotiate enormous trade deals.  Fast track means that whatever deal Obama cuts with the world’s nations, Congress must approve it or reject it on an up-o...

June 9, 2015

Abortion is down nearly everywhere...and here's how to push it down even further

The AP just released a survey of abortion trends in America since 2010.  The good news is that the total number of abortions is down for nearly every state that keeps statistics, and pretty dramatically, too, averaging 12 percent nationwide....

June 4, 2015

Mayor Bill de Blasio's crime policy causing needless deaths

Hard-left mayor of New York Bill de Blasio has a problem, and he thinks he knows how to fix it.  The problem is that New York City, once the safest large city in America, now has a skyrocketing crime and murder rate.  Despite near-miraculou...

May 30, 2015

Mount Everest was ascended for all mankind

In this very week in 1953, humanity first set foot on the summit of the world’s highest mountain in a feat of stunning resilience and skill.  The 9th British Expedition had proceeded like a military drill, creating a series of advance camp...

May 29, 2015

ISIS is winning

ISIS must have been delighted to take control of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra this week, not least because the city’s glorious Roman ruins and amphitheater allowed it to stage yet another sinister spectacle.  This time, the terrorist...

May 28, 2015

Sky-High College Costs and Student Mental Health Care

Track star and Ivy-League freshman student Madison Holleran, age 19, had been a “happy go lucky,” though achievement-oriented, kid all her life, according to her father.  She had no history of mental illness.  At home for Christ...

May 23, 2015

No Progress Since the War on Poverty Began Half a Century Ago

Eleven days ago, President Obama took the opportunity at Georgetown University to defend the government’s 50-year experiment in anti-poverty welfare programs.  The president claimed: It is a mistake for us to suggest that somehow ever...

May 22, 2015

House GOP wants to explore space, Democrats want to stare at the Earth

Yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee voted for a significant change in NASA's priorities.  Instead of the nearly 2 billion dollars requested by President Obama for "earth science" (read: global warming studies), the Republ...

May 21, 2015

Obama's 'red line' for Syria is written on water

When adversaries, real and potential, look to President Obama and gauge his mettle and strength of commitment, they need look no farther than his wavering, mendacious policy toward Syria. In August 2012, amid reports of Assad gassing rebel-held ar...

May 19, 2015

The cruel theology of <em>The Homesman</em>

Last year, a very well-reviewed but little known movie was released into theaters.  Titled The Homesman and set in 1855, it refers to a man hired to escort women home “back east” who had failed to adapt to frontier life in the Nebras...

May 15, 2015

Pope Francis and his environmental encyclical

It's a little unfair to write about a document that hasn't been released yet, but the world is going to have to be prepared for Pope Francis's forthcoming encyclical on the environment, for well or ill, when it is released next month....

May 13, 2015

Forty years on, lessons from the <em>Mayaguez</em> incident

Forty years ago yesterday, fanatical Communist forces of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia boarded an American container ship, the SS Mayaguez, which had apparently strayed into Cambodian territorial waters, and took its crew into custody.  The incide...

May 12, 2015

Poland's conservative win shows fear of the Bear

It’s not a good day for the left in when 96% of a nation votes for right-wing or center-right-wing candidates for president ahead of run-offs, but this is what happened in Poland yesterday.  A previously unknown 42-year-old, Andrzej Duda, ...

May 8, 2015

A federal appeals court limits the Patriot Act's scope

This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a decision in which it found the NSA’s “bulk telephone metadata collection program” to be exceeding its statutory authority under the Patriot Act, and asked Congress...

May 7, 2015

Forty years on, the fall of Saigon

Somebody once said that Communism is the longest and most expensive route from capitalism to capitalism, and certainly Vietnam today validates that glib observation.  After 24 years of market-oriented reforms that expanded wealth each year, the ...

May 6, 2015

To the stars through hardship

This past month, scientists at NASA may have made some astonishing breakthroughs in advanced propulsion technology.  All revolutions in science seem to go through stages of acceptance: at first ridicule, then skepticism, and finally an impressio...

May 5, 2015

The end of Boko Haram draws near

The ring appears to be closing on Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria.  All reports indicate that most of the Islamic terror group, loyal to ISIS, has finally been chased into the deep jungle of the Sambisa forest preserve by the Nigerian army of...

May 1, 2015

Cats and Kardashians

Just because you’re not interested in politics doesn’t mean politics isn’t interested in you.  Americans seem to have forgotten this dictum. A brand-new poll, taken in the form of an online survey, was just issued by the Pew...

April 28, 2015

To the shores of Tripoli

Exactly two hundred and ten years ago this week, the United States of America won its first land battle on a foreign shore – taking the city of Derne, in Libya, against the Barbary Pirate state of Ottoman Tripoli.  This battle essentially ...

April 23, 2015

Remember when George Bush's ranch got buzzed by a UFO?

If what follows sounds like a scene from the sci-fi disaster flick Independence Day, imagine what President George W. Bush must have thought on the night of January 8, 2008 as he contemplated his ranch home in Crawford, Texas. At around 8:00 pm, a...

April 18, 2015

Obama's phony war on ISIS

For eight months, from the beginning of World War II to the Nazi invasion of France in April 1940, neither Britain nor France launched any major combat operations against the Third Reich.  Both nations essentially waited to be attacked until the...

April 26, 2014

Increase Intelligence Sharing with Ukraine

President Putin, despite his long years as Russia's strongman,has failed to counteract his nation's demographic free-fall, declining life expectancy, rampant vodka addiction, and one-note economy.  Rather than address these problems head...