March 24, 2022

A modest proposal for ending the war in Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has enough bombs and rockets to flatten every major city in Ukraine, but the Ukrainian people seem determined to fight for every block and building.  It's beginning to appear that Putin has made a "massive miscalcula...

January 11, 2021

Only prosecutions can ensure future election integrity

Nations in Action, a good-government advocacy group, reports that a prosecutor in Naples is working on a case involving hacking of the U.S. presidential election by a foreign power. Sadly, that prosecutor works in Naples, Italy, not Naples, Florid...

December 21, 2020

What if Democrat senators use the Willie Brown plan to keep control of the Senate?

The U.S. Senate currently stands at 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats.  Two senators will be chosen in the Georgia elections on January 6.  If Republicans win one of those two seats, they'll keep control of the Senate. ...

October 17, 2020

How much longer can Joe Biden refuse to answer questions?

"The dog that didn't bark" was a clue in one of Sherlock Holmes' mysteries. It suggested that sometimes the absence of a response may reveal as much as a response would. Joe Biden hasn't barked quite a bit lately. For exam...

August 14, 2020

Democrats Dance with the Devil

Joe Biden wants you to be miserable when you vote. This is not an unusual wish for out-of-office politicians. Miserable people tend to vote against the incumbent. Earlier this year, Joe Biden faced daunting odds. The economy was stronger than it h...

June 29, 2020

Reimagine this

Statues and monuments are being defaced and toppled, buildings are aflame, neighborhoods are being taken over, black-suited thugs roam the streets with impunity, our cities are in chaos, and the police seem powerless to act.  What are we to...

June 20, 2020

Black Lives Matter: Democrats Can’t Live With Them, and Can’t Live Without Them

The folks at Black Lives Matter are really worried about black deaths. Not most black deaths, not even very many black deaths, mind you, but only that tiny fraction of a percent of blacks who have died at the hands of (presumably) white cops. Those a...

April 16, 2020

China’s incredible coronavirus counts

We all recognize that when it comes to the coronavirus, China has behaved badly. When the virus first appeared last year, they tried to cover it up. While the world remained ignorant of the disease, China accumulated vast quantities of personal pr...

March 16, 2020

How the coronavirus hype developed

On Fox News Sunday, the headline subject was coronavirus and its effects on the stock market and the economy. Chris Wallace asked Washington Post journalist Charles Lane, "How big a threat is this pandemic to this country...?" ...

February 18, 2020

Coronavirus: Catastrophe or hyperbole?

Thirty-five million infections.  Thirty-four thousand deaths. No, this isn't a worst-case scenario for the coronavirus.  It's a summary of our own seasonal flu last winter (2018–2019), the most recent ye...

January 23, 2020

Why English royals fall for American commoners

Now that Prince Harry and Meghan are abdicating their duties in the House of Windsor, I've been wondering: what is this strange power that American women wield over English aristocrats? Downton Abbey was the fictional representation of a very ...

December 28, 2019

Democrat cities show how not to make our neighborhoods safer

Whenever we hear of robberies, we tend to focus our sympathy toward the victims — the persons or stores that were robbed.  We should remember that there are other indirect victims on whom property crimes also take a substantial toll. ...

September 6, 2019

'It's good to be the king'

Thus spake Mel Brooks, playing an effete, Brooklyn-accented 18th-century French Louis in the movie The History of the World: Part I. It's still good to be the king, although in 21st-century America, we no longer call them kings. ...

August 27, 2019

'Why can’t a woman be more like a man?'

In My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins complained to Colonel Pickering: “Why can’t a woman by more like a man?” That was about sixty years ago. If the Professor had asked that question today, Pickering would have reported him to soci...

August 20, 2019

Figures Don't Lie, but Liars Can Figure

Last week, two events of smallish note occurred. On August 13 and 14, the stock market suffered its biggest losses of the year. Also, an “inverted-yield curve” formed. The yield on the 10-year bond briefly slipped below the yield on the t...

August 18, 2019

Let's End This Pointless War in Afghanistan Now

Our eighth round of talks with the Taliban, concerning terms for a U. S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, has concluded without agreement.  We can't agree on a timetable (we want two and a half years; the Taliban want us out within nine mon...

June 22, 2019

Great news! 52.2% of those polled don’t like Donald Trump!

They’re called the “favorability/unfavorability ratings” -- I prefer to call them “popularity polls” -- and according to Real Clear Politics’ latest average, 43.8% of registered voters like President Trump and 52.2...

June 7, 2019

Here comes another global disaster!

Scientists thought it was bad, but it's even worse than they imagined.  Now it's a potential catastrophe that will affect all our lives — unless we take action now.  Otherwise, life on Earth will be irreparably harme...

March 28, 2019

Psychology, Politics, and Science

Donald Trump is a sociopath. That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact. It’s been researched, peer-reviewed, and published by scientist John Gartner, a psychologist. Here are some more astonishing facts, published in the scientific ma...

March 18, 2019

The Green New Deal's weak chain of logic

Reagan observed: "It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant.  It's just that they know so many things that aren't so." So it is with the Green New Deal.  Most liberals regard it as a simple proposition: global war...

February 19, 2019

One national emergency that is, and many that aren't

Democrats are railing against President Trump's national emergency declaration authorizing the building of additional wall along our southern border.  The passage of drugs, children, sex slaves, gangs, criminals, and asylum- and prosper...

January 15, 2019

A fence behind the fence?

I've been amazed by videos of men and women casually climbing over our border fence.  How do they get up those twenty-foot steel slats?  They must be world-class athletes. Another camera angle reveals the secret. ...

January 11, 2019

Why Climate Change Isn't Science

Environmentalists first predicted impending climate disaster in the 1970s, but they didn’t call it global warming. Back then, it was “Global Cooling” that would end life on earth as we knew it. The smog of industrial pollutants was ...

October 7, 2018

The Democrat trick behind Senator Murkowski’s ‘present’ vote

Under the cover of doing a favor for Senator Steve Daines, Senator Lisa Murkowski actually helped the Democrats more. Yesterday the Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh as the 114th Justice of the Supreme Court.  The final tally was 50 to 48, wi...

September 9, 2018

NYT's 'Anonymous': Putting lipstick on a pig, English-style

"Putting lipstick on a pig" means trying to make something really ugly look prettier.  In politics, it is an attempt to rhetorically embellish an otherwise bad policy or weak story.  It was one of Obama's favorite ph...

August 20, 2018

The Trump card

Many Republicans, including the leaders of the House and Senate, have cautioned President Trump not to interfere in the Mueller probe.  Let him finish the investigation, they insist.  Let the process play out. But what if the p...

July 9, 2018

Dammit – Things aren't going to Hell

Doomsayers who warn that "the end is nigh" if so-and-so politician is elected become deeply depressed if the so-and-so is elected and horrible things do not occur. From a conservative perspective, Trump has not caused horrible things to ...

April 13, 2018

Mueller is trying to get fired

In most lines of work, if you fail to execute your assigned tasks, you get fired, and getting fired destroys your résumé, your reputation, and your earning potential. But if you're a partisan hack in Washington, the opposite...

January 24, 2018

Sieg heil to the chief

Democrats claim that Adolf Hitler is the most successful politician in American history, having been elected president in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, and 2016. "Hitler" is, of course, Democrats' favorite smear against e...

December 27, 2017

Capitalism's Gotta Go

A recent survey of college students indicates that a plurality of them would prefer to live in a socialist country. Critics have complained that these results show college students have little knowledge about the real world, which is filled with fail...

October 30, 2017

Mueller leaking on behalf of Hillary?

On Friday, an anonymous source leaked to CNN that a federal grand jury had approved the filing of charges against a person involved in the Russian collusion investigation.  CNN could not identify that person or the charges against him, and a spo...

October 1, 2017

Football with a side of sanctimony

The NFL is going through a nightmare.  Its employees are at war with its customers.  The players wouldn't put it that way, of course.  They say they're simply raising awareness of a serious social problem.  But the fans wa...

August 25, 2017

Auf wiedersehen, Wolf

ESPN doesn't appear to have many defenders of its decision to remove Robert Lee from the broadcast of the University of Virginia's football game in Charlottesville next month. ESPN took this action out of fear that the similarity of Robert...

August 21, 2017

Trump is the real Antifa

The Democratic Party Goon Squad chalked up another win last week when they got into a rumble with a fringe group of white racists who were protesting the removal of a statue of a famous Democrat from a park in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Nazi/K...

August 10, 2017

Will John McCain copy Ted Kennedy?

John McCain had told reporters that his vote depended upon House speaker Paul Ryan assuring him that the skinny bill would not become law, that it would go to conference.  The speaker gave that assurance publicly. Later that evening, reporter...

August 5, 2017

Frank and free speech, RIP

This week the Washington Post committed the greatest national security breach in the history of our country, and hardly anyone is talking about it.  The Post printed transcripts of private telephone conversations between...

July 15, 2017

There's only one way to make health care affordable

The Senate is trying to repeal, reform, or replace the Affordable Care Act.  But nothing they're thinking of doing will make health care affordable, because they're leaving us out of their equations.  You and I are consumers of heal...

July 4, 2017

Some People Just Can't Take a Joke

Mel Brooks once joked, “Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.” Brooks understands humor. "Funny" is the joy we feel when we see someone else suffer. Not noble, perhaps, but that...

May 25, 2017

It’s not the story – it’s the headline

Mainstream news outlets are under criticism for some of their stories about President Trump.  Here are recent examples: CNN headline, May 10: "Sources: James Comey sought more resources for Russia investigation." In the second pa...

April 6, 2017

What Paul Newman taught me about the #NeverTrumps

I never understood the #NeverTrumps, those nominal Republican pundits and politicians who declared they would never vote for Donald Trump and would never accept him as their president if he won.  Some went even further.  When Trump won the ...

March 14, 2017

Global warming: Fake news becomes no news

For decades, we've heard the Chickens Little cry that the sky is warming.  Then, in 2009, a hack of climate researchers' emails at the University of East Anglia indicated that things weren't quite on the up-and-up, science-wise. ...

March 7, 2017

Let’s bomb North Korea!

Of all the little victories in the Cold War, few were as inspirational and instructive as the story of Irina Margareta Nistor and her movie revolution. Irina was a multilingual censor for Romanian State Television.  In 1985, she was approache...

March 1, 2017

Black victimhood: The club no one can join

In 2015, a woman was fired from several positions because of her race.  Liberals, whom you'd normally expect to be up in arms over this sort of injustice, were silent.  The media gave the story wide coverage and, as is their habit in ca...

January 10, 2017

Don’t forget to steal his wallet

So you’re walking down the street with an attitude, and you pass somebody you wanna beat up.  Maybe he said something that got under your skin.  Or maybe he looked at you in a way that screamed disrespect.  Or maybe he just had a...

November 17, 2016

Hillary's nightmares

Hillary can’t be sleeping very well these days as several unpleasant possibilities darken her future.  President Obama may pardon her, or he may not.  If not, President Trump will dominate her nightmares once again.  Will he...

November 1, 2016

Jim Comey’s impeccable comedic timing

Absurdist humor earns its laughs by violating our expectations.  It sets us up with a real-world premise, then pushes us off balance with a completely illogical punch line.  Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, L. Frank Baum’s O...

October 14, 2016

The little act that is destroying the country

In 1958, New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. issued an executive order that permitted municipal employees to be represented by unions for collective bargaining.  This order came to be called the “little Wagner act,” not because...

September 8, 2016

'Leverage'...because the Obama administration does not pay ransom

The Obama administration has admitted that it paid the Iranian regime $1.7 billion for what the administration describes as payment and interest on an obligation incurred during the Carter presidency.  Payment was made in several installments in...

September 3, 2016

Hillary's unknown unknowns

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld once described uncertainty as consisting of "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns."  Many of Hillary's unknowns are well known.  Mystery continues to surround her past action...