December 23, 2024

A Cold Christmas

Winter has come early, and in many places, the month of December has brought with it record or near record cold.  As I write, the eastern U.S. lies in the grip of extreme cold, with possible record lows tonight in Tennessee, South Carolina,...

December 11, 2024

Libertinism Is No Virtue

In the 1995 film version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the noble Col. Brandon refers to Mr. Willoughby as “the worst of libertines,” a word not much used today but common in Austen’s time.  A libertine was ...

November 23, 2024

Fleeing Florida!

For a host of reasons, it became convenient for progressives to suggest that large numbers were fleeing Florida in search of a better life. When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was a GOP presidential frontrunner, liberal Democrats dug up every scrap...

November 1, 2024

The Home Stretch

It’s the home stretch of the presidential campaign, and, as expected, the Democrats are pulling out all their familiar, nasty, tried-and-true attack points.  They’ve been using the same approach for 100 years, and sometimes it w...

October 20, 2024

The Real Way to Help Those in True Need

We are a rich country — rich enough that women like Cathy, the very young pregnant woman I saw last week working at Burger King, shouldn’t have to choose between keeping her child and holding on to essentials.  With a booming ec...

October 4, 2024

My Friend John

In late winter of 1966, my high school friend John, who was just 18, drove his car into a bridge abutment and died instantly. Something had gone terribly wrong.  John had gone off to a good Midwestern college, been elected president of h...

September 26, 2024

Crime and Kamala

If you visit Kamala Harris’s campaign website and click on “issues,” you will find a tepid list of conventional progressive topics — corporate greed, health care, education, child care, and climate change among them. ...

September 17, 2024

Kamala’s Tax-Gouging Plans

Prices continue to rise, and it is putting pressure on most Americans.  Kamala Harris won’t admit that, having unleashed inflation through $7 trillion in annual spending, she herself is a major source of this “gouging.”...

August 31, 2024

Each Man’s Purpose

I spent an hour this evening cutting and pulling bushes.  Normally, this would be an easy task, but in the late August heat and humidity, it was an unpleasant chore.  By the time I had finished, I was covered with sweat, and littl...

August 8, 2024

Little Debbie

Debby was the first hurricane to strike the continental U.S. in 2024.  After passing through the Caribbean, T.S. Debby tracked offshore along the Gulf Coast of Florida before becoming a Category One hurricane and making landfall in the rela...

August 5, 2024

Which Party Protects the Vulnerable?

A society can be judged by how well it protects those who are vulnerable.  Not by the number who have been made dependent on government via welfare — that is not protection — but by the protection individuals and traditional ins...

July 7, 2024

Biden Doth Protest Too Much

Søren Kierkegaard once said that “every assertion suggests its opposite.”  Shakespeare implied the same thing when he had Queen Gertrude in Hamlet say, “The Lady doth protest too much, methinks.” “Pro...

July 2, 2024

Progressives Shalt Steal

It’s election time, and you will hear a lot about “corporate greed” and “greedy billionaires” from the Democrats.  Already, Joe Biden has unveiled plans to raise corporate taxes by one third and slam billionair...

June 12, 2024

Life without Free Will

Robert Sapolsky has written a book entitled Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will (Penguin Press, 2023).  I cannot recommend this book, but it is a useful guide to the way liberals think about human freedom. I should have known...

May 23, 2024

Catastrophe Ahead

My father was born into a tenant-farming family in western Oklahoma just a few years before even that meager existence was swept away by the arrival of the Great Dust Bowl of the 1920s.  By hard work and intelligence, he worked his way thro...

May 4, 2024

Manhood under Attack

Women’s contribution to society is inestimable and worthy of a respect that it does not currently receive: women are mothers, wives, and guardians of morality as well as excellent workers in many professions.  Without them, quite lite...

May 2, 2024

What the Markets Are Saying (about Biden)

After a strong run in 2023 and early 2024, stock markets have been selling off lately.  I cannot predict whether this market sell-off will continue, but I can state what has happened so far and speculate as to why it has happened and whethe...

April 12, 2024

Vote Out the IRS

As the federal income tax deadline approaches, it’s time to reflect on how well the Internal Revenue Service is serving the American people, and whether we might do well to abolish it. Recent polls reveal that 64% of Americans believe t...

April 3, 2024

Progressive Hypocrisy and Clarence Thomas

In My Grandfather’s Son, Clarence Thomas tells the story of his contentious confirmation hearing in great detail.  Back in the fall of 1991, Thomas faced unexpected charges of sexual harassment brought by liberals attempting not just ...

March 21, 2024

AI Is Rigged

A.I. is rigged.  When looking up any question susceptible of a liberal bias, A.I. appears to provide a biased answer. Today I asked my A.I. “copilot,” “How long does it take to re-fuel a gas-powered car?” Even ...

March 7, 2024

Morning Again, Again

In 1984, the Reagan-Bush campaign aired a political commercial that helped seal their landslide re-election, winning 49 states and 525 electoral votes.  “Morning in America“ is an iconic piece of political history — a vide...

February 15, 2024

Privacy Is a Fundamental Value

The administrative class delights in imposing its views on the rest of us, especially when it involves our private lives.  Small businesses are made to prepare wedding cakes for gays; young children are forced to study sexual practices from...

January 28, 2024

Racing to Death

Late at night, I hear the sound of vehicles racing on the highway a mile from where I live.  In the morning, I sometimes read reports of crashes, some of them fatal and some just blocks from the entrance to my community.  I grieve...

January 12, 2024

Waiting to Be Arrested

Tahir Hamut Izgil is a well known Uyghur poet who fled his country in 2017, just ahead of his almost certain arrest, torture, and internment in a Chinese concentration camp.  With the help of his friend and translator Joshua L. Freeman, Izg...

December 31, 2023

The Devil on Christmas Day

On Christmas afternoon in the Tampa suburb of Largo, Florida, a 14-year-old teenager reportedly began arguing with his 15-year-old brother over the dollar value of presents the two had received. The argument spilled over to the front porch, where the...

December 17, 2023

Now Is Our Moment

It seems that our universe is 26.7 billion years old, since the Big Bang at least, and that it stretches for seven trillion light-years in diameter.  Those are just estimates, and it may be that the most recent Big Bang is just one of an en...

December 10, 2023

If Global Warmists Are Going to Panic about Something...

It’s cold, but climate czar John Kerry doesn’t give a fart.  Or maybe he does, since he seems to have interrupted his talk on carbon releases with an audible emission of his own.  The audience pretended not to hear, bu...

November 26, 2023

What’s Extreme?

Conservatives are used to being called “extreme.” Speaker Mike Johnson is ripped by liberal media for his “extreme Christian nationalist” views and for his belief in covenant marriage.  That is to say, Johnson bel...

November 11, 2023

The Power of Love

According to the left, which now controls most public schooling along with media, corporate culture, and politics in America, there is no difference between men and women.  Those very words, “men” and “women,” must b...

October 31, 2023

Hamas and the Holocaust

One should not trivialize the Holocaust by equating it with October’s attacks by Hamas.  In the actual Holocaust, 6 million Jews were murdered along with an estimated 5 million non-Jews.  On October 7, some 1,400 Israelis, m...

October 24, 2023

Another Long, Hot Summer

A recent story from the New York Times, “Why Summers May Never Be the Same,” seems to be another example of climate hysteria gone wild.  According to the article, “To many Americans, the season felt like a climate inflecti...

October 6, 2023

Marx Was a Bastard

Karl Marx was a bastard.  He was a man who never worked a day in his life, a parasite who never produced a single object of value and who survived and wrote by sponging off others, especially his impressionable protégé, Friedr...

September 23, 2023

How to Say No

Parents find it hard to say "no" to their children. According to one source, parents "worry that a "no" will harm their relationship, or they are afraid to anger their children and "cause a battle." For parents, the...

September 9, 2023

Not a Time for Moral Vacuity

The number of murders in America has risen to "unprecedented numbers" under Biden's watch, and the Biden administration has no answer to the problem.  Even CNN and the New York Times have published the numbers, though refusing...

August 27, 2023

Eight Little Voices

The first GOP presidential debate was held on August 23 in Milwaukee.  Present were eight candidates whose combined polling was less than that of Donald Trump.  For two hours, they talked about being the future of the Republican P...

August 13, 2023

How Is the Government Preparing for a Cold Winter?

Most of us have trouble thinking to the end of the month.  This can be demonstrated by the fact that 64% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.  Actually, most are permanently in debt, what with credit card balances, car payments...

August 2, 2023

27 Billion People, and Climate Change Not High on Their List

There have been an estimated 27 billion people on earth over the course of human existence.  The world's population today is approximately 8 billion, with 19 billion human beings having preceded us on our planet.  Each of thos...

July 22, 2023

Kamala Harris's Population Bomb

Kamala Harris recently came out with another shocking statement, and one that made it clear just where progressives stand on euthanasia, the right to life, and related issues.  On July 14, speaking at Coppin State University in Baltimore, H...

July 8, 2023

Nazis on the Left?

Riley Gaines is a former NCAA female swimmer who has spoken out against the so-called right of males to compete as females.  In response, she has been attacked, verbally and physically, by transgender activists and their supporters. ...

June 23, 2023

Marriage Stands in the Way of the State

Kevin Costner's wife of many years, Christine Baumgartner, has filed for divorce.  I was struck by the routine manner in which the news of the filing was reported, as if it were "just another divorce," hardly worth reporting....

June 13, 2023

Foretelling America's Descent into Totalitarianism

Michael Polanyi was born at a particularly inauspicious place and time: in Budapest, Hungary, in March of 1891, just as central Europe was heading toward two devastating world wars, economic collapse, and a half-century of communist totalitarianism....

May 28, 2023

How Modernism Is Fascism

During a seminar on Modernism, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, I delivered a presentation linking modernist ideas with fascism; communism; and other anti-democratic, authoritarian political systems.  My presentation was...

May 26, 2023

How to Destroy a People

Twenty years ago, I interviewed a young woman for an entry-level position at the prestigious university where I taught.  I had read the candidate's Ph.D. thesis, with considerable reservations, and was eager to ask about her scholarly i...

May 11, 2023

The Progressives Are Laughing at Us

Eighteen months ago, Fed chair Jerome Powell said repeatedly: "there's no inflation — don't worry, it's only transient."  At the grocery this morning, I paid twice as much for a bag of coffee as I had before....

May 5, 2023

Love Hurts. So Do Progressive Policies.

I've always wondered why liberals would support legislation that obviously harms them.  Tax increases, open borders, defunding the police, weakness abroad, eliminating gas-powered cars — these measures harm most people, including ...

April 15, 2023

Pharaoh on the Potomac

Governmental suppression of competing ideologies has a long history, going back, at least, 4,000 years to the time of the pharaohs in ancient Egypt.  As Toby Wilkinson writes, in the Twelfth Dynasty (1938–1755 B.C.), the pharaohs ...

April 13, 2023

Surviving an Earthquake

In the spring of 1987, I walked through the abandoned city of Kotor, Montenegro (then Yugoslavia) on the Adriatic Coast.  In the devastating 6.9 magnitude earthquake on April 15, 1979, Kotor was almost completely destroyed.  Signs...

March 26, 2023

The Group the Chinese Communists Fear the Most

I have rarely heard it mentioned in the mainstream media, but, according to reports, during the 1990s in communist China, thirty thousand members of Falun Gong were rounded up and executed.  The founder of Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi, fled China...

March 11, 2023

Regional Racism and the Democrats Who Love It

The accepted definition of "racism" is "prejudice against members of a different ethnic group," with "ethnic" defined as a "subgroup ... with a common national or cultural tradition."  By this definit...

February 28, 2023

Are You Freer than You Were Two Years Ago?

Everywhere you look, you're told what to think, what to say, what to do, what to buy.  We are enslaved as never before in this country, and half of us want more enslavement and for government to "take care of us," even at the ...

February 18, 2023

Frozen, and Not from Global Warming

It's been cold for so long, and it's only early winter.  I have jackets of different thicknesses lying around the house, ready to layer or remove as the temperature outside fluctuates by fifty degrees.  My plants are cover...

February 1, 2023

Let Criminal Faces Be Shown

"Police release images of suspects in Iverson Mall shooting."  As is often the case, the images were of athletic young black men wielding powerful weapons, firing at close range, apparently with intent to kill. I ofte...

January 18, 2023

Why Government Can't Be Compassionate

Watching the old film The Bounty, I was struck by the depiction of the horrors of Captain Bligh's authority — and the charming face of the mutineers, especially Lt. Fletcher Christian, played by a young Mel Gibson.  Taking the his...

January 16, 2023

We're All Chicagoans Now

Much has been made about California leading the country: the Golden State is said to be America's future, and to some extent, that is happening.  But in other respects, as a nation, we're becoming more like Chicago, and Chicago is o...

December 26, 2022

We Must Know the Past

Michael Grant, the well known interpreter of classical Greece and Rome, begins his classic book The Ancient Mediterranean by stating that "we cannot understand our past, and cannot therefore understand ourselves, unless we know something of the ...

December 13, 2022

A Life Beyond the State

It is not the State, but individuals that constitute a nation. For most of its first 150 years, the U.S. federal government subsisted on a budget equivalent to two percent of GDP, mostly from tariffs and none of it from personal or corporate incom...

November 24, 2022

Are You Freer than You Were Two Years Ago?

Twenty twenty-two was an election in which authoritarians employed every sort of disinformation.  They ran on "character" while engaging in corruption on a multi-trillion-dollar scale.  They rolled out the old "take...

November 13, 2022

What does Joe Biden say to the scourge of human-trafficking?

I woke up at 2:30, unable to sleep and overwhelmed by thoughts of the millions of young girls and boys who have been forced into sex-trafficking.  My mind was filled with images of these children, alone and afraid, living in terror, drugged...

October 28, 2022

Joe Biden and the Cost of Living

I've always thought the phrase "cost of living" was an odd one.  Ideally, there should not be a "cost" to live.  As divinely created individuals, all of us have the right to walk the earth and to live freel...

October 13, 2022

A Conservative Life

I woke up early this morning thinking of how blessed my life is. I live a simple life, in a small house on a quiet street.  I own a few possessions that I have inherited or acquired over a lifetime, but nothing of much value.  ...

October 6, 2022

Why Build There?

Hurricane Ian was the only major tropical storm to strike the U.S. so far this season, but it was a powerful one — among the most powerful in U.S. history.  Parts of southwest and central Florida suffered extensive damage and loss of ...

October 2, 2022

Remember: Leftist Media Polls Are Often Wrong

The usual election spin has begun.  "Biden's not really so bad.  Democrats will retain the House and Senate.  Newsom will step in for the '24 presidential election.  Dems will win everything......

September 13, 2022

Another South Asian Flood? Still Not Climate Change.

We are told by a mob of climate activists that last month's flooding in Pakistan resulted from climate change.  This is no surprise: everything, whether rain or the price of broccoli, is now said to result from climate change. ...

September 2, 2022

Biden's Semi-Fascist America

We live in an Orwellian world in which words have lost their exact meanings, or in the case of President Biden, any meaning at all. Last Thursday at a fundraising event in Maryland, Biden said the "extreme MAGA philosophy" is "like ...

August 25, 2022

How Terrified Should We Be of Hurricane Season This Year?

Once again, as nearly every year, officials at NOAA and other agencies called for 2022 to be a "very active" hurricane season.  In its May 24 release, NOAA predicted "an "above-average hurricane activity this year ...

August 18, 2022

What Does It Mean for Conservatism to Be 'Compassionate'?

George W. Bush used to speak of "compassionate conservatism," when in fact his presidency was not particularly compassionate or conservative.  In reality, it represented a weak conservatism that attempted to hold back the floodgat...

August 4, 2022

Biden's Naked

In "The Emperor's New Clothes," the emperor is gulled by a conman who convinces him to purchase "invisible clothes."  Determined that he is right — and determined not to admit his mistake — the emperor pa...

July 21, 2022

Saving the Planet, or Themselves?

Since well before the publication of Al Gore's Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit in 1992, we've been told we can "save the planet" by eliminating fossil fuels.  Many environmentalists ride bikes to work, r...

July 8, 2022

On This Important Metric, America Is a Failure

Recently, a Connecticut teen, reportedly a gang member with an extensive rap sheet, was arrested in connection with 18 shootings.  For years this young man has been out on the streets, committing crimes, getting arrested, and repeatedly bei...

June 15, 2022

Biden's Deathly Presidency

For four years under President Trump, America enjoyed peace, security, and unparalleled prosperity.  Trump's presidency was a historic era of good times in which we began to regain faith in the American Dream.  Now we have the...

May 30, 2022

The Ugliest Form of Antagonism...and It's for You

Roger Scruton was a British philosopher who spent his life defending conservative values.  Sir Roger, as he was after his knighthood in 2016, saw the antagonist culture as a rejection of inherited values, including gender distinctions, capi...

May 14, 2022

The Silent Invasion and War at Home

It has been chilling to watch the steady number of deaths, the territory invaded, the executions and rapes, the fear and the flight.  It is especially shocking because we had peace for so long, but now we see all the possibilities of evil coming...

April 30, 2022

Woke Economics Makes Everyone Broke

Another name for "woke" is "warped," or better yet, "perverse."  A recent book, Vivek Ramaswamy's Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam (New York and Nashville, 2021), addresses tha...

April 15, 2022

Regional Racism: What It Is, and Why It's Getting Worse

In One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (LSU Press, 1982), sociologist John Shelton Reed wrote convincingly of what he called "regional racism." The accepted definition of "racism" is "prejudice against member...

March 26, 2022

No, AOC, Humans Are Not Killing the Earth

By 2050, there will be nearly ten billion human beings on the planet. According to AOC, those nearly 10 billion humans will place a major burden on the Earth.  With what they need to live a comfortable existence — the house, car, u...

March 17, 2022

An Injustice Worse than the Plight of George Floyd

The names of Terry Aultman and Brenda Aultman are not well known, but they should be, more so than that of George Floyd. George Floyd was a repeat offender with a long rap sheet who was resisting arrest at the time of his death.  He did ...

March 7, 2022

Rising Seas and Government Greed

Rising gas prices are an immediate problem — rising seas are not.  Yet in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Biden had nothing new to say about bringing gas prices down.  Releasing a few barrels from the St...

March 4, 2022

Chastity Is the Key to Happiness

The word chastity has an oddly quaint sound, like the idea of a fringed carriage or a white picket fence, and it has been mocked by a host of modernists from Remy de Gourmont to Havelock Ellis and Aldous Huxley.  But Pope John Paul II was r...

February 19, 2022

Biden the Bloodshedder Steals Our Livelihood

Ecclesiasticus 34:22 reads, "He who takes away his neighbor's living slays him; and he who defrauds the laborer of his hire is a bloodshedder." Biden's cavalier attitude toward the loss of American jobs must be judged according t...

February 10, 2022

Our Authoritarian Moment

In The Authoritarian Moment, Ben Shapiro warns of the rise of censorship, voter fraud, fake news, and other leftist tactics for seizing control.  According to Shapiro, these authoritarian abuses have been especially prevalent since the star...

January 29, 2022

The Unbearable Racism of COVID

The media like to say that "COVID has struck minorities harder than other races" or, as the Washington Post has it, COVID "ravages" minorities rather than other races.  This is a loaded and utterly dishonest statement, a...

January 23, 2022

Prudence Is the Definition of Conservatism

In a recent year, only 69 girls born in America were named "Prudence."  That's a shame, because Prudence is not only a lovely name, but also an important virtue — one that we ought frequently to be reminded of. For co...

January 14, 2022

Biden's Immigration Policy Should Infuriate Hispanics

Emma Lazarus lived only to age 38, but she composed one of the greatest poems on the topic of American immigration.  In "The New Colossus," she spoke of a "world-wide welcome" for the "huddled masses yearning to bre...

January 12, 2022

Good News! It's Snowing!

Recently, Molly Taft at Gizmodo proclaimed, "California's Epic Snowstorms Are Great News."  Great  news, indeed, with snowfall running some 150% above normal for the Sierra Nevadas, or "200% of average for snow ...

January 1, 2022

My Wish for a Healthier, Happier New Year

I spent eight years in Japan, living as the less affluent Japanese do in a small, noisy, and cold apartment, with no car, and eating mostly rice, noodles, vegetables, and fish.  It was a simple lifestyle, difficult in some ways but clean an...

December 17, 2021

A Better Fate for America Than Suicide

No thoughtful person believes that human beings can substantially change the Earth's climate.  Even the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of climate activists rather than objective observers, has admitted th...

December 10, 2021

Progressives, Thou Shalt Not Steal

As a child, I owned very little, but what I owned was mine, and what others owned was not to be stolen or even touched without their permission.  Only later did I understand how important this principle of ownership was to the survival of m...

November 25, 2021

Forget 'Friendsgiving': Remember to Be Grateful Today

According to theatlantic.com, "Friendsgiving" has "become a widely celebrated holiday in its own right," one that, among many Americans, may be replacing traditional Thanksgiving celebrations.  For these people, the holi...

November 19, 2021

Yes, Democrats, let's just give our oil reserves away

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, created following the oil crisis of the 1970s, exists to supply Americans during a war or other emergency.  Democrats are now calling for oil to be released from the reserve to help reduce the high gas price...

November 5, 2021

How Much Would You Like to Be a Serf?

In her remarkable trilogy entitled The Bourgeois Era, Deirdre McCloskey studies the history, evolution, and importance of the middle class from its rise in Western Europe some 400 years ago to the magnificent heights of affluence and power it enjoys ...

November 1, 2021

What Stops Us from Killing Those Weaker than Ourselves?

Thirty years ago, I was hiking alone on a section of the Appalachian Trail known as "Rocky Top" when I encountered two stocky young men.  The thought occurred to me that they could easily kill me, toss my body in the brush, and ge...

October 28, 2021

Can America Wrest Back Its Happy Future?

The Democrats' $3.5-trillion Build Back Better spending plan — actually a $5- to $10-trillion bill, depending on the time horizon — has reportedly been scaled back.  Not to zero, as it should have been, but to $2 trillion ...

October 21, 2021

Dictators, Double Standards, and the Taliban

In her brilliant foreign policy essay "Dictators and Double Standards," Jeane Kirkpatrick made the commonsense case for always supporting our friends and opposing our enemies.  That policy might seem obvious, but Biden seems deter...

October 8, 2021

Communist Elitism

In communist Yugoslavia, where I lived for a year, Marshall Tito claimed at least 34 villas as his "home," though officially all were "owned" by the state. Many of these palatial homes were seized from the nation's former roya...

September 17, 2021

Warming Causes Cooling, Says Climate Scientist

Let's get this right: global warming caused the record cold in Texas last winter.  And the climate will be even colder for decades to come because the climate is warming, so let's spend trillions to make it colder.  Global...

September 3, 2021

What the Black Death and COVID Have in Common

Having killed as many as 200 million people in Europe, Asia, and North Africa, the Black Death began to lift in the years 1348–49.  Europe had lost between a third and half of its people.  In many cases, entire villages stoo...

August 21, 2021

Joe Biden, Cooing Cannibal

I listened to part of President Biden's recent speech congratulating himself upon Senate passage of the $1.9-trillion infrastructure bill — a "bipartisan" plan that seventeen Republicans were foolish enough to support.  ...

August 14, 2021

America the Violent

Another horrific instance of violence in America occurred on August 7: the killing of Chicago police officer Ella French and the shooting of her partner.  The two brothers arrested in this case include 21-year-old Emonte Morgan, who receive...

August 5, 2021

Homeland Insecurity for Conservatives

The Department of Homeland Security was created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks for the purpose of protecting America against terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda.  It was not intended to spy on ordinary Americans or track their political affi...

July 20, 2021

The Left's Contempt for the Masses

Karl Marx is often portrayed as the hero of the masses.  After all, he believed in the creation of a "worker's paradise" following the temporary reign of the "vanguard of the proletariat" — that small, highly e...

July 9, 2021

All Lives Matter When It Comes to Murder

In the wake of the killings of George Floyd; Daunte Wright; and Andrew Brown, Jr., which have received huge national attention in the media, it's time to establish the truth in our thinking about race and crime.  How common are killings...

July 1, 2021

How to Stop Global Warming: Misery or Death

By 2050, there will be nearly ten billion human beings on the planet. Each of these humans will, just via flatulence, produce a good deal of gaseous emissions.  These emissions are the source of CO2 and methane, as well as frequent embar...

June 27, 2021

Another Brutal Murder, and Silence from the White House

Early on June 17, Elsa Mikeska was shot and killed outside a Houston gym.  The 62-year-old grandmother had just pulled into the gym parking lot when two men in an older Chevy Suburban got out, apparently demanding money, and then shot her d...

June 19, 2021

Biden's Crooked Path to the Middle Class

The New York Times headlined a recent article, "Biden's $6 trillion budget aims for path to middle class, financed by the rich."  But is it possible to confer middle-class status on individuals just by giving them a handful of...

June 3, 2021

Biden's Idea of Democracy

Nearly every statement from the president, and other Democrat leaders as well, is now being touted as a "defense of democracy."  "Democracy," in fact, has become the left's favorite word for defending its violent ass...

May 20, 2021

What Trump Meant to Millions

I loved President Trump because he stood up for the ordinary people of America, those who for so long had been kept in cultural servitude by the political elite. Trump endowed ordinary Americans with a sense of possibilities by returning manufacturin...

May 7, 2021

Whatever Happened to QAnon?

Back in February, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of her committee roles, despite her expression of "regret" for some of her more extreme views.  One of the charges against Rep. Greene is that she has supported QAnon, who...

April 29, 2021

Biden's Tax Cuts Won't Hurt the Rich, but They Will Hurt You

Like those looters in Portland, Seattle, and other U.S. cities, progressives in Washington think the property of others is theirs for the taking.  They control a majority in both house of Congress and the presidency, so they believe they ha...

April 10, 2021

The Left's Idea of a Happy Future

Liberals are fond of predicting the future, and their predictions, which are always dire, then become the pretext for more government.  Otherwise, they say, we'll all starve, a class war will break out, or the Earth will come to an end....

April 3, 2021

When Everybody Is a White Supremacist

For a long time, liberals have been accusing conservatives of being conspiracy theorists.  Say anything about Hunter Biden, and you're a conspiracy theorist.  Urge Andrew Cuomo to resign, and you're a conspiracy theorist. ...

March 23, 2021

Whenever You Disagree with Liberals, You're a Conspiracy Theorist

The proper definition of "conspiracy theory" is the "false belief in a secret force influencing events."  Liberals used to say Nancy Reagan's astrologist, Joan Quigley, directed American foreign policy by way of Nanc...

March 19, 2021

What All Riots, Including America's Today, Have in Common

In the 1770s, London was a riotous place.  The city had always been a center of liberal opinion, and thousands of residents belonged to radical groups.  Apprentices were notorious for their rowdy behavior, and secret societies tha...

March 2, 2021

At CPAC, Trump Doubles Down on Populism

In his CPAC speech on Sunday, former president Trump articulated a populist vision for the future of the Republican Party and for America.  At the heart of the president's thinking lies a powerful message of hope for America's worki...

February 20, 2021

Suddenly, It's All a Conspiracy Theory

Gov. Cuomo continues to insist that nursing home–related charges against him are a "conspiracy theory."  Cuomo is referring to suggestions that thousands of seniors may have died as a result of his actions and that he and ot...

February 11, 2021

Floridians Shiver through the Coldest Winter in Two Decades

In December, Floridians celebrated their ninth coldest Christmas on record, and the coldest in 21 years.  Even South Florida, that frost-free region of palm trees and margaritas, was shivering on Christmas Day.  Broward County iss...

January 23, 2021

Joe Biden's Concept of an American Nation

Like millions of others, I listened to President Trump's Farewell Address with a mix of admiration and sorrow.  The president's great accomplishments are impossible to refute — the creation of a booming economy, record tax cut...

January 16, 2021

Our Mounting Orwellian Nightmare

So we are to imagine that those who objected to Biden's having stolen the election are responsible for the violence at the Capitol?  And that, going forward, any public official who questions Biden's win should be removed from offic...

January 11, 2021

'Resexualizing Necrophilia': A Look at What Your Kids' College Professors Care About

Ever since its founding in 1883, the Modern Language Association has been considered the leading professional group for college faculty in language and literature.  Each year, it holds a meeting — this year virtual, but featuring the ...

December 26, 2020

If You Disagree, You're a Rat

Sen. Ron Johnson, among the best qualified and most level-headed of senators, has been labeled a conspiracy theorist by the media because he questioned the validity of the 2020 vote.  We're at the point where any questioning of the libe...

December 11, 2020

Why They Hate Trump

Simply put, they hate Trump because he represents ordinary Americans — those who are not part of the political and corporate elite, who lack the advantages and connections of the Deep State, who are not media, academics, or celebs.  P...

December 1, 2020

Why It Matters When New York's Governor Spits on SCOTUS's Defense of Religious Freedom

During the COVID-19 epidemic, Gov. Cuomo of New York and other governors have tried to shut down or limit attendance at America's churches. Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that Cuomo's COVID response, which limited church attendance to as f...

October 31, 2020

High Noon in America: Will You Fight or Hide?

By coincidence, I was watching High Noon this week, just as polls showed President Trump trailing Biden by 9 to10 points nationally.  Like the hero of High Noon, the president sometimes seems to be fighting alone.  It's high n...

October 29, 2020

Trump's Most Exciting Campaign Pitch: A Return to Normal Life

"A normal life — that's all we want, a normal life."  That was President Trump's message one Monday evening in Sanford, and the following Friday in Ocala, Florida.  He repeated the idea in Carson City, Neva...

October 13, 2020

Homer Understood Climate Change

For students of ancient civilizations, one of the curious facts is that the site of Troy (Hisarlik in western Turkey), whose walls Homer describes as overlooking the sea, is now 6.5 kilometers inland at the closest point to the Aegean.  Mil...

September 29, 2020

Mr. Nowhere Man

A crowd of about twenty gathered recently to see Joe Biden in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin — the same week that President Trump held rallies in Nevada, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  Aside from the Wisconsin trip, B...

September 11, 2020

Who's the Real Joe Biden?

Is there any such thing as "the real Joe Biden" in the sense of an actual, breathing human being with enduring loyalties and principles?  His long political record and recent behavior provide some idea. The choice of Kamala Har...

August 30, 2020

Silence Is OK

Today's protesters carry signs claiming that "Silence Is Complicity."  They believe that systemic racism exists in the U.S. and that silence perpetuates it.  Only by supporting or even joining the street protests can...

August 10, 2020

How to Stop Children Intent on Destruction

President Trump has labeled today's protesters "anarchists," and rightly so.  They stream through the streets, breaking windows, bashing cars, setting fires, blocking highways, occupying city blocks, beating up innocent bystan...

July 25, 2020

Democrats Have Completely Abandoned Civility

On July 20, Nancy Pelosi said that if President Trump refuses to accept the results of the November election, he will have to be "fumigated" out of the White House.  Fumigation is a technique used against insects, and the idea tha...

July 10, 2020

How Antifa and Black Lives Matter Compare with Satan

John Milton understood evil.  Some say he understood it so well that he made Satan, not Man, the most interesting character in Paradise Lost (1667).  Regardless, what he recorded in that epic of Man's fall from Grace is one of...

June 20, 2020

Statues Are Part of History

In the great cathedral at Como, Italy, there are two large statues: one of Pliny the Elder and the other of his nephew, Pliny the Younger.  Despite calls from some in the church to remove them, the images of these two pagan writers have sto...

June 15, 2020

How President Trump Just Won Re-Election

It's visuals that take down a president, and the video of George Floyd's death is about as graphic as it gets — just like the victims of Hurricane Katrina stranded on rooftops, waving for help that was slow to come. Katrina was the e...

June 4, 2020

What Justice Demands

Nearly everyone has seen the video of George Floyd's killing, and no one with a good heart could help but be saddened.  George Floyd, himself convicted of the violent crime of aggravated robbery, suspected of attempting to pass counterf...

May 22, 2020

Pelosi's Leninist Stimulus Bill

As soon as the Bolsheviks took over Russia in October 1917, Vladimir Lenin began churning out rubles.  In fact, he spent half the state's revenue on just the printing of new currency.  Within a year, the ruble was wo...

May 11, 2020

The Dishonest Politics of Interracial Violence

Recently in Sacramento, police appear to have solved a 40-year-old cold case.  Based partly on DNA evidence, a black man now 71 years old has been charged in the brutal rape and murder of Robin Brooks.   Like Robin Brooks, each...

April 26, 2020

The Red Death and Other Catastrophes

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842) tells the story of a prince and his court who flee to the countryside to escape an outbreak of infectious disease.  Unfortunately, the disease, taking the form of a masked...

April 13, 2020

The Left Is an Existential Threat

The March 2020 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the "existential threat" to the Earth posed by global warming, despite the fact that no significant global warming seems to be taking place.  With its appealing cover a...

March 25, 2020

This Too Will Pass

Norman F. Cantor's book, In the Wake of the Plague, tells the story of the Great Plague in 14th-century Europe and the lasting effects of that horrible pandemic.  The medieval plague was so destructive, killing as much as 60% of the pop...

February 29, 2020

Earth to Climate Alarmists: Warming Is Good

It's cold tonight, and I sit at my desk, wishing it were warmer.  Even with central heat and air, winter is a difficult time.  My sinuses are inflamed, my knuckles are dry and red, and my joints are sore with the cold.  Every year ...

February 21, 2020

The Wages of Promiscuous Sex Is Death

Once more, the wisdom of the ancient world has been proven true. A new report by British researchers shows a strong association between the number of one's lifetime sexual partners and one's risk of developing cancer and other se...

February 11, 2020

Democrats Trot Out 'Peak Oil' Again, and Are Just as Wrong as Ever

Just when we thought it was safe to assume a reliable supply of oil due to the miracle of fracking, liberals have come up with a new excuse to shift from fossil fuels to renewables.  They've discovered — as everyone invested in oi...

January 30, 2020

Coronavirus: Dems Rooting for a Global Pandemic

Russiagate didn't work; Ukraine didn't work; the economy is growing at a healthy rate.  Nothing works against this president — but maybe the coronavirus will do it!  That seems to be the attitude among liberals in th...

January 15, 2020

Roger Scruton: A Defender of Life on a Human Scale

Roger Scruton passed away on Sunday, January 12, 2020.  Scruton was among the most original and perceptive conservative thinkers of our time.  In over forty books and countless articles and posts, he worked to defend the ideas of national s...

December 25, 2019

Liberals at Yuletide

"And So This Is Christmas," released as "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" in 1972, is a Beatles Christmas classic.  I enjoy a lot of Beatles songs, but this one has always been a problem for me.  Voted the most popula...

December 7, 2019

The Left Screams 'Armageddon,' but Is Anyone Listening?

Liberals like Nancy Pelosi are prone to using words like "Armageddon," and yet, so far, we have not yet arrived at the end.  Most Americans go on living in comfortable homes with more than enough to eat, dependable utility service...

November 18, 2019

A Liberal Doomsayer Has the Solution to All Our Woes

Ian Bremmer is a respected thinker who, as President of Eurasia Group, has a large following that includes Lawrence Summers, Bill Gates, and Christine Lagarde.  In Us vs. Them (New York, 2018) and a host of other books, Bremmer presents a f...

October 21, 2019

Elizabeth Warren's Character

I grew up in Oklahoma City, attending a high school a few miles away from the one Elizabeth Warren attended.  Like Warren, I won a state championship in speech and debate.  While we were one year apart in school, our childhood exp...

October 6, 2019

Trump vs. Warren: Trump Builds, Warren Destroys

President Trump's vision of our country is America First.  Unlike all presidents of the past 30 years, Donald Trump is not afraid of saying he puts his own people first.  Everything he does is in the interest of ordinary Ameri...

October 4, 2019

Democrats' Contempt for the Sanctity of Life

Ed Buck, a prominent Democrat donor and fundraiser, has been charged with battery, administering illegal drugs, and operating a drug house.  The charges paint a disturbing picture of this wealthy scion of liberal politics.  At thi...

September 6, 2019

Liberal Libido

One major difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives are generally more restrained in their sexual behavior.  Liberals are not.  Much of the high-minded talk of liberals about tolerance and open-mindedness...

August 23, 2019

Recession by Someday

"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." Lies beget other lies, and with them come anger and division.  That's what has been happening ever since Donald Trump was elected: false witness against the presiden...

August 12, 2019

We're All Going to Starve to Death...Again

According to the draft of a new United Nations IPCC report, "Climate Change and Land," the world's land and water resources are in dire shape.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report was produced by 108 exp...

July 29, 2019

It's No Longer about Equality

The Squad is offended because someone finally talked back.  Even after some foul-mouthed attacks on the president of the United States, the Squad members thought they should be immune to criticism.  That's the problem: not the...

July 4, 2019

America under Attack

America is a providential nation, chosen by God always to be a beacon of freedom and hope.  In the freedom and opportunity it offers its citizens and in the example it offers to other nations, America is that "city upon a hill" en...

June 30, 2019

Democrats' New Favorite Word to Bludgeon Trump: 'Ethical'

Every few months, progressives shift their attack, introducing or recycling one theme after another.  First, it was "collusion."  Then, it was "obstruction."  Now the word is "ethical."...

May 27, 2019

Fixing Income Inequality

In a recent op-ed in Barron's (April 18, 2019), Professor Michael Pettis of Peking University points out the dangers of income inequality, comparing our situation today with that of the late 1920s.  This comparison is commonplace among ...

May 13, 2019

Don't You Know It's the End of the World?

The annual United Nations Global Environment Outlook is just out, and it goes way beyond anything previously "reported."  Environmentalists are desperate to eliminate fossil fuels and shift energy production to their favored indus...

April 22, 2019

Trump Will Definitely, Definitely Be Re-Elected

Leftists have been licking their chops over 2020, citing a host of reasons why President Trump will definitely, definitely be defeated.  Among these are the "crimes" in the newly released Mueller report; the supposed failure of th...

April 9, 2019

Socialism or Communism: Call It What You Will

For decades, Bernie Sanders has proclaimed that he is a socialist, but is he a communist? A common definition of communism is a system in which all means of production are owned, and all workers employed, by the state.  A familiar defini...

March 24, 2019

Beyond Race, Class, and Sex

The default setting for present-day intellectuals is race, class, and sex.  Nearly every academic study, as well as innumerable general books and the entire liberal media, relies on the hackneyed notion that social identity constitutes the ...

March 13, 2019

Democratic Presidential Candidates' Perfect Orwell's Language Manipulation

Seventy-three years ago, in his now classic essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell examined the deceitful nature of political speech in his day.  He offered some superb examples of words that mask their actual me...

February 18, 2019

The Joy of Marijuana?

Last week, Kamala Harris admitted that she had smoked marijuana and that, unlike Bill Clinton, she actually "inhaled."  Recreational use of marijuana should be legal, she declared, because "it brings a lot of people joy....

January 25, 2019

Propaganda: The Bread and Butter of the Progressive Left

I've just googled "Russian collusion" and come up with 24 million results.  This despite the fact that no credible evidence exists of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian agents.  How is it possible that ...

January 13, 2019

It's Diet Season Again

The holidays are over, and it's time to shed those extra pounds.  Marie lost the weight, and you can, too, or your money back.  The same with other diet plans, all guaranteed to work – only for most people, the weight co...

January 1, 2019

The Great Depression of 2019?

Happy new year.  Now let's turn our attention to the Great Depression of 2019. Depending on the metric, things are the best they've been since 2000 or even 1968.  Employment, consumer confidence, you name it – the...

December 20, 2018

Why We're Divided

Senator Schumer has rejected the President's request for funding a border wall, even withdrawing an earlier offer of $1.6 billion. As I write, Congress is working on a stop-gap measure to avoid a shutdown but with no funding for the wall. This ac...

December 6, 2018

Paris Burns, and Macron Backs Down

Following weeks of rioting, President Macron backed down on his costly carbon taxes.  As in other European countries, the French decided that heavy taxation of fossil fuels, putatively designed to slow global warming, just wasn't worth ...

November 20, 2018

Don't Paint It Black on Thanksgiving Day

On this Thanksgiving Day, I have lots to be thankful for.  I live in a wonderful country, have a wonderful family, and enjoy freedoms that many in this world do not.  This Thanksgiving, I will sit down to a beautiful meal prepared...

November 7, 2018

Tornado Alley Jogs South and East

Even as the left has failed to gain control of the energy industry via legislation, it has labored to cement the link between fossil fuels and climate change.  Leftists argue that climate change is a life-threatening problem demanding a gov...

October 19, 2018

A Day to Celebrate the Father of Modern Conservatism

Today is the centennial of the birth of Russell Kirk, considered by many the father of modern conservatism.  It's a day we should celebrate because Russell Kirk was a courageous intellectual warrior in the defense of traditional conserv...

October 3, 2018

Monkey Business in Florida...and Everywhere Else

In the 1952 movie Monkey Business, Carey Grant plays Dr. Barnaby Fulton, a researcher working on an anti-aging treatment that he tries out on himself.  As it turns out, the secret to youth lies not in his pill, but in chemicals accidentally...

September 3, 2018

RIP, VS Naipaul: A Great Conservative Writer

V.S. Naipaul died on August 9 at his home in London.  Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, Naipaul was one of the great conservative writers of our time.  Among his best known novels are A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend...

August 15, 2018

Let the Bad Times Roll

The left is hoping for bad times, and soon. If not this fall, then before the 2020 presidential election.  They would rather see harm done to America than see Trump succeed.  A market crash, a war in Asia or the Middle East, an...

August 4, 2018

Florida's Mr. Nowhere Man Faces a Challenge

This is the year when non-politicians will oust the professionals.  Among the longest serving of these career politicians is Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida.  Nelson, who began practicing law in 1970, was elected as a state representa...

July 12, 2018

Abolish ICE, Abolish America

Universalism is a fundamental pillar of liberal thought.  According to universalist ideology, all human beings, all faiths, and all cultures and societies are equal.  Because all are equal, the goal of wealthy nations must be to r...

June 28, 2018

Torn from Her Mother's Arms

It was heartrending to see the little girl torn from her mother's arms. When the girl, probably two or three years old, realized what was happening, she broke into a terrified wail.  I was standing just a few yards away, and the effect ...

June 17, 2018

Why Do They Hate Us?

A new study by the Washington Times shows that 90% of the broadcast coverage of President Trump remains negative, even after the accomplishments of his first 500 days.  Certainly, the so-called intelligentsia hate Donald Trump, but they hat...

May 24, 2018

Progressives on the Brink

The Trump era has exposed the dark, vindictive, and oppressive side of liberalism, but that side has always existed.  "Progressives," as they prefer to be known, have a long history of extremism going back to Woodrow Wilson's ...

May 9, 2018

Was Plato a Trump-Supporter?

As far back as 360 B.C., thoughtful individuals recognized that career politicians are bad news.  In Book VII of the Republic, Plato wrote that ordinary citizens, accomplished in areas other than politics, make the best leaders. ...

April 27, 2018

How Millennial Socialists Endanger America

Millennials, those born between 1982 and 2004, are the largest age cohort in American history, and according to a recent poll, most of them (44%) prefer socialism to capitalism (42%).  An earlier 2015 poll found an even larger number of Millenni...

April 13, 2018

Facebook on Trial

In addition to their liberal tilt, Millennials are the first generation to be brought up on social media.  Mark Zuckerberg, himself a Millennial, was born in 1984, and his "genius," if you call it that, created the platform for mu...

March 21, 2018

Hillary Clinton and Sclerotic Radicalism

Last week in Mumbai, Hillary Clinton declared that the 2016 Trump campaign was "looking backwards."  The message that followed was utterly predictable.  "I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, looking forward...

February 24, 2018

Leftists versus the People

Do they really hate ordinary people that much? Yes, they do.  For liberals, the distinction between the "dumb masses" and their enlightened selves renders life meaningful.  Disdain for ordinary folks is not just an ancillary tr...

February 21, 2018

Trump's Energy Policy Is Working

While we weren't watching, the price of oil more than doubled from its low early in 2016.  Volatility of that kind is not unusual.  A look at the 70-year chart shows that there have been eight times when oil prices have double...

January 20, 2018

Our Less than Eminent Victorians

Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians, once quipped that "[t]he history of the Victorian Age will never be written.  We know too much about it."  Strachey was writing back in 1918, and Victorianism is still with ...

December 30, 2017

Trump's Energy Success

Just six months ago, the Trump administration was attacked for its "slow start."  It was said to be "in disarray," in "chaos," "at war" with itself, and incapable of governing.  Now the list of succes...

December 23, 2017

Fasting for Christmas

This Christmas, I'll be fasting. There is, of course, a long tradition of religious fasting, including the Nativity Fast celebrated in both the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity.  Fasting is also an important part of the Mormon...

December 6, 2017

Our Reps Are (Still) Idiots

OK, so they finally passed it.  The Senate tax reform bill, however imperfect, will return money to taxpayers, spur business, and increase jobs.  Significantly, the bill repeals the Obamacare mandate and provides other benefits, such as ope...

November 22, 2017

The Illogical Attacks on Judge Moore

They play the race card.  If that doesn't stick, they toss out the gender card, as they have with Judge Moore.  If the opponent survives these attacks, then it's the class card, as it was with Mitt Romney.  If none of this work...

November 9, 2017

Hearts of Stone on the Left

"Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart," the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote, having witnessed the violence of the 1916 Easter Rising and its aftermath.  In an America more divided than ever, and with the left more radicaliz...

September 22, 2017

Totalitarianism and the Progressive Lemming

In his 2005 book Memory and Identity (New York, 2005), Pope John Paul II posed a profound question concerning the goals of progressivism.  Examining what he called the "anti-evangelical currents" of contemporary society, with its assau...

September 15, 2017

After the Storm: Picking Up the Pieces in Florida

On the morning of September 11, the eyewall of Hurricane Irma passed about 10 miles to the east of my home.  With the power out, I sat in an interior space, a hand-cranked radio almost my only contact with the world.  Without electricity, W...

August 26, 2017

The Monuments Endgame: How Far Do We Go?

All across the South, statues of Confederate heroes are being removed, warehoused, and in some cases destroyed.  They are being removed under the false assumption that they are "symbols" of racism.  That assumption is based on a g...

August 18, 2017

Obama 2.0 in 2020

Not surprisingly, Deval Patrick has been ordained by the Obama camp as the favorite for 2020.  As Obama 2.0, the former Massachusetts governor would bring the same failed policies as his mentor.  The danger is that by 2020, much of the elec...

August 7, 2017

Are We Red Yet?

In Reflections on a Ravaged Century (New York, 2000), his classic study of twentieth-century politics, Robert Conquest emphasized that democratic capitalism was far and away "the best and most hopeful arrangement available to us" in the rea...

July 24, 2017

To Sink Trump Is to Sink Ordinary Americans

The left is determined to sink the Trump presidency. But something even more important than the Trump presidency is at stake.  The ultimate target is not Trump, but human liberty.  Donald Trump is a great man, but far greater are the mil...

July 3, 2017

The Most Abused President in History

There's no doubt that President Trump is the most abused president in modern history – more so than George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon, all of whom caught their share of flak.  That's the judgment of Fox News's Br...

June 21, 2017

The Consciousness of a Conservative

I've known a number of liberals who are highly intelligent – many of them professors at major universities who have published important books, won lucrative research grants, and participated in international conferences.  Their I.Q.s m...

June 19, 2017

Revolution Interrupted

Revolution interrupted.  That's how the left views the Trump presidency: as an anomaly, something to be resisted at every turn, even by violent means, until progressives can get the revolution back on track.  They see Trump as a threat ...

May 15, 2017

Trump Gets Real

There were real accomplishments in President Trump's first 100 days, despite obstruction from Democrats and many in his own party.  Granted, these accomplishments were less than one might hope, but they do confirm the president's intenti...

April 20, 2017

Donald Trump: A Simple Man

Liberals believe they are smarter than the rest of us.  They believe that ordinary people should have little say in politics, because the so-called intellectuals know better.  That is the essential appeal of liberalism to most of its follow...

April 2, 2017

Conservatives and the Progressive Ahabs

Early in Moby-Dick, America's greatest work of fiction, Ishmael sits near the front window of a cozy inn, peering out into the stormy evening.  His eye rests on those fellow human beings passing by, unprotected from the cold and wet.  I...

March 10, 2017

The End of the World...for Liberals

In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle demonstrated how human consciousness becomes imprisoned by the controlling mind, and how that mind, so much focused on the task of controlling and centralizing one's attention on the past and future, may feel th...

February 18, 2017

The Left's Endgame of Gnostic Activism

With the left's scorched-earth strategy in response to the Trump administration, we have entered a new stage of politics.  Some, including the great German philosopher Eric Voegelin, would point to that strategy as proof that we have entered...

January 26, 2017

The DC Empire Strikes Back

For the political elite, President Trump's inauguration was like a party from hell.  First there was the inaugural speech, in which Trump skewered "a small group in our nation's capital" who have prospered at the expense of hea...

January 20, 2017

Barack Obama's Dismal Energy Legacy

In a laughable Wall Street Journal op-ed ("How Using Less Oil Helps the Economy"), two Obama advisers proclaim that forced reductions in energy usage benefit American consumers.  Due to restrictions such as EPA fuel standards, drivers ...

January 6, 2017

Progressives Really Are Deranged

In the wake of Donald Trump's election victory, progressives have doubled down with charges that he is "dangerous" and "extreme."  Just this week, Rosie O'Donnell charged that Trump is "mentally unstable" ...

December 23, 2016

What Are They Afraid Of?

Now that Donald Trump has been elected, hope is gone.  That's more or less what Michelle Obama told Oprah Winfrey in a recent interview.  "We are feeling what not having hope feels like," she said. There are millions of lib...

December 3, 2016

Trump's Cabinet: Character and Ability, Not Politics

Obama's cabinet picks had one thing in common: they were all ideological leftists who fell in line with the president's thinking.  Most of them not only thought like Obama, but shared the same background.  They were so-called intell...

October 24, 2016

Trump's 'High Energy' Policies

At this point in the campaign, when the leaked evidence of Hillary's abuse of power and Trump's purported sexual improprieties seem to be the main topics of debate, "lesser" matters such as providing for the nation's energy need...

September 23, 2016

The Anger Is Real

This weekend, I talked with a distinguished scientist, now retired, who in his day contributed to the production of drugs that saved millions of lives.  This man – I'll call him "Frank," and frank he was – offered an un...

September 2, 2016

The Sinister Side of a Cashless Society

Some on the left are proposing the elimination of currency bills larger than $10.  This may seem like an insignificant matter, but if adopted, the proposal would be a giant step in the direction of totalitarianism. By forcing Americans to use...

August 5, 2016

Back to School with the Left: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

As students head off to college this fall, one of the books they may encounter is Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.  This is not because Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the Great Books on a par with Homer, Dante, or S...

July 11, 2016

What Lomborg Leaves Out

Danish author Bjorn Lomborg has articulated one of the most compelling arguments against the agenda of the climate alarmists – not by denying climate change, but by demonstrating how wasteful all government attempts are to control it.  For...

June 26, 2016

Unleash the Producers, Not the Parasites

In his wonderful book, The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley explores the ways in which trade and commerce have propelled innovation and well-being.  Ridley presents evidence that for the last 100,000 years, humans have engaged in trade and that th...

June 6, 2016

The California Primary: Millennials' Last Fling

Millennials, who first arrived in 1980, are the largest generational group in American history.  As such, they tend to have a deep-seated, some would say exaggerated, sense of their own importance.  Now that the last of the millennials, tho...

May 18, 2016

Election 1896: Donald Trump as William Jennings Bryan

From the podium at Cleveland, he was proclaimed his party's populist candidate for president.  The general election campaign stretched through August, September, and October.  With his message of national prosperity and restoring the pl...

May 16, 2016

Fires in Canada, Folly in Washington

Everyone has seen the dramatic footage of flames rising hundreds of feet in the air as convoys of residents flee Ft. McMurray.  No human lives have been lost, thanks to prompt action of authorities and company personnel, but the fires rage on, a...

April 17, 2016

Are You Ready for $5 Gas?

In a version of "hit 'em while they're down,' the Obama administration has unleashed a slew of new regulations targeting U.S. oil and gas production.  These include costly methane emission rules on all new and existing wells, re...

March 13, 2016

Obama Turns His Regulatory Pen on Methane

In his last months in office, Barack Obama continues to issue regulations that cripple the energy sector.  Far from being a champion of the poor and the middle class, Obama is destroying jobs, raising energy costs, and making the U.S. vulnerable...

February 29, 2016

Inequality in an Election Year

In 1754, Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men. In this work, Rousseau identified capitalism as the ultimate basis of all inequality, and so set the stage for centuries of attacks on the capital...

February 12, 2016

America's Energy Outlook Is Bright – and Obama Hates It

In its annual outlook for energy report, ExxonMobil presents data that contradicts Obama's green energy utopianism.  Who has the better track record of predicting the global energy future: Obama or a private company that actually produces th...

January 10, 2016

Hillary Wants to Kill Me

Like millions of other Americans, I suffer from a life-threatening illness.  My disease is incurable, but its progression is slow.  I have lived with it for years while hoping for the breakthrough drug that will cure or further slow it. ...

January 4, 2016

Fracking Saves the Day

Unless you live in North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, or one of the world's other communist or socialist nations, 2015 was a pretty good year.  This in spite of all that leftists in the U.S. and elsewhere could do to spoil it. The U.S. economy...

December 16, 2015

How a Race-Neutral Admissions Policy Will Promote Minorities' Success

As a college professor, one of my duties was to advise undergraduate students.  I recall one student in particular, an intelligent African-American who was nonetheless earning mediocre grades, semester after semester.  When I suggested that...

December 3, 2015

COP21: Carbon Regulation without Representation

Consumers are enjoying low gas prices, low home heating and electricity prices, and low costs for the shipment of goods to homes and stores.  President Obama and the representatives of 150 other countries at the Paris climate conference, COP21, ...

November 18, 2015

The End of the World, All Over Again

Once again, the sky is falling.  Only this time it's the ocean that is rising, but the narrative is the same.  The world as we know it is coming to an end – that is, unless we enact crippling new carbon taxes, write ever bigger ch...

November 5, 2015

Liberals: Not Loyal to Anything

A new report from Pew Research confirms what most of us have known all along: Democrats tend to have no religious affiliation (28%, to be exact).  Among the other 72%, only 16% are evangelical Protestants (versus 38% for Republicans).  Larg...

October 19, 2015

Habitat Exchange: A Bad Idea

The idea of habitat exchange has been gaining ground at the state and federal level.  Already several western states have implemented small-scale exchanges through which businesses, energy companies, government entities, and developers purchase ...

October 6, 2015

The Latest Skirmishes on the Inequality Front

Envy may be the most corrupt of human passions.  There is a reason it is listed among the "seven deadly sins."  It sullies the man who falls prey to it.  It is a source of divisiveness and violence.  And it is purely neg...

September 9, 2015

Obama's Persistent Economic Malaise

The August jobs report was hardly reassuring.  On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported net job creation of 173,000, far below estimates.  There's no way to sugar-coat it, though White House officials attempted to do just that...

August 18, 2015

Time to Lift the Oil Export Ban

Today, there is only one major product the U.S. bans from export.  Surprisingly, it is a product in which the U.S. is nearly self-sufficient. Forty years ago, it may have made sense to ban the export of oil, but the U.S. is now producing an e...

July 30, 2015

Hillary's Shortsighted Capital Gains Proposal

Unlike Hillary Clinton, I have no idea whether short-term trading is good or bad for markets.  I do know that government has no business regulating it. Under a plan put forward last week, Clinton would double capital gains taxes on assets hel...

July 22, 2015

Welcome to the Whatever Economy

Between 1900 and 1999, U.S. GDP expanded by 1,000%.  Never in human history has a major economy expanded at such a rate for so long.  At the end of the 20th century, the average American enjoyed ten times the standard of living as the perso...

July 19, 2015

Hillary's Coming Out Speech

The idea that totalitarian economies are more efficient than capitalist democracies keeps popping up among progressive writers.  That’s because of the progressive dream in which, as Hillary Clinton famously put it in 1993, “[w]e must...

June 24, 2015

Regulatory Taking on an Unprecedented Scale

The Fifth Amendment’s “takings clause” stipulates that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.”  Many state constitutions provide additional limitations on eminent domain, s...

June 6, 2015

Jeb's Uncommon Problem

On June 15, Jeb Bush is expected to announce his bid for the presidency.  In many ways, he is an attractive candidate.  He possesses universal name recognition, ready access to funding, an Hispanic spouse, and (unlike his presumed opponent)...

May 4, 2015

Energy: The Missed Opportunity for Economic Growth

During the first quarter of 2015, U.S. GDP growth was 0.2%.  That’s two tenths of one percent, not two percent.  For March, the jobs number was 126,000, less than half of the 12-month rolling average – and most of those jobs wer...

April 11, 2015

Obama's Legacy of Overreach

The liberal media is beginning to talk about Obama’s legacy – a sure sign that he doesn’t have one.  What he does have is a negative legacy – a record of unconstitutional overreach that matches or exceeds that of any pres...

March 25, 2015

If It Works, Kill It

Under regulations announced Friday, fracking on federal lands will be subject to a costly new set of rules covering the entire process of drilling, from application to production.  Under the new rules, drillers must submit a detailed plan with s...

March 13, 2015

Electric Lemons

For years, the Obama administration has pumped billions into the development and subsidy of electric vehicles, but e-cars show little sign of catching on.  Currently, just one in a thousand Americans own a plug-in electric car, and most of those...

February 20, 2015

A Keystone Veto Puts America at Risk

The Keystone XL pipeline has now been approved by both houses of Congress and will be sent to the president’s desk within the next ten days. Obama has vowed to veto the bill, and it will be interesting to hear his excuse for doing so. Having st...

February 2, 2015

Obama's Offshore Drilling Deal

Here’s a deal for you.  You give me a million bucks right now.  I promise to pay you the million back in fifteen years.  But in two years I’ll be leaving town and will have no authority or ability to pay you back.  And...

January 14, 2015

No More Excuses for Blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline

Environmentalists have a host of arguments for not building the Keystone XL pipeline.  The pipeline would traverse the environmentally sensitive Sandhills region of Nebraska and the Ogallala aquifer; it would increase global warming by encouragi...

January 1, 2015

Obama's Energiewende

President Obama has committed the U.S. to a 26% to 28% reduction in carbon emissions from 2005 levels by the year 2025. Is a reduction of that magnitude workable? The German experience with energiewende (“energy transition”) proves that i...

December 13, 2014

Fracking Drives Global Oil Prices Down

One of the perennial arguments of the anti-fracking crowd has been that the shale revolution has failed to bring down oil prices.  If the huge investment in fracking hasn’t lowered prices for U.S. consumers, what’s the good of fracki...

November 24, 2014

Regulate First, Ask Questions Later

Last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Gunnison sage grouse a threatened species.  The designation may not do much to protect that particular species, but it does threaten the future of Homo sapiens in America.  By restr...

October 25, 2014

Flashback: When Presidents Respected the Constitution

“I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves.  I want them to have the rewards of their own industry.  That is the chief meaning of freedom.” Those words are taken from Calvin Coolidge’s Inaugura...

October 9, 2014

News Flash: 'Extreme Weather Ends'

According to climate alarmists, a rising level of CO2 in the atmosphere is causing global warming, which results in severe weather.  Tornadoes, hurricanes, heat waves, cold snaps, too much rain, too little rain, rising seas, and the end of civil...

September 21, 2014

The Science Is Settled: Fracking Is Safe

The science is settled, as the climate change supporters like to say.  Only this time, science confirms the safety of hydraulic fracturing.  According to a new study published by the National Academy of Sciences, fracking is safe.  End...

September 4, 2014

Hillary's Organizing Principle

In her now famous Atlantic interview, Hillary Clinton let it be known that the president’s foreign policy lacks an “organizing principle.”  She’s right about this, but what about her own organizing principle?  What i...

August 26, 2014

How Best Not to Respond to ISIS

For the left, American power must never be exercised except in the direst of situations, and even then, it must not be a unilateral exercise of power. This is the logic underlying the White House response to ISIS, or the Islamic State, as it calls...

August 15, 2014

Democrats Do Better?

According to a recent study by Princeton economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, Democrats do better on the economy.  Going back to 1947, the authors found that U.S. GDP grew 1.8% faster under Democratic presidents than under Republican ones. ...

August 6, 2014

Regulating the Roads, and Everything Else

Aside from liberals in Washington and some at the New York Times, most economists agree that increased regulation strangles economic growth.  Exactly how this works can be demonstrated by a simple experiment. In a group of 25 individuals, ass...

July 24, 2014

Protecting Government against the American People

Protectionism does not work.  Whether the object is to protect industries, jobs, or consumers, every attempt to impose protectionist sanctions has failed.  The inevitable result, as Milton Friedman insisted, is perpetuation of uncompetitive...

July 10, 2014

Seven Facts for Fracking Deniers

At a recent town hall meeting in Edmond, Oklahoma, local citizens gathered to discuss the possible connection between fracking and increased seismic activity in their area.  According to one published report, members of the audience left “...

June 24, 2014

A Return to Normalcy in 2016?

Without looking it up, I was unable to name the Democratic candidate for president in 1920.  The name is James M. Cox, a successful two-term governor of Ohio and Democratic Party leader – in his day, a politician as widely known as Hillary...

May 15, 2014

Climate Alarmists in Denial

As if this winter weren’t enough, there’s new evidence that the climate is cooling.  For those alarmists who still don’t get it, even the International Panel on Climate Change, hardly a group of climate change skeptics, now adm...

April 22, 2014

2014: The Year Without Summer

In their excellent book, The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History, William and Nicholas Klingaman relate the history, causes, and effects of the record cold that gripped the northern hemisphere in 1816...

March 11, 2014

Obama's Great Man Delusion

Amid the Ukraine crisis last week, President Obama spoke several times by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin.  According to reports, the “conversation” soon devolved into accusations.  Now U.S.- Russia relations are the...

February 12, 2014

The High Cost of Fracking Regulation

In Europe, where fracking is heavily regulated or prohibited altogether, consumers pay more than twice for natural gas than what they do in America (currently $11.59 per mBtu vs $4.78).  As consumers, businesses, and electric utilities pay ...

January 23, 2014

Obama, the Ingrate

The December jobs report was truly awful, with 74,000 non-farm jobs created and the labor-force participation rate at a 35-year low.  Liberals -- the same bunch who insist that the climate is warming at an alarming rate -- were quick to poi...

January 1, 2014

Extending Unemployment Benefits: Obama's Urgent Political Priority

When a temporary program of long-term unemployment benefits expired on Saturday, the media was chock-a-block with whiners.  Those losing the temporary benefits were whining, liberals were whining, and the chair of the Democratic National Co...

December 20, 2013

Global Warming Gone AWOL

On Tuesday morning, Bostonians awakened to a temperature of 9 degrees, with a predicted high of 23.  Another 5 inches of snowfall was expected.  Obviously, it was the result of global warming. It's not just Boston.  So...

December 5, 2013

Obama's Plan to Snatch Your Savings

In his first term, Obama managed to get his paws on health care, banking, energy, student loans, the auto business, and more.  Now he has his sights set on your 401(k). The left has had its eye on retirement savings for years, but so far ...

November 15, 2013

The Emperor of the Oil Patch

On energy policy, Obama continues to be the emperor who wears no clothes.  His fantasies of large-scale green energy projects and millions of electric vehicles on the road just aren't materializing.  In this respect, the president...

October 29, 2013

Provincial Coastal Media Cover the Series

They are so very provincial, the coastal media.  While they claim to represent the country as a whole, most "national" media figures represent only one third of the nation's population.  As for the flyover states -- that vast region lying b...

October 18, 2013

Obama, the Environmental Charlatan

The president is committed to the idea of anthropogenic global warming.  Man-made carbon emissions, he believes (or pretends to believe), cause global temperatures to rise, and this temperature increase is destructive.  By reducin...

October 2, 2013

IPCC Now '95%' Sure of Global Warming

Six years ago, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a much criticized report that included a number of significant errors.  Now the IPCC's climate activists -- er, scientists -- want us to believe they've cleaned up the...

September 20, 2013

Obama's Middle-Class 'Mission Accomplished'

Barack Obama won re-election by convincing the American people that he cared -- really cared -- about the middle class.  By contrast, Mitt Romney was portrayed as a hard-hearted member of the hated 1%.  But it is Obama who is the real enemy...

September 4, 2013

Obama's GDP Magic

Magic is the art of illusion.  The same can be said of the Obama administration's recently revised second-quarter GDP figures.  There's a lot less there than meets the eye. On Thursday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis issued a report that...

August 21, 2013

Stopping the Hillary Juggernaut

It's obvious to any sentient being that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.  Already she has begun the round of speeches at influential venues, the visits to primary states, the media spin, the heightening of...

August 9, 2013

Another Busy Hurricane Hoopla Season

This spring, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued its annual hurricane forecast.  In its report, NOAA indicated a 70% chance that the 2013 season would be "more active than usual."  So far, they've been wrong. "More ...

July 31, 2013

Why Environmental Professionals Hate All of the Above

For many environmental leaders, "clean energy" is a moving target.  What was acceptable last year is no longer so, and the question is why. In terms of carbon emissions, natural gas is twice as clean as coal.  That was once good enough to...

July 18, 2013

Sunspots and the Great Cooling Ahead

Presumably, even among the ill-informed ideologues at the White House, there are a few who have heard of sunspots.  There may even be one who knows, as most informed persons do, of the correlation between sunspot activity and the earth's climate...

July 10, 2013

A French Plan to Solve America's Economic Problems

On Sunday, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde charged that recent U.S. budget cuts were "absolutely inappropriate" and should be replaced with "credible fiscal policies."  Ms. Lagarde did not specify exactly what those policies might be or ...

July 3, 2013

Obama's Fundamental Transformation of a Nation He Despises

Is it just incompetence, or is there something else going on here? Obama's only real competence, it seems, lies in spying on Americans and imposing new restrictions on their liberty.  This fact may be the key to understanding this president. ...

June 26, 2013

New Carbon Regulations, at Greater Cost to America

Five years into Obama's presidency, twelve million Americans remain unemployed, ten million others are underemployed, the unemployment rate is rising, and Obama wants to make it worse. In the fourth year of the Reagan presidency, the national econo...

June 14, 2013

The Future of the Humanities

On June 6, Harvard University released a long-awaited report on the state of the humanities.  A central part of the report, "Mapping the Future," is a study of the "trends" in humanities education and "stakes" for faculty, students, and society ...

May 29, 2013

Christie Conservatism

Once again, Chris Christie has walked the Jersey Shore with President Obama, and once again he has enunciated what his brand of conservatism means.  It is not, he said, an attempt to gain political advantage or advance one's ideology.  Noth...

May 22, 2013

The Oklahoma Tornadoes and the Pornography of Death

As a native of Oklahoma City, I have been following news coverage of the recent tornado damage with much interest.  The loss of life and property damage in Moore, Oklahoma, and other areas has been horrific, and as Oklahoma's governor, Mary Fall...

May 15, 2013

The President's Ruinous Energy Policy: Once More with Feeling

During his reelection campaign, the president boasted that domestic oil and gas production was at an all-time high, with the implication that he was somehow responsible for this accomplishment.  In fact, Obama has done everything possible to ret...

February 27, 2013

The Growing Tyranny of the Political Elite

Recently, the White House released a photo of the president shooting skeet.  But where's the snap of him fishing for bass?  Apparently the White House felt compelled to portray Obama as a marksman in light of the widespread pushback over th...

February 11, 2013

Obama Wants More Snow

A winter storm of epic proportions has pounded the northeast.  The president's solution: make it colder.  That's the message he sent during his second inaugural speech, and it's what we're going to hear in the State of the Union address o...

February 6, 2013

Exchanging Liberty for a Pittance

The president's priorities during the December fiscal cliff debate were clear: expand government assistance to the welfare class at the expense of those who are actually working and succeeding.  Obama has a vision of America as a socialist econo...

January 26, 2013

Killing the American Dream

President Obama won re-election on the premise that he is defending the middle class.  But that very assertion assumes, firstly, that the middle class needs "defending" and, secondly, that it is the function of government to defend it.  Bot...

January 7, 2013

Why Exceptionalism Matters

America is exceptional, despite what our current president may think. Asked whether America was an exceptional country, Mr. Obama famously replied that every country is exceptional.  North Korea is exceptional?  Castro's Cuba is fine? ...

January 2, 2013

'Saving' the Middle Class

Obama won re-election by selling the idea that he was the champion of the middle class.  Now he is forcing them into poverty and driving them from their homes. That is the effect of new taxes going into effect on Jan. 1, regardless of how nego...

December 19, 2012

No Fracking in the Promised Land

Promised Land, a new film co-written by and starring Matt Damon, comes out on Dec. 28.  Do as you like, but based on what I know, I will not be rushing out to see it. The subject of Promised Land is the potential damage of hydraulic fracturing...

December 13, 2012

Ramping Up Government Control of the Energy Sector

If insanity consists of "doing the same thing over and over and expecting it to come out different," President Obama is surely mad.  He has spent four years funding green energy start-ups that have failed, one after another.  Now he wants t...

November 29, 2012

Doha-ing It Again

The latest United Nations conference on climate change opened Monday in Doha, the capital of Qatar.  Once again, delegates will be at it predicting warming temperatures, melting ice caps, rising oceans, and a general end-of-the-world scenario. ...

November 22, 2012

Thanksgiving with Winnie

In an appearance at Royal Albert Hall on November 23, 1944, Winston Churchill spoke in honor of the American holiday of Thanksgiving.  On that day, just as Hitler was about to unleash the desperate counterattack that became known as the Battle o...

November 15, 2012

Midnight Again in America

Yes, it's midnight again in America. Obama, in fact, is the only president other than Herbert Hoover to preside over an economy that shrank in real terms during his first term.  And Hoover, as I recall, was not re-elected.  Roosevelt's marg...

November 4, 2012

After This Election, Does PBS Deserve Public Funding?

During the first presidential debate, Mitt Romney injected the issue of funding public television into the campaign.  He was widely attacked by liberals in the media, and by President Obama himself, for wanting to kill off Big Bird. Is that real...

November 1, 2012

Obama Is No Friend of the Middle Class

Barack Obama has based much of his re-election campaign on the issue of "fairness" and especially the charge that "the rich" are not paying enough in taxes.  Creating a straw man to blame for one's own failures is a classic political ploy, but i...

October 21, 2012

Losing Our Place

Strangely enough, with all the rhetoric directed at which presidential candidate is better qualified to "save the middle class," few in the media have asked just what it actually takes to do so.  The short answer is economic growth.  Candid...

October 16, 2012

Your Land Is My Land

Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" has always been a favorite of the left, and lately I've heard it reprised more and more often in leftwing circles. It was the subject of a National Public Radio story in July 2000. It was featured on the sound...

October 10, 2012

The Only Mad Hatter in the Room

One symptom of madness is the tendency to view oneself as superhuman.  Superheroes believe that they should not have to run for re-election; after all, they are entitled to it.  They don't hold press conferences at which unvetted journalist...

October 7, 2012

Prohibiting Cheerleaders the Free Exercise of Religion

The atheists have struck again.  Having discovered that a small group of cheerleaders in Kountze, Texas (pop. 2,100) were lettering Bible verses on football banners, the Freedom from Religion Foundation sprang into action.  It contacted the...

September 26, 2012

Obama: 'You Belong to Me'

"Government is the only thing we all belong to."  That assertion was the theme of a now infamous DNC video that aired during the Democratic convention in Charlotte.  After it was lambasted by everyone from Rush Limbaugh to the Romney campai...

September 19, 2012

Rich Man, Poor Man

"Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited," Joseph Stalin asserted in a 1937 interview with H.G. Wells.  "To abstract oneself from this fundamental division ... means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts." ...

September 13, 2012

Obama in the Buff

"The emperor has no clothes!"  That was the cry of a small child in the Hans Christian Andersen tale as the emperor made his way past, entirely unclothed, while no one had the nerve to speak up. That's pretty much the situation today.  With...

September 6, 2012

Obama and the Infernal Serpent

The president may not be aware of it, but envy has always been regarded as a sin.  Envy of the rich is actually one of the seven "deadly sins," according to Christian belief.  The idea that envy is "deadly" is so deeply rooted in Western ci...

August 28, 2012

Who's the Extremist?

Over the weekend, the president unleashed a new charge against his opponent.  Not only is Gov. Romney rich (apparently considered a fatal defect in and of itself), not only has he fired American workers, not only has he transported the family pe...

August 23, 2012

Obama's Oil and Gas Folly

Obama's campaign speeches always seem to include a line about how he can take credit for increasing domestic oil and gas production.  As the official White House website has it, "domestic oil and gas production has increased every year President...

August 15, 2012

Obama's Hungry Children

As a result of the Midwestern drought, global prices for corn and other staple foods have increased dramatically.  Corn prices are up by half since May, while soybean prices are up by over a quarter.  With the drought only worsening, trader...

August 9, 2012

Debt Drag

On Monday, August 13, the national debt will reach $16 trillion.  Obama, the same leader who in 2009 promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, is responsible for more than $5 trillion of that debt.  And the deficit h...

August 5, 2012

Liberal Decay

Last week I spent a few hours with one of America's finest writers. My old friend is still writing, producing some of the best fiction published in America today. And like most writers and intellectuals in this county, my friend is a staunch liberal....

July 24, 2012

End the Ethanol Madness

Economists are warning that the current drought in the Corn Belt is going to result in higher food prices.  That increase will hit consumers hard, reducing discretionary spending and further weakening an already fragile economy.  With every...

July 20, 2012

Yesterday's Heroes and Today's Commander-in-Chief

James Donovan's recent book, Blood of Heroes (New York, 2012), is an extraordinarily moving account of the men who died at the Alamo in 1836.  Donovan's book records the determination of those who joined Col. William Travis, Davy Crockett, and J...

July 13, 2012

A Leftist Media for Obama

The national media likes to present the left, even the radical left, as more or less mainstream, even as it depicts the Tea Party as a fringe movement.  Politicians who espouse Marxist ideas, like Barack Obama, are treated as if they are centris...

July 2, 2012

Thanks, Cher

Thank you, Cher, for revealing what Hollywood liberals really think of America. If I interpret your tweet correctly, you are not happy about the prospect of having a white man ("the whitest man in MAGIC UNDERWEAR") in the White House, and you are dou...

June 25, 2012

Romney Is Mr. Normal

Divisions between radical leftists in the Democratic Party and so-called extremists on the right get most of the media attention these days, but a more important political current is emerging with Romney's success in the presidential campaign.  ...

June 20, 2012

Obama: Against the Law

You'd think that, having taught law at least part-time, President Obama would have more respect for the subject.  As it is, more than a dozen major scandals and Supreme Court reversals have rocked his administration, all of them attributable to ...

June 11, 2012

Fiscal Cliff, No Leader

On January 1, 2013, America careens off a fiscal cliff.  The largest tax increase in the country's history goes into effect.  Spending on defense, Medicare, and other vital areas will be cut indiscriminately.  And, according to the Con...

June 4, 2012

Export Natural Gas to Create Jobs

Does President Obama care more about jobs for Americans or about his own re-election chances?  A decision last week on natural gas exports provides the answer. On Monday, the White House announced that it would postpone a decision until after th...

May 31, 2012

Are Liberals Immoral?

Yes, liberals are immoral.  The liberal power elite are selfish, hypocritical, arrogant, self-righteous, and, worst of all, destructive of those around them.  They are willing to saddle everyone else with rules and regulations that do not a...

May 23, 2012

The Lost 5 Million

Five million Americans have been thrown under the bus.  They are walking around dazed, outcast, and defeated.  Worst of all, they are not even counted in official tallies of the unemployed.  They are those whom the Obama administration...

May 14, 2012

Your Money or Your Schools

As a child, I was fond of adventure stories about the exploits of pirates, highwaymen, and miscreants of all sorts.  In every such tale there was the moment when the dashing if disreputable protagonist confronts a gaggle of respectable folk and ...

May 8, 2012

Obama Wants Power, Not Jobs

Natural gas is a feedstock for the production of fertilizer, plastics, and many chemical products. Fortunately, America possesses vast reserves of recoverable natural gas. The low price of this gas is one factor spurring companies like Dow Chemical t...

May 2, 2012

Lisa Jackson Must Go

As a result of his outrageous comments over "crucifying" oil and gas companies, Al Armendariz has resigned his post as regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency.  Now it's time for his boss, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, to acce...

April 30, 2012

From Russia with Love (of Oil and Gas)

Imagine a president who gets behind drilling, welcomes the cutting-edge technology of companies such as ExxonMobil, and offers generous 15-year tax breaks to ensure that new drilling projects move forward.  That's the kind of energy policy Ameri...

April 25, 2012

A Recovery That Never Comes

The President has been promising an economic recovery ever since 2008, when he promised to create 5 million green jobs and to "act quickly to help people stay in their homes." With all the promises Obama made, many voters who supported him expected t...

April 16, 2012

BrightSource and the Fracking Task Force

Bad stuff always happens on Friday the 13th.  So it was on Friday that BrightSource Energy, the large solar energy company that has already received $868 million of a $1.6-billion loan guarantee, canceled its IPO application.  And that same...

April 10, 2012

Is the EPA Just Sloppy, or Cooking the Books?

After issuing a hastily compiled report last year claiming a direct link between groundwater contamination and hydraulic fracturing at Pavillion, Wyoming, the EPA now admits that it may be wrong.  Or, it may be, it was intentionally cooking the ...

April 4, 2012

Climate Change, Act Three

Once upon a time, it was the contention of global warming alarmists that the earth was getting warmer -- a lot warmer.  Now, after decades of such claims, the evidence points to a world that is, for the present at least, growing colder.  Wh...

March 23, 2012

No Quick Fix?

In response to criticism of his handling of gas prices, President Obama has repeatedly stated that there is "no quick fix."  To some extent, this is true.  But then, where has he been for three and a half years? That's been more than enough...

March 19, 2012

Tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) was established as a safeguard against emergencies such as the cutoff of oil supplies from the Middle East.  Even when prices have spiked, previous administrations have been loath to tap the SPR.  Presi...

March 8, 2012

Economic Outlook: Worse after the Election

Despite everything Obama has done to ruin it, the economy is getting better.  And while a growth rate of 2.3% and an unemployment rate of 8.3% are not exactly worth bragging about, the president is doing just that.  The direction of the eco...

February 26, 2012

Don't Be Evil?

"Don't Be Evil" is Google's unofficial motto, and GenY seems to have adopted it as its credo as well.  No generation has ever aspired to "make a difference" to the extent that the millennials have.  And no generation before has expressed su...

February 23, 2012

Son of Marx

Son of Islam?  Let's get real. Aside from his childhood attendance at a Muslim school in Indonesia, a school that was selected for him by his parents, Obama has never shown much interest in Islam.  Nor, some would say, has he demonstrated a...

February 14, 2012

Are Libs Smarter?

Every teacher knows that one can make any group of kids look smart just by altering the content of the test.  That is what's behind several studies purporting to show that liberals are smarter than conservatives. Using data from previous studies...

February 7, 2012

Enough Oil?

A report for November 2011 indicated that, for the first time in forty years, the U.S. was a net exporter of petroleum products.  Liberals seized on this report as evidence that the U.S. needs no acceleration in drilling, no XL pipeline -- indee...

January 30, 2012

Davos Disneyland

This year's World Economic Forum, which meets at Davos, Switzerland each year, adjourned with calls for more "social responsibility" and less pure capitalism.  Sessions on "remodeling capitalism," "fixing capitalism," and the virtues of the "Chi...

January 24, 2012

Takers Taking Over

In case anyone hasn't noticed it yet, Europe is in crisis.  Faced with violent protests and general strikes, European politicians seem unwilling to take the necessary steps of structural reform that would save their economies.  With rigid l...

January 17, 2012

Harry Reid: Friendly like a Rattlesnake

On  Sunday's "Meet the Press," in his usual ingratiating tone of voice, Sen. Harry Reid urged Republican lawmakers to abandon their partisanship and join him in passing everything Democrats could dream of. The GOP House, he said, had been "led o...

January 9, 2012

Take This Job, and Keep the Change

Every era in American culture has its signature song.  For the late 1970s, the era of gas lines, stagflation, and national decline, it was Johnny PayCheck's "Take This Job and Shove It."  The song expressed the nation's sense of  frust...

December 30, 2011

Unhappy New Year

Most economists predict that, under current policies, the nation's unemployment rate will be close to 9% through the end of 2012, with the broader measure of unemployment (U-6) running above 16%. GDP growth is predicted to be sluggish, in the range o...

December 21, 2011

The EPA's Unconscionable War on Fracking

The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees that "no person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."  For government to harm investors in a private business by bringing false charges against that bu...

December 14, 2011

Obama is the Jobs Grinch

Labor Department numbers came out recently showing soft job-creation for the month of November.  This is nothing new, of course.  Job-creation has been weaker than expected ever since Obama began his attack on capitalism.  What's new i...

December 9, 2011

A Wiser Outlook

They control a big share of the American economy, they plan 30 years out, and they have never failed to balance their budget. No, I'm not speaking of any federal agency. I'm talking about Exxon Mobil, which is among the world's most productive and be...

December 2, 2011

A Stern Vision of America

Yesterday, in a lengthy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Andy Stern laid out his vision of America's future in remarkably unambiguous, and chilling, terms.  That vision hinges on state planning and government control of a kind practically indis...

November 29, 2011

No Gold Medals for Obama

When I was teaching at Indiana University in the early 1970s, one of the undergraduates at the university was Mark Spitz, an NCAA champion swimmer who went on to win seven gold medals at the 1972 Munich Olympics.  Spitz was a legendary athlete k...

November 22, 2011

Radicals Don't Compromise

As the impasse at the deficit reduction supercommittee shows, Congress's inability to get things done is once again on display.  The blame for this failure has been widely attributed to the "unwillingness of both sides to work together," but the...

November 15, 2011

Generational Wealth Gap

A recent census report disclosed that the wealth gap between seniors and younger Americans is at an all-time high.  Those over 65 have accumulated $170,494 in total assets, while those between 25-34 had a net worth of $3,662 -- a difference of 4...

November 7, 2011

Everyone Should Pay. It's Only 'Fair.'

Among tax plans offered by GOP candidates, the most noteworthy is not Hermann Cain's 9-9-9 or Rick Perry's optional 20% flat tax, and certainly not Mitt Romney's "hold the line" approach of maintaining the status quo.  It is Michele Bachmann's p...

October 31, 2011

Professor Obama's Investing 101

Here's a great business model.  Start your company with the idea that it's going to go bankrupt.  Then, when it folds, inform your investors that the business was a success because it did exactly what you expected. That's more or less what ...

October 24, 2011

How About 6-6-6?

Ok. Let's get any talk of the devil out of the way. I'm not talking about THAT 666 -- I'm talking a serious alternative to 9-9-9.  Herman Cain's 9-9-9- tax plan, which he has called a "bold" rewriting of the tax code, has gained a lot of attenti...

October 21, 2011

A Contract on the Rich

In the Massachusetts senate race Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly referred to a "social contract" that obligates the rich to transfer a greater share of their income to the poor. According to Warren, this conception of the social contract has shaped A...

October 13, 2011

Predicting the Weatherman

It is the nature of protest movements that they must either expand or wither away: they can never stand still. The current Wall Street protests, originally conceived of as an "occupation," are attempting to maintain their momentum by expanding thei...

October 7, 2011

More Fun When You Share

This week I received a credit card offer that suggested I share duplicates of my card with family and friends.  "It's more rewarding when you share," the offer promised.  Just call the 800 number, and we'll zip a duplicate of your card to a...

October 6, 2011

Fed Punishing the Prudent

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be," Polonius advises his son Laertes in Act I of Shakespeare's  Hamlet.  "For loan oft loses both itself and friend, / And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry." Polonius may be Shakespeare's idea of an ol...

September 28, 2011

Obama Does 'Rich Man, Poor Man'

On September 25, addressing a DNC event in San Jose, California, the president recited a litany of liberal values dear to his heart: everything from increased spending on education to further subsidies for clean energy.  But the main thrust of h...

September 19, 2011

Obama's Hope and Lies

One thing about the Obama White House: you can't fault them for a lack of optimism.  Obama has been operating on little more than "hope" for three years now, with rosy predictions of economic improvement just around the corner.  Back in Jun...

September 13, 2011

The Player and the President

Anyone watching Sunday's women's final at the U.S. Open tennis tournament was treated to an appalling display of temper on the part of Serena Williams.  At the beginning of the second set, Williams was judged to have hindered her opponent by sho...

September 8, 2011

Green Pigs Don't Fly

Reportedly, Obama's jobs speech will focus on infrastructure spending, and much of that spending will undoubtedly be tied to the creation of "green jobs."  The problem is, what he has already spent has not created jobs.  According to the He...

September 1, 2011

Actresses and Professors Protest the Pipeline

On Tuesday Daryl Hannah was arrested near the White House while protesting possible approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline.  The Keystone XL project is designed to carry large quantities of oil from Canadian oil sands to refineries on the U.S....

August 22, 2011

Liberal 'Compromise'

Rhetoric has been cut loose from reality in the hands of the Democrats for some time now, but in the current calls for spending "compromise," an apotheosis has been reached.  The great Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, once pointed out that...

August 14, 2011

Obama and the Perry Miracle

Liberals have let it be known that they intend to "kill" Romney -- or any other GOP candidate who poses a threat to Obama in the 2012 election. The attack on Romney at the Iowa state fair by hecklers pretending to be ordinary retirees is prelude to w...

August 13, 2011

Obama's Vision and the Constitution

In To Begin the World Anew (2003) Bernard Bailyn writes that "the founders of the American nation were one of the most creative groups to appear in world history" (page 4). They were indeed a brilliant and creative group of thinkers, often espousing ...

August 1, 2011

Please, Mr. President, May I Have Some More?

"Please, Sir, may I have some More?" So asked the eponymous hero of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, only to be upbraided by the portly gentlemen directors of the workhouse where Oliver lives. These days conservatives are feeling a lot like little Oliv...

July 18, 2011

Who Owns the Deficit?

In the battle for public opinion now underway, Democrats are posing as centrists who favor a "balanced" budget agreement.  They have portrayed Republicans, especially Tea Party Republicans, as radicals and "obstructionists," a label the mainstre...

July 14, 2011

Barry's Angels: Obama's Amazonian Guard

Since the 1980s Moammar Gaddafi has surrounded himself with a specially trained corps of female guards, popularly known as the Amazonian guard.  It is believed that Gaddafi chose to employ women in this capacity on the theory that potential Arab...

July 8, 2011

Obama's Plan for $10 Gas

American drivers are angry at having to pay $4 a gallon for gas, and understandably so.  Their anger is often directed at the oil companies that supply the gas.  It should be directed at Barack Obama instead. From the beginning of his appea...

July 5, 2011

A Horrible Racial Preference Ruling in Michigan

On Friday, a panel from the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Michigan's ban on affirmative action.  In a split decision (Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action vs Regents of the University of Michigan), Judges R. Guy Cole, Jr. and...

July 1, 2011

The Fiscal Dance of Death

As depicted in hundreds of medieval plays and paintings, the dance of death was a macabre embodiment of the European public's belief in the likelihood its own imminent demise. A crucial element in this art was the concept of the Day of Reckoning: the...

June 24, 2011

Cash for Pumpers

On Thursday the President announced that he would release 30 million barrels of oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The immediate effect on world markets was to knock the oil price down by over $4 a barrel. But many experts question th...

June 17, 2011

To Sext, or Not to Sext

"Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure," or so Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan. Byron himself was a larger-than-life figure, a romantic hero beside which our present-day Don Juans, from Bill Clinton to Anthony Weiner, are more of an embarrass...

June 16, 2011

We Can Do Better

In its most recent report, Blue Chip Economic Indicators predicted that the nation's unemployment rate would fall to 8% by the end of 2012.  That might seem like good news, considering the fact that unemployment now stands at 9.1%.  But it ...

June 10, 2011

Recovery Slumber

Back in June 2010, President Obama proclaimed the beginning of what he called "recovery summer."  As HUD deputy secretary Ron Sims boasted on the White House blog, that was the summer we would see "the most active season yet" of economic activit...

June 4, 2011

Another Devastating Jobs Report

The May jobs report is out, and it is not good.  The Labor Department reported only 54,000 jobs created, while the unemployment rate rose to 9.1%.  Not only that, the March and April numbers were revised downward.  According to NBC New...

June 1, 2011

Sustainable Nonsense

Large-scale central planning, even of the most ruthless sort, has always been the left's preferred mode of operation.  Within the Obama administration, this planning has focused on achieving what the left calls "sustainability."  Like so ma...

May 27, 2011

A Generational Divide?

In Running on Empty, Peter G. Peterson excoriates the "we-first" attitude of retiring baby boomers.  Having read Peterson's take on boomer retirement, one is left with the impression that boomers are selfishly intent on bankrupting fut...

May 21, 2011

Boomer Barons?

A major policy debate is underway involving the burden that baby boomer retirement places on the U.S. economy.  Increasingly, this discussion is suggesting that the claims of boomers on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid represent an unsust...

May 13, 2011

A Good Hot Shower

Not much compares with the joy of lolling in a hot shower with water streaming full force down one's body, massaging one's back and shoulders, and easing the wrinkles on one's face. In an age of near universal regulation, censorship, and media confor...

May 2, 2011

The Boom America is Forfeiting

Australians are partying like it's 1999, but for Americans it's more like 1937.  That's the year recovery from the Great Depression, already under way when FDR took office, collapsed under the weight of Keynesian spending and settled into four m...

April 26, 2011

Conan the Campaigner

Even liberals admit that Obama is not much at the job of governance.  When in Washington, he leaves governance to leaders in Congress, as he did to Reid and Pelosi in the first years of this presidency.  Or else he flounders about, shifting...

April 21, 2011

The Left's Hitler Obsession

My childhood has long passed, but I still have a clear memory of one particular occasion when I found myself squared off against a grammar school bully -- a young misfit who roamed the playground just looking for trouble. How the altercation began I ...

April 14, 2011

Obama's Budget, Again

Pardon me, but I thought the President had already submitted a budget, and that was just two months ago.  Now he devotes another of his many "major speeches" to the budget and comes out with another policy makeover -- or the appearance...

April 8, 2011

The Democrats' Shameful Rhetoric

There are many ways to refute an argument.  The proper way to do so is with ideas, with rational argument, and with facts.  If you are considering a reduction of the federal budget by $61 billion, don't resort to scare tactics.  Check ...

March 31, 2011

The President's Snooze Button

In a speech at Georgetown University on March 30, President Obama declared that "we cannot keep going from shock to trance...rushing to propose action when gas prices rise, then hitting the snooze button when they fall again." Obama meant t...

March 29, 2011

Obama's High Food Price Policy Stealing Milk from Babies

The price of corn has reached a record $7 a bushel. Other basic foodstuffs, including wheat, sugar, and soybeans are selling at or near record prices. Milk prices as well have risen to record levels, making it more difficult for families to purchase ...

March 23, 2011

Obama's War on the Middle Class

Whenever he is in campaign mode, President Obama goes to great lengths to remind voters that he is "struggling to defend the middle class." As he did in January 2010, Obama speaks of the middle class as "under assault" (by whom he...

March 17, 2011

Exploiting the Japanese

For the left, no crisis is too terrible to go unused. So it is with the horrific suffering that has taken place in Japan.The President himself was the first to swing into action. Having already planned a nationally televised news conference to respon...

March 15, 2011

None of the Above on Energy

In terms of energy policy, as in so much else, the Obama administration is in leaderless disarray. The only thing it seems capable of doing is delaying and shutting down energy production.  As soon as some promising new supply pops up, like the ...

March 10, 2011

Thanks for Small Favors, President Obama

On Feb. 28, just after Interior Secretary Salazar declared that he was not satisfied with Gulf drilling safety standards, President Obama's drilling czar, Michael Bromwich, announced that a permit had been approved to resume deep-water drilling 70 mi...

February 28, 2011

Obama Nixes Safe Drilling

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was in Houston this weekend talking with oil executives who are eager to start drilling again in the Gulf of Mexico. That may sound like progress, but after the meeting Salazar said that nothing had changed. He was not ...

February 21, 2011

Media Gone Mad

The battle to reform spending on public employees is underway in a dozen states, and there's little doubt as to which side the mainstream media is taking.  In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker is leading the charge to reform spending o...

February 11, 2011

No Coal, No Power, No Gas

Let's see if I get this straight. During the early February cold spell in the southern plains, when wind chills in Dallas dipped to minus twenty degrees, Texans were going without power to heat their homes and businesses even as the state was sitting...

February 10, 2011

The Welfare State of the Union

President Obama has been speaking lately of what he views as an upswing in the economy. "The economy is growing again," he declared in the State of the Union address. Not surprisingly, he failed to mention that for 104 consecutive weeks, la...

February 5, 2011

NBC News: Making No Difference

For several years now, NBC Nightly News has concluded its broadcasts with a feature called "Making a Difference."  Invariably, those people thought to be "making a difference" fit neatly into the politically correct template ...

January 26, 2011

Excuses, Excuses

On January 25, the president delivered his State of the Union address.  Speaking with vigor and aplomb, the president demonstrated once again that he can look serious, act like a president, and read the words that have been written for him....

January 19, 2011

Tucson and the Politics of Lament

The left is attempting to make Tucson into another Katrina.  With Katrina, which played nonstop for months in the mainstream media, the suggestion of every "news" story was that the crisis was all George Bush's fault.  The "s...

January 14, 2011

America Is Losing the Resource Race

Although the Obama administration seems completely oblivious of the fact, the U.S. has now embarked on a race of global proportions, one that will have even greater consequences than did the space race of fifty years ago.  The resource race in w...

January 9, 2011

Good News! American Workers Are Giving Up

On Friday, the president wasted no time informing the country that unemployment rates had dropped from 9.8% to 9.4%.  That sounds pretty good until you dig into the underlying numbers. Then it sounds dire.Despite expectations that the U.S. would...

January 7, 2011

More Hurdles for Drilling

Even as other nations press ahead with plans for deep-water drilling, Obama continues to block offshore oil and gas projects in the U.S.  Despite the symbolic lifting of the deep-water drilling ban back in October, no new projects have been appr...

January 3, 2011

If You Can't Beat Them, Shame Them

In the good old days of Puritan New England, lesser offenders -- those who were spared pressing or hanging -- were treated to a few days in the stocks.  The offender's feet would be secured in a heavy wooden frame.  In this way, he would be...

December 27, 2010

Fannie, Freddie, and Fur

In a fascinating book entitled Furs, Fortune, and Empire (New York, 2010), Eric Jay Dolin recounts the entire history of the fur trade in America.  Dolin's book is full of interesting stories, one of which involves government's attempted takeove...

December 20, 2010

Really Free and Open

"Freedom and openness" has become a mantra for many on the left. On Dec. 1, FCC Chair Julius Genachowski circulated his remarks on preserving internet "freedom and openness," even as he promoted greater government regulation of th...

December 17, 2010

Solar Eclipse

The prospects for solar and wind companies have declined significantly in the last few years.  Those who have been unfortunate enough to invest in solar and wind enterprises have, on the whole, experienced mediocre returns even as the overall ma...

December 13, 2010

Teen Tyrants

During the eight years I lived in Japan, there occurred a rash of horrific murders committed by young men in their teens.  Almost all of these crimes were the acts of lonely outcasts, teens with especially low self-esteem who had been victims of...

December 4, 2010

Fantasy Figures, Real Pain

Early Friday morning, before the Department of Labor released its monthly jobs report, the mainstream media was reporting job gains of as much as 200,000 as more or less the consensus figure. Never mind that 200,000 was not the consensus among reputa...

December 3, 2010

Apocalypse Now! (Or Pretty Soon, Anyway)

November 30 was the last day of the Atlantic hurricane season. Those with six-month memory spans will recall that back in May, forecasters at NOAA were predicting "an extremely active" hurricane season, with 14 to 23 named storms and three ...

November 29, 2010

Me Being President

This fall, in the course of the ongoing tirade over taxing the rich, the president offered some informal remarks at a town hall meeting in Washington sponsored by CNBC. Obama was making the case that hedge fund managers should not be taxed at the sam...

November 22, 2010

No Business, No Jobs

Last week President Obama decided to repair his strained relationship with business. He did so, not by advocating permanent reductions in taxes and less regulation, but by interviewing a former Clinton-era Treasury official for a position as economic...

November 18, 2010

The Left and Energy Policy

There are several factors that contribute to a nation's future prosperity. One of the most important is an efficient and dependable supply of energy. A modern economy cannot function without adequate energy sources to power its electrical grid, suppl...

November 12, 2010

The Boom Box

In 1986, I was sitting in the American Center in Belgrade when I was approached by a distraught young man. In his hand, he held a copy of an American newspaper with a full-page ad for electronics. "Is it true?" he asked. "Are these pri...

November 3, 2010

Low Volts, Falling Leafs

As the launch dates for the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf approach, we need to ask how big a role the electric vehicle will have in America's future. Certainly, a great deal of hype surrounds the launch of these new models, but how successful will t...

October 23, 2010

Forty Million Losers

"Seen from a distance, we are just forty million losers." So wrote French political journalist René Étiemble just after Allied troops drove the Nazis from his country during World War II. Such candor is rare for a French polit...

October 13, 2010

Pimps and Parasites

When someone connected with Jerry Brown's campaign referred to Meg Whitman as a "whore," it revealed a lot about the way liberals think. The liberal mind, it would seem, always thinks in terms of offering or receiving payment for illicit se...

October 10, 2010

Two Steps Forward

Lenin famously described his strategy for communist domination as "one step forward, two steps back." Of course, by that he did not mean to suggest steps of equal length. The step forward was a lot more like two large steps, and the two ste...

October 9, 2010

Every Month, They're Lying

Figures for the last significant jobs report before the November election are a major embarrassment for the administration. On October 8, the labor department reported a decline of 95,000 workers, a figure much worse than economists had estimate...

October 7, 2010

The Battle Ahead

Things are getting pretty weird when even my home handyman starts complaining about a minor provision buried within the health care reform act. But that's exactly what happened last week. My levelheaded and normally apolitical handyman, a master of p...

September 28, 2010

Energy Independence: Are You Serious?

At last, some promising energy news. A new discovery of oil and gas in an unexplored region is leading to hope for potentially more energy than that possessed by the oil-rich nation of Libya. Enough energy to make every man, woman, and child an insta...

September 20, 2010

In anticipation of a Halloween 'trick or treat'

Every year at this time, when I was a kid, I started looking forward to the wonders of my favorite holiday, Halloween. What with the fun of dressing up, school parties, and a large annual haul of treats, it was a child's dream come true. Even now, th...

September 11, 2010

Election-Eve Stimulus

"When government talks reform on the eve of an election year, you can bet whatever they do will be based on the time honored principle of robbing Peter to pay Paul" (Reagan, in His Own Hand, New York 2001). That was Ronald Reagan in mid-Oct...

September 6, 2010

Obama's Silver Lining?

The August employment figures are dismal. Only 71,000 new jobs were created in the private sector in this, the beginning of the second year of economic recovery. At this rate, economists tell us, the unemployment rate will continue to rise indefinite...

August 31, 2010

The Party of Know-Nothings

"Ideas may be cut loose from experience in two senses: either they have no roots in experience, or they are not submitted to the test of experience. Either way, they are free to be foolish." So wrote Jeane Kirkpatrick in the Introduction to...

August 27, 2010

How to Regulate America Out of Business

Vladimir Lenin had a much simpler time of it. Following the October Revolution, he swiftly nationalized nearly all industry, commerce, and agriculture in the Soviet Union. Those who opposed the takeovers, such as those millions of small landowners kn...

August 23, 2010

The Obama Recovery

During the same week in which the president was vacationing in a $50,000-per-night home in Martha's Vineyard, half a million Americans were standing in line, waiting their turn to apply for unemployment benefits. Those benefits are about $400 a week,...

August 21, 2010

The Ride Down

Revised numbers from the Labor Department show negative job growth during June 2010. For each job opening, there were five persons looking for work, and 300,000 fewer workers were hired in June than in May. The ride down continues.Meanwhile, Treasury...

August 5, 2010

The Prophet of the Ruling Class

So now the EPA has been petitioned to ban the use of lead in bullets and fishing weights. For hundreds of years, human beings have used lead for those purposes, and life on earth has not exactly come to an end. Now we are told that the lead used in h...

July 26, 2010

The Anti-Drilling Commission

The commission appointed by President Obama to investigate the Gulf oil spill (the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling) does not include a single member with specialized knowledge of petroleum engineering. ...

July 16, 2010

Future of the News

It's a frightening thought: government takeover of the media. But having tightened their grip on health care, financial services, and energy, it's only logical that the Democrats should turn their attention to the media.Discussions underway at the Fe...

July 12, 2010

Free Market Obama

Now he tells us. He's been reading Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman instead of playing golf and shooting hoops, as reported by the press. While no one was looking, he's been downloading podcasts of the Glenn Beck show and checking out heritage.org...

July 6, 2010

A Hapless Administration

Last week was extraordinary. The president's economic advisor, Christina Romer, declared that Americans should be feeling pretty good about the June jobs report. After all, the unemployment rate dropped from 9.7% to 9.5% because 650,000 people were s...

June 21, 2010

Endless Zeros

Twenty trillion dollars. That is the estimate of federal indebtedness by 2020. But that $20 trillion is just the federal debt: it does not include $3.4 trillion in current annual spending, nor does it include state and local obligations.Government ha...

June 15, 2010

Tea Party Cynics at the Polls

Violent, angry, racist, fascist -- all of these charges have been unjustly brought against the tea party movement. But along with these more colorful and far-fetched accusations, there is the broader and more corrosive suggestion of cynicism.An opini...

June 8, 2010

Rushing to Climate Change Conclusions

A group of distinguished scientists has issued a report confirming the theory of man-made global warming. Many of those same scientists are now holding their breath, hoping that a major research project in Antarctica will, for the first time, prove t...

May 27, 2010

Another Sham Stimulus Bill

Given the choice between retaining power in the short term or doing what's right for America, which would you choose? Most Americans, I believe, would be willing to sacrifice a great deal for their country, and this willingness to sacrifice has alway...

May 22, 2010

Sugarcoating Socialism the French Way

The American left embraces a romantic myth of the superiority of French socialism, to impress upon mushy minds that the corporatist state envisioned by Obama would be a good thing. At one point in the 1995 remake of the classic film Sabrina, the titl...

May 17, 2010

'Brighter Days Ahead'

President Obama has compared himself to a lot of other presidents, including Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. He is starting to sound a lot like Herbert Hoover.At a battery factory in North Carolina, the president declared that "[b]righter days are sti...

April 24, 2010

Government's Compulsive Spending Disorder

There are hundreds of thousands of examples of wasteful government spending, and the numbers continue to multiply faster than anyone can keep track of them: six-figure retirement packages for state workers, 28 separate security offices at the State U...

April 19, 2010

Bond-Buyers Voting against Obamanomics

It's getting harder to trust Washington's numbers. There was, for example, the not insignificant matter of fuzzy health care budgeting. How it was possible for the CBO to budget six years of health care spending based on ten years of revenues is stil...

April 4, 2010

Another Twenty-Five Years of Affirmative Action?

The Obama administration has filed a brief with the fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case involving the use of racial preferences in the admission of undergraduate students at UT Austin. The brief was filed in o...

April 3, 2010

Aerobics and the Invisible Hand

Like thousands of other Americans, I belong to a senior aerobics class, one that meets in a church gymnasium. At least once a week, the class utilizes chairs as part of its workout, and it has always been the case that as students arrive for the clas...

March 30, 2010

Obama Blames China

"It is certainly in our interest, and in the interest of peace and stability in Asia and the world, that we take what steps we can toward improved practical relations with Peking." That was Richard Nixon in his first foreign policy report t...

March 18, 2010

A Man Named Rick

This morning, I met a man named Rick. Rick, a 57-year-old unemployed construction worker, was sitting in his truck outside our local post office, asking passersby for work. Rick, it should be stressed, was not a panhandler or a bum. He was a veteran ...

March 9, 2010

Methane Madness

The environmentalist assault on economic growth resembles the old shell game practiced by con artists for centuries. Just when you're sure the pea will appear at the right, it shows up in the middle. Place your bet on the middle, and the pea appears ...

March 6, 2010

Activist Science

Recent attention has focused on the "push to oversimplify" at the IPCC, especially in connection with its 2007 report that announced "unequivocal" evidence of man-made global warming. That report, which has been shown to contain n...

March 4, 2010

Bad News Bair

A report released from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation suggests that economic recovery may not be as swift or robust as hoped. As the FDIC's director Sheila Bair admits, the report does not support the president's insistence that recovery i...

February 23, 2010

Backing Losers, Shackling Winners: Obama-Style Industrial Policy

Team Obama seems intent on selecting the weakest players to represent the American economy in global markets. The administration's tax and regulatory policies handicap our finest industries while trying to promote others that may never be competitive...

February 19, 2010

Aren't We Supposed to Win?

Just after reading M. Stanton Evans's remarkable book, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies (New York: 2007), I was talking with a close friend, a man with a broad interest in Americ...

February 16, 2010

A Trying Time of Year

This time of year, which C. S. Lewis (at least in William Nicholson's portrayal) called a "trying time," seems depressing enough already, but for those who wish to be further disheartened, the U. S. Treasury Department maintains a National ...

February 15, 2010

Let's Make a Deal?

President Obama has suggested a half-day bipartisan meeting, to be televised live on February 25, to discuss moving his health care agenda forward. Considering what has transpired this year, Obama's half-day TV special will probably be a lot more lik...

February 13, 2010

Whatever Happened to Toni Morrison?

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Woffford) is one of several prominent African-Americans to have been awarded the Nobel Prize. Best known for her novels Beloved and Song of Solomon, Morrison was for several years among the most widely discussed writ...

February 10, 2010

Multiplier Effect Defect

Liberals are fond of referring to government spending as "investment." From Barack Obama on down, Democrats speak of investing in job creation, education, alternative fuels, high-speed rail, and every other pet project for which they can ex...

February 4, 2010

What the Obama Budget Reveals

Obama's fiscal 2011 budget, totaling $3.834 trillion, provides more than just details about revenues, expenditures, and deficits. It offers the clearest road map yet as to where the president intends to lead America. What that road map reveals is not...

January 29, 2010

A Really Mediocre President

In a December 18 interview, President Obama stated that he "would rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." Several things need to be said about this apparently straightforward remark.American political...

January 20, 2010

The Left's Rhetoric of Accusation

In a book called Alien Powers, Kenneth Minogue described the way in which Marxist ideologues defended the violence and oppression resulting from their own politics. If the Marxist is accused of stifling jobs by undermining the free market, he will ac...

January 13, 2010

Shake and Take

Over the past several years, the president has repeatedly vowed to make the United States less dependent on foreign sources of oil. From the actions of Ken Salazar and his lieutenants, however, it would seem that the Interior Department's main missio...

January 10, 2010

Eat More Canine?

For years, a popular fast-food chain has run a successful ad campaign encouraging Americans to eat more chicken. Adhering to the logic that canines generate less CO2 emissions than bovines, environmental radicals are urging the consumption of man's b...

January 5, 2010

Happy States

According to data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control, the five happiest states in the nation are Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona. Analyzing the data in the December 17, 2009 issue of Science, Professors Andrew J. Oswa...

December 29, 2009

'I Am Not a Spendthrift'

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once defended the proposition that every statement suggests its opposite. Others have expressed a similar skepticism concerning the trustworthiness of words, especially when those words are not backed b...

December 25, 2009

Christmas under Communism

I lived for two years in Eastern Europe, during and shortly after the end of the Communist era. In those two years, my wife and I celebrated a traditional Christmas, complete with festive decorations, Christmas cards, modestly wrapped gifts, a holida...

December 23, 2009

The Quarter-Percent Solution?

The proposal to charge a ¼% tax on financial transactions doesn't sound like much, especially when we're talking about villainous Wall Street speculators making tens of millions of dollars per year. Surely, the speculators could "pitch in...

December 13, 2009

The Obama Energy Fiasco

Whatever happened to President Obama's urgent campaign appeal to "free America from dependency on foreign oil"? In eleven short months, the Obama administration has made more mistakes on energy policy than did Jimmy Carter in his entire ter...

November 11, 2009

A Lesson in Biofuels from Tennessee

In 2007, to great fanfare and amid ever-greater expectations, a large-scale demonstration project was initiated to turn switchgrass into biofuel. For an investment of $70 million, the taxpayers of the state of Tennessee were promised a lucrative new ...

October 5, 2009

All Politics, No Principles

In separate Associated Press reports, President Obama was said to be "mulling options to boost job growth" and "considering a range of ideas" for dealing with Afghanistan. The president seems to spend a great deal of his time thes...

July 5, 2009

The Young Tyrant - a Lesson from History

A charismatic young leader, supported by a coalition of intellectual elitists on the one hand and a dependent underclass on the other, has gained control of the country. With each month that passes, the leader and his court reveal themselves to be mo...

June 17, 2009

Medical Tort Reform

President Obama was booed this week at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in Chicago. He was booed by an audience that included America's leading medical experts for declaring he was "not advocating caps on malpractice awards...

June 11, 2009

How to Really Create or Save Two Million Jobs

President Obama has spoken recently of "creating or saving" 600,000 jobs at a mere expense of $787 billion. Sixty thousand of these, he claims, have already been created or saved. Just last month, of course, it was a million jobs that were ...

June 7, 2009

A Wise Latina Spender?

As more information becomes available, we are able to form a clearer impression of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. She is an intelligent, well-educated individual with broad experience in both corporate and judicial law. According to the White House and to he...

June 3, 2009

Cap and Fade

All great national powers have relied on access to and control of large quantities of natural resources, including energy and foodstuffs, to maintain their influence and status. Government policy that limits access to these resources must certainly w...

March 15, 2009

My Socialist Past

"Socialism, a luxury of the wealthy. To the poor, a suicidal creed ..."  --David Hare, A Map of the WorldAnyone who has lived inside the demoralized, unproductive, gray prison of a communist state, as I did in the mid-1980s, knows to w...