March 23, 2015

Drink cyanide, bloody neanderthals

An AP story by Daniel Estrin appeared in the Sunday Boston Globe, recounting the “despair” and “rage” on the Israeli left after Netanyahu’s election victory: TEL AVIV — Israeli liberals woke up after last week...

January 16, 2015

The people who shut down traffic in Boston for hours yesterday

On the Thursday before the MLK weekend, police arrested 29 protestors who blocked traffic on I-93 both north and south of Boston.  Traffic was snarled for most of the morning, blocking commuters and an ambulance attempting to get to Mass General...

December 17, 2014

Compromising with a Pack of Jackals

Not much has changed since this story appeared in The Hill in December 2010: Senate Democrats have filed a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill that would fund the government through fiscal year 2011, according to Senate GOP sources. "Th...

November 6, 2014

A case study in Obama grammar

My daughter is a senior in high school who has been studying for her SATs, and I asked her to find the grammatical error in the following sentence: The challenges that lay ahead of us are far too important to allow partisanship or ideology to prev...

November 2, 2014

Criminalizing Weather-related Fatalities

Deaths from natural disasters are traditionally considered “acts of God,” or “acts of nature,” beyond human control. This view is being challenged in a French trial where prosecutors have charged a small-town mayor with mansla...

October 14, 2014

A 'Difficult Issue' on the Gay Rights Agenda

The AP reports that “even as they celebrate epic victories in the push for marriage equality, gay rights activists acknowledge that other difficult issues remain on their agenda.”  One such issue is that the HIV infection rate has re...

August 26, 2014

The Word 'Bacon' Banned in Vermont Street Sign

The list of things that offend Muslims is long. Muslims are incensed, ready too often to murder offenders of their religion. The offenses range from substantive criticism: the Danish cartoons, The Satanic Verses, Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali...

July 12, 2014

Obama the Bear is Loose

As NBC reports, “'The Bear is Loose': Obama Strolls to Starbucks in D.C.” Hear him roar! Elsewhere we read: CNN: “Obama, the ‘Bear,’ is loose and trying to reconnect with voters” ABC: “Obam...

June 14, 2014

Obama to Maliki: 'Set aside sectarian differences'

President Obama’s reaction to foreign affairs is often maddening, but his statement Friday on the crisis in Iraq rose to new levels of folly.  He began by correctly identifying ISIL as “a terrorist organization…that poses a da...

June 7, 2014

'Republicans have moved much further right'

Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party.  It left me.”  Since Reagan’s time, the Democratic Party has become increasingly radical on defense, government spending, environmental policy, and socia...

May 28, 2014

Obama Shuts Down 500,000 Acres

President Obama signed an executive order last week to place 500,000 acres under the “permanent protection” of the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument (OMDP) in south central New Mexico.  Despite Obama’s claim that ...

May 25, 2014

Like a Boss?

The Democrats are running a cutesy campaign asking people to vote on which bumper sticker they like best.  I’m still scratching my head over sticker #1: I had to Google the phrase, which refers to “a person completing an actio...

May 18, 2014

Obama Endorses the Orwellian 'B1 Emissions Path'

Has the Obama administration set the U.S. on the “B1 emissions path”? The B1 emissions pathway was defined in an obscure IPCC report published fourteen years ago (and since superseded), titled the Special Report on Emission Scenarios (...

May 4, 2014

Bacon Is Good for You

Those who love rib-eye steaks and double-cream Brie will feel better about their guilty pleasures after reading Nina Teicholz’s article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, “The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Di...

April 19, 2014

Only the Right Kind of Hydroelectricity Need Apply

Rent-seekers in the Massachusetts renewable energy industry are “raising alarms” about abundant, clean hydroelectricity from Quebec.  They argue that Renewable Portfolio Standards – mandates forcing utilities to purchase renewa...

April 7, 2014

Global Warmism's New Campaign: 'Loss and Damage'

DEVELOPED COUNTRIES MUST TAKE URGENT ACTION We must make dramatic reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change (“mitigation”), and we must fund and implement programs to help people adapt to the effects ...

March 12, 2014

Obamacare's Architect Talks about the Law's Making

Ezekiel Emanuel – brother of Rahm, with whom he shares a charm deficiency – shared his behind-the-scenes stories in the recent Wall Street Journal essay “Inside the Making of Obamacare.”  To my ear, Emanuel’s abrasi...

March 1, 2014

Boston Globe: 'Mass. may give up on still-failing health site'

Following the passage of  RomneyCare in 2006, the state of Massachusetts set up a prototype of the Obama health care exchanges called the Massachusetts Health Connector. It was a simple website that listed plans offered by various health insurer...

February 14, 2014

Another Green Bird-Killer

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, the world's largest "tower-based" solar plant, is scheduled to open this week in the Mojave Desert. According to Brightsource, one of the project's investors, the plant covers 3,500 acres (five square mil...

January 31, 2014

Shell Cancels Chukchi Sea Drilling

President Obama boasted in his State of the Union address that "over the last three years, we've opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration." To give the impression of immediate action, he proclaimed: "Tonight, I'm directing my administ...

January 22, 2014

Warmists Pivot to Climate Adaptation

Climate change activists utilize two strategies in their war against global warming: mitigation and adaptation. Despite ongoing efforts, mitigation efforts to cut CO2 emissions are failing. There is little political will in developing countries like ...

January 20, 2014

Time's Hillary Cover too much even for the Boston Globe

Time Magazine has achieved the status of the class clown, willing to embarrass itself to attract attention. Its latest cover asks, "Can Anyone Stop Hillary?" The accompanying article is seven pages of slobbering sycophancy. If anyone still reads Time...

January 6, 2014

The Corruption of 'Climate Literacy'

A recent Wall Street Journal article expressed concern about low math and science standards in the Common Core curriculum, despite President Obama's frequent speechifying about the importance of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) educa...

December 5, 2013

The Audacity of Ignorance

Bret Stephens's otherwise excellent column in the Wall Street Journal, "Obama and the 'Amazon Experience,'" concludes with a head-scratching interpretation of a recent Obama comment: "I'm accused of a lot of things, but I don't think I'm stupid en...

November 23, 2013

Forcing Mom into Medicaid was Part of the Plan

Nicole Hopkins' heartfelt account in the Wall Street Journal, "Obamacare Forced Mom Into Medicaid," describes the author's mother's experience with the Washington State Health Care Authority. The subheading sums it up: "My mother preferred to pay for...

November 18, 2013

The Affordable Care Act is not 'Incomprehensible'

Fresh off her recent column lionizing Chris Christie, Peggy Noonan turns to making excuses in her Wall Street Journal column for Democrats who voted for ObamaCare because, well, it's just too darn complicated: More and more it seems obvious that th...

November 7, 2013

Where is the RNC's VoteBuilder Software?

A friend went to help another friend who is running for the local School Committee. I'm being coy because my friend did a little undercover work and showed me screenshots of the software the candidate was using, something called VoteBuilder, "a partn...

November 2, 2013

More Lipstick on the ObamaCare Pig

The White House PR machine keeps trying to put lipstick on the ObamaCare pig. According to Whitehouse.gov, "there's some great news from a Department of Health and Human Services report... Thanks to Obamacare, half of young adults between age 18 and ...

October 24, 2013

'If the N.S.A. is Big Brother, We're Big Mother'

When President Obama said, ObamaCare is "not just a website," unfortunately he was right. The disastrous launch of the ObamaCare exchanges is only part of the transformation of the U.S. healthcare system that has been going on since 2009. One promine...

October 8, 2013

Another Leftist Slur

Peter Wehner's Commentary magazine article, excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, offers a list of the ad hominem insults aimed at Republicans during the government shutdown: Republicans are being referred to as jihadists, arsonists, anarchists, te...

September 6, 2013

Lame GOP Fundraising Efforts

The Democrats' 2012 campaign playbook is no secret, but, based a sample of one -- the email and snail mail targeted at me -- the GOP establishment continues to fundraise like its 1999. I am an officer in my local Republican City Committee, and the St...

August 28, 2013

Obama's Mortgage Police

This summer the White House unveiled "President Obama's Plan for a Better Foundation for Middle Class Homeownership," which is so amazing it merits a second slogan, the "Better Bargain." A cutesy infographic explains the Plan, using language that see...

July 9, 2013

Net-Zero Busybodies

International agreements to lower greenhouse gases like the Kyoto Protocol have proven to be unenforceable, but zoning laws have real teeth. Thus global warming activists have begun to work on the municipal and state level to pass zoning laws that ma...

July 1, 2013

Obama Infatuation Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

We're starting to see the occasional disillusioned mainstream media reporter coming out of the closet. A writer in the Sunday New York Times, for example, attempts to compare Obama to Mandela, and closes his column with a damning comparison: Mandel...

May 30, 2013

The Betrayal of Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton might have been a little touchy about Benghazi when she testified to Congress in January because Barack Obama had thrown her under the bus, abandoning her philosophy of "normalization" -- the policy of intentionally minimizing securit...

May 25, 2013

Democrats Attempt to Link Tea Party to Nazis

A fundraising appeal from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee titled, "Danger: tea party update" begins with this warning: "At one Tea Party rally this week, mobs chanted "Waterboard Obama, Waterboard Hillary! At another, radicals waved sign...

May 24, 2013

'Youths' Riot in Sweden

In addition to the horrendous beheading of a British soldier in Woolwich by Muslim terrorists, Stockholm's suburbs have seen riots for the last four nights, with car burnings and crowds throwing rocks at the police, reminiscent of the recurring riots...

May 14, 2013

Politicizing Junior High Literature

Forty-five states have adopted the Common Core State Standards, including the New York State Education Department, which publishes a document titled, "Grades 6-8 English Language Arts Curriculum Map." Four texts are specified for each year, or 12 boo...

May 8, 2013

What if They Held Impeachment Hearings and the MSM Didn't Show Up?

Today's Benghazi hearings brought back memories of my grandparents glued to the television for weeks at a time during the Iran Contra hearings. History in the making! Scandal at the highest levels! Possible impeachment proceedings! Former Deputy Ch...

April 21, 2013

'Nothing tough about this boxer's character'

A great smack-down of the Tsarnaev brothers appeared-of all places-in Saturday's Boston Globe. It was in the Metro section, which might explain it. Kevin Cullen is in no mood for any lily-livered liberal sympathy from the why-do-they-hate-us crowd: ...

April 19, 2013

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's 'hood

I'm currently under lockdown in Cambridge about a mile from the Watertown neighborhood where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is reported to be holed up. He's in a quiet residential neighborhood that has a large Armenian population, and many great Armenian food sto...

April 11, 2013

Obama's Budget: More Spending, More Debt

See also: Battle of the Budgets President Obama is trying to sell his 2014 Budget as a "fiscally responsible" plan that will "cut the deficit by $1.8 trillion over the next decade." Obama remarked, "When it comes to deficit reduction, I've already me...

April 11, 2013

Battle of the Budgets

On Wednesday President Obama presented his 2014 Budget Proposal -- two months later than required by law. Even the Obama cheerleaders at Reuters glumly confess, "it has little chance of becoming law." Obama's budget joins two earlier budgets presen...

April 10, 2013

Not Yet Time to Declare Victory over Climate Anti-Capitalists

Some climate change skeptics have begun to express optimism recently, based in part on a mildly skeptical article in the normally true-believer Economist magazine.  On AT, for example, Jonathon Moseley argued in "The Coming Global Warming Voter ...

April 9, 2013

Boston Globe puts death of Annette Funicello above the fold, Thatcher below

Two stories appear above the fold on the front page of today's Boston Globe: one about "license plate-reading devices" and one on a transportation bill passing the House. A photo of Annette Funicello in her Mickey Mouse ears also appears above the fo...

March 25, 2013

The Dream of a World Without Oil

The New York Times devoted most of the front page of its Sunday Review section to a story promoting the green dream of "Life After Oil and Gas." The story cites an article by Stanford engineers published in the journal Energy Policy, titled "Providin...

March 24, 2013

Ryan Budget: Better than the Senate's, but That's About It

The GOP FY2014 House Budget Resolution, authored by Paul Ryan, is far better than the budget plan passed this weekend by the Senate, but it's hardly a radical small-government plan of action.  It's telling that the Senate defeated the Ryan propo...

March 9, 2013

Don't Touch Obama's Stash

Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs published an article in the Financial Times last week, titled "Obama has always planned to slash spending."  The claim sounds ridiculous, but in fact there's a kernel of truth in it.  Obama has proposed cutti...

March 8, 2013

Those Tycoons and Their Yachts

The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is in its usual high dudgeon, this time about Paul Ryan's proposed budget, which "hands tax breaks to the Republicans' largest corporate backers and billionaire CEO funders." According to the DSCC: John Boehn...

March 4, 2013

Obama's Mythical Spending Cuts

President Obama has engaged in a two-pronged attack during the recent budget battles -- which, given the failure of sequester negotiations, will continue with our next budget crisis on March 27th when the Continuing Resolution funding the federal gov...

February 13, 2013

A short note on Speaker Boehner's expression

I had dinner guests and forgot to DVR the State of the Union, so I tuned in late. The picture of three politicians at center stage however gave me hope. On the left was just plain dumb as a box of rocks Joe Biden, so obviously aware of the camera, t...

February 8, 2013

Massachusetts Bans Travel

I'm sitting at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts during big blizzard of 2013. At 6:30 we have had about two inches of accumulation. For the last 2 ½ hours it has been illegal to drive a car on any road in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, per order ...

February 2, 2013

Grumblings from Colin Powell Republicans

Peggy Noonan's column in today's Wall Street Journal gushes about the one panel at last weekend's National Review Institute conference that struck a false note to my ear. It had a clever title, "What's Wrong with the Right?" but a less clever premise...

February 1, 2013

Obama's Rebirth as an American Exceptionalist

It's a given among conservatives that President Obama doesn't have a lot of admiration for the Founding Fathers, and only believes in American exceptionalism, as he said at the 2009 NATO summit, as much as "Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." In...

January 30, 2013

Is Winning the Argument Enough?

I attended the National Review Institute conference in Washington this weekend and came home rejuvenated and satiated by an abundant intellectual feast -- 16 hours of speeches and panel discussions on Saturday alone, with one 45 minute break for cock...

January 16, 2013

Memo to Beijing: Carbon Dioxide Doesn't Cause Smog

This weekend in Beijing, the air quality index broke historic records, summarized succinctly in the title of a New York Times story by Edward Wong, "On Scale of 0 to 500, Beijing's Air Quality Tops 'Crazy Bad' at 755." The South China Morning Post re...

January 9, 2013

MSM Attacks Hagel Attackers

Chuck Hagel is going to face a lot of questions in his confirmation hearing as Obama's nominee for Secretary of Defense. Many Senators have pointed out his questionable judgments on Israel, Iran, the Iraq War. In fact most of the foreign policy posit...

January 5, 2013

Tax increase for the 0.7%. Or is it the 77%?

The New York Times summarized the fiscal cliff deal in an article celebrating "the most progressive [tax code] since 1979," that brought "tax increases on the incomes of a small sliver of the richest Americans": The last-minute deal struck by the de...

December 15, 2012

Rep. Capuano (D-MA) vs. the Public

Michael Capuano, former Mayor of Somerville, MA and Democrat Congressman for a "majority-minority" district that includes Cambridge and most of Boston, addressed the fiscal cliff in his e-update this week, in which he announces: "I believe in comprom...

December 7, 2012

Obama Takes it to the American People

President Obama's idea of negotiating a solution to the fiscal cliff crisis is to campaign directly to the American people, encouraging them to pressure Congress to accept his unreasonable demands. He describes the strategy in a letter from the White...

November 24, 2012

Obama's Santa Claus Presidency

Mitt Romney was castigated last weekend for comparing Obama to a Santa Claus who bought votes by showering presents on the electorate. Even conservatives had their feathers ruffled. Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, George Will and Susana Martinez -- all of...

November 6, 2012

NYT on Benghazi: It's Bush's Fault

Okay, that headline is a bit of an exaggeration...but not by much. The New York Times finally published a rare story addressing security failures in Benghazi -- on the Sunday before the election. The story, titled "Libya Attack Shows Pentagon's Limit...

October 25, 2012

Electoral College Update

I believe that Mitt Romney will win on November 6th. The alternative is too ghastly to contemplate. I'm encouraged by the polls, as reported in Rick Moran's blog post, "Romney has lead in all 4 major tracking polls." These polls however don't address...

October 18, 2012

Tanzanian Muslims Burn Churches and Call for Beheading of 14-Year-Old Boy

This sad story of Muslims behaving badly comes from the Tanzanian Citizen newspaper: two 14-year-old friends, one Muslim, one Christian, were walking home from school in a Dar es-Salaam suburb.  The Muslim boy told the Christian that anyone who ...

September 26, 2012

'Questionable Solar Math' Revisited

After I posted a blog piece on what I called "questionable math" on the payback period for installing solar photovoltaic panels, I received an email from Jeff Ressler, President of Software Services at Clean Power Research, the company that provided ...

September 19, 2012

The Progressive War on Parking

Mark your calendars: September 21 is international PARK(ing) Day, described as "annual open-source global event where citizens, artists and activists collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spaces into 'PARK(ing)' spaces."  Get it? ...

September 17, 2012

Questionable Solar Math at the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal published one of its Pollyannish green energy articles on Monday, which begins with this photo caption under a photograph of photovoltaic solar panels: "ROOFTOP REWARD With a utility rebate and tax credit, a residential solar ...

September 14, 2012

Senseless Violence?

President Obama urged in his press conference following the attacks on our embassies in Libya and Egypt: "We must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants." Thankfully, the President's eloqu...

September 13, 2012

Romney 'reckless remarks' feeding frenzy at Boston Globe

I had to cancel my subscription to the Boston Globe today, for health reasons. (I know, I should have done it years ago, but the kids like the comics.) I suffer from mild hypertension, but at a check-up yesterday I discovered that my blood pressure w...

August 6, 2012

Obama Campaign Video Touts Dubious Green Energy 'Success' Story

The Obama-Biden campaign recently released the video "Our Jobs Come from the Wind," whose title comes from the words of Steve Smiley, CEO of Heron Wind Manufacturing of Traverse City, Michigan. The video holds up Heron Wind as a validation of Obama's...

July 20, 2012

They're Coming for Our Food, One Food Policy Council at a Time

If you live in a sane place where the local government confines its duties to schools, public safety, and pothole repair, it's tempting to congratulate yourself when you read about the recent proposals to ban 17-ounce sodas in Cambridge, MA and New Y...

July 13, 2012

A Sociology of the Jet Ski

Daniel Henninger's column in the Wall Street Journal reproduced the photograph of Mitt and Ann Romney on a jet ski in Lake Winnipesaukee, adding to the criticism that the photo made him look like an out of touch rich guy, akin to John Kerry windsurfi...

June 28, 2012

Markey Attacks

Ed Markey would like to present himself as a genteel senior statesmen, whose 36-year career in Congress has been devoted to helping the people of Massachusetts, as well as saving the planet with legislation like the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill....

June 26, 2012

Doing the Math on Solar Water Heaters

The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) claims that "solar hot water systems are great because they provide an easy and low cost way to create hot water in a clean and sustainable way." On the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star web...

June 6, 2012

The Big Lie: Republicans are Racists

It goes without saying that Obama supporters do not condone the nastier genocidal bits of National Socialism, but the Big Lie, described by Hitler and perfected by Joseph Goebbels, is a familiar leftist tactic. It is described by its creators below:...

May 30, 2012

NPR v. Fox News: Who Is the Smartest of Them All?

It's happened to every talk radio listener.  You're running errands on Saturday morning.  Forgot to bring the iPod with the Rush 24/7 podcasts.  One AM station has an infomercial about investing in gold coins, the other a rerun of the ...

May 29, 2012

Boston Globe Admits that Food Deserts 'aren't as common as the rhetoric suggests'

Conservatives have been highly skeptical from the beginning about the fixation of Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign on the elimination of "food deserts." For example, two years ago I wrote an article for AT, titled "Federal Anti-Obesity Initiative...

May 25, 2012

Newton (MA) saves money by going green. Sort of. Not really.

A recent press release from Massachusetts Governor Patrick's office joined the unanimous praise for the City of Newton, a suburb of Boston with a population of 84,000: Last week, Mayor [Seti] Warren signed a contract requiring 100 percent of municip...

May 23, 2012

Boston Globe Publishes Biased Photos Next to Complaint About Bias

It's no surprise that the mainstream media's election coverage is biased toward President Obama, but every now and then they outdo themselves. On yesterday's editorial page, a letter writer complained about the lack of "Equal Treatment [by the press]...

May 6, 2012

'Death with Dignity' on the Massachusetts Ballot

A group called Death with Dignity is collecting signatures for a ballot proposal that would make Massachusetts the fourth U.S. state, following Washington, Oregon, and Montana, to legalize assisted suicide. The Boston Globe published a balanced cover...

May 2, 2012

Obama, the Warrior?

Peter L. Bergen's op-ed in last Sunday's New York Times, titled, "President Obama, Warrior in Chief" makes the following claims: The president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the...

April 25, 2012

Clean Cities Cash Flow

Forget the war on women, the Obama Administration has been waging a war on petroleum. This is not a deranged partisan accusation but the aim in the mission statement of the Clean Cities Coalition Program at the Department of Energy, which reads as fo...

April 9, 2012

Unelected EPA Bureaucrats Approve E15 Ethanol

Last week, "an unelected group of people" over at the Environmental Protection Agency revised our national energy policy, approving a new gasoline blend with up to 15% ethanol, known as E15, which may be available in pumps this summer.  Currentl...

April 3, 2012

Fracknation Documentary Film Raises Production Money Through Kickstarter

James Delingpole alerted readers to a worthy project: a documentary that extols the benefits of fracking, called "Fracknation." The producers are currently raising money through Kickstarter, the website that describes itself as "A New Way to Fund and...

April 1, 2012

ObamaCare in My Mailbox

Just as the headlines about the GOP War on Women's Right to Taxpayer-funded Condoms have started to die down, I received a notice from my health insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts -- the first of many to come if the Supreme Co...

March 2, 2012

Diversity Studies on Steroids at Tufts University

Tufts University in suburban Boston has become a global powerhouse in the last decades, excelling in medicine, international affairs, and many other fields.  A spot in the class of 2016 for today's high school seniors is highly coveted.  It...

March 1, 2012

$10 Billion a Year Expected from Ohio's Utica Shale Formation

The Ohio Shale Coalition has released a report, "An Analysis of the Economic Potential For Shale Formations in Ohio," which paints an optimistic picture: For the first time in over 100 years, Ohio finds itself on the threshold of not only being self...

February 29, 2012

Creative Destruction at the Academy Awards

Two notable films have dealt with the historic transition of the movie industry from silent films to talkies: Singin' in the Rain (1952) and The Artist, this year's winner of the Oscar® for Best Picture, not to mention four other awards including Bes...

February 24, 2012

On the Cusp of a Natural Gas Bonanza, Massachusetts Bets on Wind Power

You'd have to be a dim bulb -- perhaps one of those 13-watt compact fluorescents -- to believe that forcing utilities to purchase expensive offshore wind power will lead to economic prosperity.  Yet this is precisely the reaction of the Boston p...

January 19, 2012

Conservative Happy Warrior Challenges Warmist Ed Markey for House Seat

First things first: if that headline has your blood flowing, read no farther and go to Jeffin2012 to chip in whatever you can to Jeff's campaign.  Jeff reads American Thinker faithfully, and he jumped at the chance to talk with AT.  A pile ...

January 11, 2012

People for the American Way Identifies Photo of Westboro Baptist Church Demonstrators as Tea Party Members

It won't shock AT readers to learn that the Left is deceitful, but here's another piece of evidence: a fundraising letter from Ralph Neas's People for the American Way (PAW) arrived in the mail today. The outside of the envelope and the letter inside...

December 19, 2011

Harvard's Deep Green Pockets

Australian science writer Jo Nova estimates that since 1989 the U.S. government has spent $79 billion on global warming-friendly climate research. Nova notes that the "figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, [o...

December 9, 2011

Moral Equivalence in the New Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (opening nationally December 9) is in many ways a brilliant new adaptation of the John Le Carré novel, with Gary Oldman in the role of George Smiley (played by Alec Guinness in the BBC films from the late 1970s.)  Actin...

December 7, 2011

Obama, Tax-Cutting Friend of Working Americans

I'm trying to hold in one of those Howard Dean screams...aaaarrrgh! Sorry, couldn't help myself. In the past week, the White House has been drawing a picture of a great battle to save the "middle class," in which Barack Obama the tax cutter is fighti...

November 30, 2011

Barney Frank Classless to the End

Barney Frank's retirement speech was as classless as his victory speech in 2010 over Republican Sean Bielat.  Then he spent much of the time whining (after winning?) about "vituperation," and "anonymous smears," accusing Republicans of running c...

November 28, 2011

Rick Perry's 'Lazy' Ad Called 'Borderline Criminal'

  The Sunday Boston Globe featured a story on the front page, titled "Deceptive campaign ads hint at year of mudslinging," with the subheading, "Perry, Romney spots take Obama out of context; 'low bar' is set, critics say." The story focuses on...

November 17, 2011

Transgender Civil Rights Come to Massachusetts

Transgender groups in Massachusetts have been lobbying for Transgender Equal Rights "designed to help gender-confused individuals," in particular those who are faced with restrictive male/female categories on public restroom doors. The State Legislat...

November 14, 2011

Politicizing the Farmers' Market

I don't understand those "No Farms, No Food" bumper stickers you see around places like Cambridge and Berkeley. Isn't it obvious? Why not "No toy factories, no toys"? "No Apple, No iPods"? "No Chickens, No Eggs"? (Or is it the other way around?) Is t...

November 4, 2011

Carrie Fisher: 'I was fresh bait' for Ted Kennedy

The headline of a Fox411 celebrity interview with Carrie Fisher announced that she has undergone electric shock treatments for her depression. The story wasn't much of a blockbuster confession, but the interview continues with some truly interesting ...

October 28, 2011

Obama Finds A Teacher who Supports More Money For Schools

The White House has found another school teacher who supports the American Jobs Plan, specifically a bite-size $25 billion "investment in school infrastructure" that Obama chipped off from his half-trillion dollar Jobs Plans so that dim-witted Republ...

October 18, 2011

The Revolutionary Communist Party's Little Yellow Book

Four days after the first occupiers arrived on Wall Street in September, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper offered editorial space to a Maoist fringe group called the Revolutionary Communist Party. The article by RCP spokesman Ray Lotta urged rep...

October 10, 2011

A History Lesson for Lawrence O'Donnell

On Thursday night, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell accused Herman Cain of "sitting on the sidelines" during the civil rights movement.  The accusation has rightly been condemned as contemptible.  Politics is one sphere of human achievement, b...

October 8, 2011

Obama's English Teacher Fiction

President Obama gave yet another speech on Thursday trying to peddle AJA to the American people -- the American Jobs Act, as opposed to the 1977 Steely Dan album.  Obama cited the experience of a Boston English teacher named Robert Baroz to urge...

October 5, 2011

Dems Say No Thanks to Walmart Offer to Eliminate Food Desert

A recent Boston Globe headline reports: "City won't back a Walmart in Roxbury, Sees it hindering Dudley rebuilding."  (An offer to rebuild "hinders rebuilding"?)  According to the story: Menino administration officials declined to endorse ...

October 3, 2011

The Tweet Revolution, Coming to a Square Near You?

Groups emulating Occupy Wall Street are springing up around the country; the Occupy Together website lists "occupations" underway in 113 American cities (Fargo/Morehead, ND; Joplin, MO, etc.), plus 28 international groups. My local Boston group, call...

September 18, 2011

Peggy Noonan's Faint Praise for Obama

One-time Obama cheerleader Peggy Noonan has seen the light, almost. This week's column reports that the American people are signaling a "broad rejection" of Obama, telling him "You've lost us." Noonan however can't quite give up on the man she once p...

September 10, 2011

The School Budgeting Con

A recent Boston Globe story titled "Budgets cut, teachers dig deeper for supplies," relates the story of Hanover, Massachusetts, where English teacher Stacey DeCotis was forced to spend several hundred dollars of her own money for "a small library of...

September 3, 2011

Obama's Online Suggestion Box

An email from David Plouffe, senior advisor to President Obama, announced a new internet initiative called We the People.  Actually, the website isn't quite up and running -- sort of like Obama's jobs plan -- but the White House wants to give us...

August 21, 2011

'Useless expenditure' of a bankrupt country

Scarcely a week goes by without a call from President Obama for more "investment" in transportation infrastructure. CNN summarizes this year's State of the Union address: President Obama renewed his call to improve the nation's "crumbling" infrastru...

August 2, 2011

Obama's Idiotic Infographic

President Obama has suggested in his last 147 television appearances that he inherited the national debt from President Bush, who squandered the Clinton surplus with his "tax cuts for the rich" and his unnecessary wars.   Now someone at whi...

July 23, 2011

Cost-cutting, Federal Government Style

An internal memo from Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation, encouraged DOT employees to "Please Submit [Their] Cost-cutting Ideas to the SAVE Award Contest." According to the memo:  Last year's winner was Trudy Givens, a 20-year employee of t...

July 2, 2011

Harvey Milk, the New Gay MLK?

The California State Senate just passed a bill called the Fair Education Act, which bears the same Orwellian relationship to fairness as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea does to democracy. According to Fox News: [G]ay rights activists in Ca...

June 14, 2011

Publicly Funded Leftism on Community Television

The last time I watched my local Cambridge Community Television (CCTV), sometime during the Clinton Administration, the bulk of the programming seemed to consist of a couple of geeks fooling around with a Betacam and a live camera feed on the corner ...

June 3, 2011

Dorothy Rabinowitz Dismisses Doomsday Talk about Big Government

Dorothy Rabinowitz is a smart, conservative journalist who has written for the Wall Street Journal since 1990.  In general I look forward to her columns, but today's effort, The Republican Who Can Win, is an example of conservative journalistic ...

May 24, 2011

The Myth of the Palestinian 'Refugee Camps'

Controlling the vocabulary is a crucial part of any political debate, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically the 1948 exodus -- or one should really say, the 1948 departure -- of Palestinians from Israel, is no exception.  A typical ...

May 5, 2011

Was OBL really growing pot?

Rush brought up the story about Osama bin Laden's garden having marijuana growing next to his potatoes. OSB may have been a stoner for all we know, but the presence of marijuana in his garden means nothing; it's a common weed in Pakistan. When I was ...

May 2, 2011

Playing the Race Card Against Matriculationists

The release of Obama's birth certificate has released an orgy of hatred, in which anyone who questioned the murky chronology of events of Obama's early life is accused of acting out of racist motives. This is nothing new -- a Google search of "b...

April 29, 2011

Scott Brown Urges Racial Gerrymandering

Senator Scott Brown announced that he is urging the Massachusetts Legislature to create a "majority-minority" Congressional district -- a district with a majority of non-white voters -- centered in Suffolk County. Redistricting is required ...

April 25, 2011

Democrats' taste for (rhetorical) blood

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is under the new leadership of Sen. Patty Murray, but it appears that the same rabid copywriters kept their jobs.  Apparently donors respond to hyperbole like the following from a recent email:The GOP...

April 24, 2011

Rauf's Taqiyya Defense of Islam

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, of Ground Zero Mosque fame, recently published an op-ed in a handful of regional newspapers, which I happened to catch in the Bangor (Maine) Daily News.  Rauf sets out to undermine "5 Myths about Islam," coming ...

April 23, 2011

Socialists Rally for Climate Justice in Portland

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April 21, 2011

Boston Globe: Haley Barbour 'Assails' Poor People

As we approach the 2012 elections, the mainstream media is sharpening its hatchets to defend their candidate Barack. The Boston Globe exhibited a sample hatchet job on Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour on its front page, titled "Amid strained c...

April 11, 2011

Boston Globe Columnist 'Surprised' that Americans are Good People

James Carroll's Boston Globe column, "The Faces of a Country," relates his discovery on a book tour of the nation that Americans are kind, smart, good, courteous and "positively minded" [sic?]. It was a pleasant break from his usu...

April 8, 2011

Global Warming Alarmism's Long March through State and Local Institutions

It's tempting to be complacent about the progress made against global warming alarmism.  Climate legislation seems to be stalled in the U.S. Congress.  A recent Gallup poll shows that concern about global warming among the American public i...

April 1, 2011

Professor Obama's College Completion Fixation

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March 21, 2011

The Ignorance of the Anti-Nuclear Power Press

German physicist Peter Heller has written a passionate defense of nuclear power, titled "A plea for a return to science on the nuclear power issue," posted at Watts Up with That?A representative sample:Over the recent days I have grown...

March 19, 2011

Harry Reid's 'dogged' defense of NPR

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March 18, 2011

Updater-in-chief

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March 3, 2011

Gunman Screams 'Allahu Akbar', Obama Sees Motive Unclear

A terrorist described as a "21-year-old Kosovar who lives in Frankfurt," opened fire at the Frankfurt Airport, killing two American soldiers. Kosovo's population is 80% Muslim. The New York Times reports that "the gunman first talked t...

March 1, 2011

Gov. Perry's 'gaffe' that wasn't

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February 28, 2011

Bury Keynesianism, not Cash in Coal Mines

John Maynard Keynes once suggested that the government could create jobs by burying bottles full of money in coal mines, covering them with trash, and encouraging people to dig them up. I know, pretty dumb idea. If Korea builds cars, China builds com...

February 26, 2011

Michelle's Healthy, Hunger-Free Menus

As part of the "Healthy, Hunger-free Kids Act of 2010" the White House released a "Before/After Elementary School Lunch Menu," with five typical "Before" (unhealthy) and five "After" (healthy) menus.The Before ...

February 24, 2011

Obama administration won't defend DOMA in the courts

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February 17, 2011

The ObamaCare Real Estate Boom

Investor's Business Daily reports that due to ObamaCare, Health and Human Services is on track to become "the first $1 trillion federal agency." This expansion of government leads to new hiring (e.g., 650 new employees to work in the Medica...

February 14, 2011

Obama Trying to Weaken America?

Michael Medved argues today in the Wall Street Journal that Obama Isn't Trying to 'Weaken America,' citing Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and an article by Victor Sharp on "the well-regarded American Thinker website."Medved may have a valid poi...

February 13, 2011

White Oscar Night: It's Obama's Fault

The average person who sees the photo line-up of the current Oscars nominees does not immediately think, oh, my God, how terrible, they're all white! Journalists obsessed with identity politics think however that there's a big story here, some kind o...

February 6, 2011

NY Times goes off on Bloomberg for outdoor smoking ban

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February 3, 2011

'ROTC Discriminates Against Transgender People'

The above title appeared in today's Harvard Crimson over a letter from Janani Balasubramanian who is credited as being "an officer within the Stanford Students for Queer Liberation." (Within? Is that to downplay the hierarchical nature of o...

February 1, 2011

In Contradistinction to Heartless Republicans, Obama Cares about Sick People

The New York Times Business section responded to the Florida court decision on ObamaCare not by addressing the issues but by tugging at the heartstrings:With a court decision on Monday declaring the health care law unconstitutional and Republicans in...

January 29, 2011

Bipartisanship, The Obama Way

I got an email from Barack Obama today, addressed "Dear Peter," with an informal comma rather a formal colon.  I guess we're on first name basis now. I was hoping for an instant that the President wanted to ask permission to quote from...

January 24, 2011

Cooking the Gun Homicide Numbers at the NYT

In his New York Times column "Obama's Gun Play," Charles M. Blow lays out a familiar but inaccurate talking point: we need increased gun control laws because the United States is the murder capital of the planet.  Mr. Blow writes:[T]he...

January 20, 2011

Race, Propaganda, and Schoolkids

A new exhibit opened this week at the Boston Museum of Science (MOS) called "RACE -- Are we so different?"  [Caps in original.]  The exhibit offers a fascinating window into the fun-house mirror world of race theorists, racial ...

January 9, 2011

William Cohen adds Rush Limbaugh to the List of Those Responsible for the Giffords Shooting

An article on the front page of today's Boston Globe mentions Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and the town hall meetings as contributing to "tension," a degree of heat in political discourse," "a potential for physical danger in their ...

January 8, 2011

New York Times Implicates Sarah Palin in Giffords Shooting

To add to Jack Cashill's post on More Tea Party Violence: The New York Times inserted this paragraph in the middle of a story about the mass murderer who killed 6 people and wounded 18, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords: During the fall camp...

January 1, 2011

Arms Treaty Nonsense

The New York Times editorial "The Next Treaties" contains two statements of mind-numbing stupidity:First: "The United States and Russia...cannot credibly argue for restraining the nuclear ambitions of Iran, North Korea and other wannab...

December 30, 2010

Preventing development of domestic oil resources

The New York Times editorial, A New Day for Wilderness, describes the Department of Interior's reversal of a Bush administration agreement that barred 250 million acres administered by the Bureau of Land Management from being given wilderness status ...

December 15, 2010

Edible Fracking Chemicals

I share Ed Lasky's concerns about environmentalists attempting to block the country's access to what appears to be an enormous supply of American natural gas  (American Thinker, Cheap Natural Gas and its Enemies.)  Environmentalists have no...

December 13, 2010

Boston Globe Criticizes Anti-Poverty Program

Credit where credit is due. The Boston Globe is publishing a major three-part story by staff reporter Patricia Wen that is highly critical of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. Part One on Sunday's front-page bore the title, "A lega...

December 10, 2010

Small Complicated Climate Building Codes

The Cancun Climate Summit organizers -- escaping frigid temperatures in Europe and North America -- have announced that "more nations may agree to cut emissions."  It is easy to dismiss the climate change activists in international and...

December 4, 2010

DSCC Offers "Rush Limbaugh is Bad" Magnets

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is offering a set of cute poetry magnets as thanks for your donation.  It contains a selection of words to enable Democrats bitter about their shellacking in November to express frustration in a grown...

December 4, 2010

Republican Derangement Syndrome

You'd think that at very least under the Obama-Pelosi-Reid clique we might have had a reprieve from Bush Derangement Syndrome. Instead Palin Derangement Syndrome continues to addle liberal brains, the out-of-power GOP is pilloried as the Party of No,...

November 27, 2010

Christmas Tree Bomber was Young Male Muslim. Could There Be a Pattern?

On Friday a 19-year old man attempted to detonate a bomb in a crowd that had gathered for the annual Christmas tree lighting in Portland, Oregon.   It is depressingly predictable that he was a another young Muslim male terrorist, a Somali n...

November 23, 2010

Entrepreneurship, Obama-Style

Valerie Jarrett recently posted a blog entry at Whitehouse.gov titled "Celebrating National Entrepreneurs' Day," a reference to the Presidential Proclamation last week announcing both a Day and a Week to celebrate the American capitalist:...

November 7, 2010

Noonan Celebrates GOP Victory by Calling Sarah Palin an Ignorant Nincompoop

Peggy Noonan's weekend column, Americans Vote for Maturity, is generally supportive of the Tea Parties, but she can't resist joining the chorus of ruling class Republicans grousing about "unqualified" candidates. She concludes:Americans don...

October 25, 2010

Anti-Green Iconoclasm -- in the Boston Globe!

Something's up when the Boston Globe publishes articles two days in a row that mock the dogmas of the Green religion.   On Sunday, automobile writer Clifford Atiyeh writes in "The crusade against cars" that "in this green age...

October 16, 2010

Nanny Bloomberg's Outdoor Smoking Ban

Last month, New York Mayor Bloomberg proposed a ban on outdoor smoking in and on 1,700 parks, plazas, and beaches. The City Council in Cambridge, Massachusetts recently followed New York's lead (Chronicle 10/4/10), joining a number of college campuse...

October 8, 2010

Fighting the Danger of Fifth Hand Smoke

Moonbat Cambridge (Massachusetts) City Councilor Marjorie Decker has once again managed to distinguish herself from the rest of the moonbat City Council. The Cambridge Chronicle reports that Decker "has proposed a ban on smoking in the city's p...

October 4, 2010

Obama's Costly Green Jobs Project

The transcript of President Obama's weekly address on whitehouse.gov is titled, "President Obama Lauds Clean Energy Projects as Key to Creating."  Creating what? one might ask.  The word "Jobs" seems to be missing, perha...

October 1, 2010

The John Kerry Playbook: Lie and smear

What is it about Karl Rove that gets under the skin of Democrats?   A fundraising letter from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, signed by John Kerry, froths at the mouth about "Rove's shadowy  groups":We know Ka...

September 25, 2010

Tom Friedman's Totalitarian Temptation

Thomas L. Friedman's recent New York Times column, reporting from the World Economic Summit in Tianjin, China, is another iteration of his theme that democracy is poorly equipped to address a "catastrophe" like global warming. "Aren't ...

September 23, 2010

The Pledge Shows a GOP Willing to Confront Obama

As Rick Moran wrote this morning, the GOP Pledge to America does not contain any radical policy proposals, which might create controversy close to an election.The Pledge is very encouraging in one aspect however: its authors are not afraid to come ou...

September 22, 2010

Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs: Proceed with Caution

The Cambridge Energy Alliance is going door to door in North Cambridge, Massachusetts next month, handing out free compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) in return for "inefficient incandescent bulbs." Well, they're not actually free. The C...

September 20, 2010

Public health busybodies on the move again

The Boston Globe reports that "City may curb sales of sugary beverages":First, it was smoking in restaurants and bars. Then, artery-clogging trans fat in fast food joints and bakeries. Now, Boston health regulators have their crosshairs fix...

September 16, 2010

The Right Wing Onslaught on the University?

An email from Amazon arrived this morning:As someone who has purchased or rated Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, you might like to know that Counter-Narrative: How Progressive Academics Can Challenge Extremists and Promote Social Justice is now av...

September 7, 2010

Five Best Books to Make Glenn Beck's Head Explode

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September 6, 2010

Obama's Belabored Labor Day Speech

An increasing number of Americans wish President Obama would stop trying to fix the economy, since his every effort seems to bring the country closer to bankruptcy. Obama's accomplishments in his first two years have already earned him the crown of t...

August 23, 2010

Christian Zionists and other Dangerous Fundamentalists

A friend (who happens to be a rabbi) argued with me recently that "fundamentalism is the greatest danger facing our world."  I responded it was important to differentiate among fundamentalisms; a Muslim fundamentalist will saw off your...

August 11, 2010

Cambridge City Council to MIT: Halt Layoffs

A local story in Cambridge, Massachusetts illustrates the sense of entitlement that government officials have adopted under the Obama administration.The Cambridge Chronicle reports that City Councilor Marjorie Decker is not amused with the behavior o...

August 1, 2010

Kerry email appeal; He 'feels your pain'

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee might have chosen a more opportune time to have Sen. John Kerry join the fundraising roster. After the imbroglio of his $7 million dollar yacht, built in New Zealand, registered in Rhode Island to avoid t...

July 29, 2010

Thousands of New Bureaucrats to 'Protect' Consumer Finances

The Boston Globe featured two op-eds on local favorite Elizabeth Warren, who has been nominated to head the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Agency.  On what passes for debate on the left, Joshua Green made "The Case for Elizabet...

July 27, 2010

'Avant-Garde Sustainability Curriculum' to Replace Three R's at Nation's Oldest High School

A recent Boston Globe story reveals the destructive effects that Al Gore and global warming activists are having on American education. According to the story,[A]fter a screening of "An Inconvenient Truth'' three years ago, [students in the Yout...

July 21, 2010

CBO: Unemployment benefits might, or might not, stimulate economy

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July 20, 2010

A food czar coming to your city soon?

"There's no department of food, federally or statewide,'' laments Holly Freishtat, Baltimore's food czar, in the Boston Globe . Not yet anyway. Michelle Obama's efforts to insert government between your fork and your mouth may lead to a feder...

July 19, 2010

The Feds' $95-million Breastfeeding Boondoggle

Michelle Obama's speech to the NAACP convention last week introduced a new healthy food topic of interest: the federal fight to "support" breastfeeding. This does not involve federal subsidies for nursing bras. As Mrs. Obama explains:F...

July 14, 2010

Not Much of a Teachable Moment

The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates one year ago today has been described as a "teachable moment." The past year has seen a lot of teaching, in the form of editorials, blog posts, presidential speeches, and official repor...

July 12, 2010

'Whatever makes them cry, makes us happy'

Two men are featured in a FoxNews story on the murder of 74 people in Uganda gathered to watch the World Cup final.  One is Nate Henn, a 25-year old Christian missionary who was killed in the blast:Henn, 25, was remembered as a tireless and devo...

June 25, 2010

Town Jeopardizes Health of Sexually Active Preschoolers

Provincetown, Massachusetts "to rethink condom policy," reports the Boston Globe.  After Governor Deval Patrick "expressed concern" the School Committee will revisit its policy of providing free condoms to "the Cape Cod ...

June 21, 2010

Not letting the BP crisis go to waste

The BP oil spill will certainly cause harm for many years, but eventually clean-up efforts and nature's rejuvenating power will bring the Gulf Coast back to normal. The spill might however provide enough political will for the Obama Administration t...

June 15, 2010

Austerity, French-style

A headline in the Wall Street Journal reports that "France Plans to Raise Retirement Age." This sounds like good news until you read further. The current retirement age in France is 60, and President Sarkozy has not specified how far he ...

June 10, 2010

The Helen Thomases of Talk Radio?

"Will Beck and Limbaugh be Next?" asks Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi. The Globe Op-Ed page displays a rogues gallery of photos of reporter Helen "go home to Poland" Thomas, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck in a lame attempt to ...

June 9, 2010

Blue-State Bonanza for Americorps Funding

This week the White House announced $234 million in grants to Americorps and other "service"-oriented nonprofits through the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. The press release reports:Together with other positions in AmeriCorps VISTA an...

June 6, 2010

Homeland Security cracks down on canoeists

As someone who believes that our nation has a right to enforce its borders, I should have been gratified when the Immigrations official at the border saw the canoe on our car and informed us that anyone who crossed the nearby international waterway i...

June 2, 2010

Israel = Iran?

A policeman shoots a psychopath holding a child hostage.  A psychopath shoots a child hostage. Moral equivalence:  guns are evil.A woman pushes an old man out of the path of a speeding bus.  A woman pushes an old man into the path of a...

May 27, 2010

Experts say: George Washington's honesty a sign of stupidity

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May 25, 2010

Governor Patrick Plays the Sedition Card

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick reiterated the accusation made last month by Time columnist Joe Klein: disagreeing with the legislative agenda of the Obama Administration is dangerously close to "sedition."  According to the Bosto...

May 21, 2010

Transit Equity?

The Obama administration announced new criteria for awarding Department of Transportation grants under the Federal Transit Administration. The Bush administration's coldhearted measurements like improving efficiency and shortening commuters' travel t...

May 21, 2010

Obama's 'Deepwater Horizon Unified Command'

The punch line of a cartoon in today's Boston Globe is that the only solution BP has offered is to put out a suggestion box.  This is unfair to the work BP is doing, but it's not a bad description of the White House response.  The Administr...

May 19, 2010

As goes Detroit, so goes the nation

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May 18, 2010

Activists: Government to blame for unsafe gay sex

An op-ed in the Boston Globe by two gay activists, Rebecca Haag and Douglas Brooks, reports CDC findings that "[m]en who have sex with men are 44 times more likely to contract HIV than other men."  The authors' analysis offers a stagge...

May 15, 2010

Newspaper reports Pakistani-Americans Terrorized by 'Recriminations'

When a radical Muslim attempts mass murder, it's a sure bet that the press will recycle a "fear-of-anti-Muslim-backlash" story from its archives.  The Boston Globe did not disappoint.   Two days after Muslims connected to the...

May 11, 2010

Conservative columnist goes squishy on AZ law

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May 10, 2010

Physician Assisted Suicide as a Civil Right

Section 1553 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., ObamaCare), titled "Prohibition Against Discrimination On Assisted Suicide," appears to side with opponents of physician assisted suicide, protecting them from "di...

May 8, 2010

Feds to solve problem of children not fishing and hunting enough

President Obama stated in a Presidential Memorandum last month:the Federal government...has a responsibility to... [r]econnect Americans, especially children, to America's rivers and waterways, landscapes of national significance, ranches, farms and ...

May 6, 2010

'Feckless' Obama betrays environmentalist wackos

Joshua Green started a new weekly column for the Boston Globe, leading off "Even an oil spill won't move Washington" with this admission:In Washington, environmental disasters come with a silver lining. They have the power to change the leg...

May 6, 2010

Boston Joins Arizona Boycott

The Boston City Council unanimously passed a resolution "calling on the city to cut business ties with Arizona."  From the Globe:The mayor's aides said they had already identified at least one contract, a $1.1 million agreement between...

May 4, 2010

The Jackboot on the Throat of BP

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is trying to cash in on the BP disaster.  They write in a fundraising letter this afternoon:The Obama administration has vowed to "keep a boot on the throat" of BP to ensure the corporation ...

April 29, 2010

Fiddling While Madrid Burns

The Spanish have a reputation for enjoying life. My brother, who returned from Spain yesterday, was not prepared for how much the good times are rolling in Spain.  According to his anecdotal evidence, streets and public restrooms are consta...

April 28, 2010

Comparing the Tea Party to al-Qaeda

After accusing the Tea Party of being racist, sexist, homophobic, stupid, fake, and violent Timothy McVeigh prototypes, you'd think that the well of insults would be getting dry. In his Boston Globe column "Screaming Extremism," Neal Gabler...

April 28, 2010

64 government housing programs can't be wrong

The City of Cambridge, MA has published their Fiscal Year 2011 One-Year Action Plan , which lists 64 different government programs that "the City of Cambridge anticipates utilizing with HUD appropriated funds" to address "the housing c...

April 27, 2010

What the open borders crowd really thinks

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April 17, 2010

Year Zero

The Khmer Rouge declared revolutionary Year Zero thirty-five years ago today, on April 17, 1975, the day Communist guerrillas in black pajamas and truck-tire sandals marched victoriously through the streets of Phnom Penh. An indication of the regime'...

April 15, 2010

Acting stupidly in Cambridge

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April 14, 2010

'You're Racist, Sexist, Anti-Gay! Tea Party Bigots Go Away!'

Sarah Palin appeared at the Tea Party Express rally on the Boston Common this morning.  The weather was a perfect 68 degrees and sunny, Boston's flowering trees are at their peak, the speeches were passionate, the music was good (although Americ...

April 13, 2010

A $400 million 'modest investment'

Michelle Obama plans to spend $400 million dollars a year on her Let's Move initiative's  "ambitious goal" of eliminating "food deserts"  in the U.S. -- making sure every low-income person in the country has the option o...

April 12, 2010

Federal Anti-Obesity Initiative to Eliminate Food Deserts

Before you get alarmed about the feds prying the Häagen-Dazs out of your cold dead fingers, the word "desert" in the title is not misspelled. A "food desert" is an area without a grocery store. For example, the Mojave Desert....

April 9, 2010

Nancy and Harry want you to choose the best candy bar

A sample of the level of detail in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare):SEC. 4205 H) RESTAURANTS, RETAIL FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS, AND VENDING MACHINES (viii) VENDING MACHINES.-(I) IN GENERAL.-In the case of an article of food so...

April 9, 2010

Sarah Palin, Boston Common, April 14

Here's a fun party trick.  Surround yourself with liberals-not hard to find in Boston-and invite them to hear Sarah Palin at the Boston Tea Party rally on April 14th, the day before Tax Day.  I tried it out last night.  People looked a...

April 6, 2010

Does Anybody Really Understand ObamaCare?

Since the passage of the Health Care Reform Bill, the Democrat leadership has embarked on a strategy of demonizing its opponents as angry, potentially violent racists. Charles M. Blow developed a new line of attack in his New York Times column last w...

April 6, 2010

Tend to Your Seeds, Mr. President

The Washington Post's Robert Samuelson criticized ObamaCare in "Planting the Seeds of Disaster":Should the United States someday suffer a budget crisis, it will be hard not to conclude that Obama and his allies sowed the seeds, because they...

April 6, 2010

Six scary words: 'And not a moment too soon'

Cross that one off Obama's list. The Health Care Reform Bill was signed without incident, apart from the G6 federal employee who suffered a hernia carrying the bill back to Congress.  Fortunately his Cadillac federal insurance policy covers hern...

April 4, 2010

Bonnie and Clyde's propaganda coup

The New York Times published a seductive photo (here) on its front page of the 17-year old baby-faced girl who blew herself up on a crowded Moscow subway, taking 39 other commuters with her to paradise, and her 30-year old killer husband, both wieldi...

March 31, 2010

'What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous?'

It's hard to parody the New York Times when they see your parody and raise it with self-parody of their own.  Yesterday I pointed out how the New York Times took pains to emphasize that the defining characteristic of the Moscow terrorist bombers...

March 30, 2010

Caucasian female alert level raised to amber

The fact that mainstream media coverage of the Muslim terrorist attacks in Moscow was predictable makes it no less craven.  The Wall Street Journal (the hero of the story) ran the story above the fold, with a dramatic photo of a survivor, correc...

March 29, 2010

Constitutional separation of powers 'a real drag'

Boston University law professor Jay Wexler reviews Supreme Power by Jeff Shesol in the Boston Sunday Globe.   The book deals with FDR's scheme to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices favorable to his New Deal legislation.  W...

March 26, 2010

The Weatherization Boondoggle

Leave it to the left to turn something as sensible as insulating your house into a big-government organized-labor boondoggle.Dismal reports from Spain and other European countries about investing public funds in solar and wind power manufacturing see...

March 26, 2010

Who's the enemy here?

Renée Loth, the editor of the Boston Globe editorial page, praises Nancy Pelosi today in The Power of Pelosi, citing in particular Madame Speaker's well-circulated quote:You go through the gate...If the gate's closed you go over the fence. If ...

March 25, 2010

Rep. Capuano: Further needed health care reforms

An internet search for "Republican lies about health care" returns 4.3 million hits.  On many lists the number one lie is that Obamacare is an intermediate stop on the way to single payer nationalized health care.In a column in today's...

March 20, 2010

Community Organizing 2.0: 'Climate Community Activism'

The Cambridge, Massachusetts Climate Emergency Congress (CEC) is more than a grassroots group of out-of-touch leftists. Rather, it is a casebook study of a new movement of "climate community activism" that pushes sustainability issues in mu...

March 10, 2010

Is the NFL 'Socialistic'?

With the threat of an NFL player walkout in the news, the Boston Globe editorial board grabbed the opportunity to bring up the fatuous argument that football is a socialist enterprise.  In the space of the brief editorial titled "NFL: Socia...

March 6, 2010

Disgusted that Partisan Politics Is Going On

Democrats are always bemoaning the lack of bipartisanship in Washington. Their fundraising appeals to potential donors, however, where they might feel among friends, demonstrate a hyper-partisan nastiness at odds with their public speechification. Co...

February 28, 2010

If You Get Too Cold, I'll Tax the Heat

The carbon tax has never gained much political momentum, but if cap-and-trade is defeated, then it might be dragged out again, peddled as an efficient, market-oriented approach to encourage wise use of carbon resources. This new incarnation may seem ...

February 10, 2010

Green Police Aren't Just in Super Bowl Ads

If you've been watching the daily scandals destroy the credibility of the U.N. IPCC, then you might not realize that Cambridge, Massachusetts is in a state of climate emergency. This is not hyperbole, but an official policy order, passed by the City ...