Column

In a March 2008 column, I criticized pundits' concerns about whether America was ready for Barack Obama, suggesting that the more important issue was whether black people could afford Obama. I proposed that we look at it in the context of a historical tidbit. In 1947, Jackie Robinson, after signing a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, broke the color barrier in Major League…

In Part 1 of my series on the Common Core State Standards being infused into 45 state public school systems, I revealed how the feds spent $350 million of taxpayer money, giving grants and waivers to muscle states and local school districts to accept the standards. And that was after 2009, when feds awarded, in the Department of Education's words, "governors approximately $48.6 billion ... in…

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace." -- John Lennon "Black Friday" was a metaphor beyond the merchants' bottom line. Headlines on last Friday's Drudge Report reflect a culture that is being trampled by the greed and me-only attitude of a growing number of us:

Back in September, The New York Times promoted Bill de Blasio's mayoral candidacy with an editorial titled, "Don't Fear the Squeegee Man." The editorial informed readers that crime wouldn't get worse under de Blasio because "policing is far better than it used to be, thanks to innovations by Mayor David Dinkins." (Emphasis added -- the Times was not being sarcastic.) Under the policing "…

After months of the feds doing everything they could to distance themselves from the origin and launch of the controversial Common Core State Standards, more and more of Washington's tentacles are surfacing through public rage, implementation revelations and the White House's own foot-in-mouth disease. After Education Secretary Arne Duncan cast bigoted blame on "white suburban moms" for…

My parents voted for Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. I had not yet developed a political worldview, but as a freshman at American University in Washington, D.C., I stayed up late to watch the election returns slowly trickle in before going to bed at 2 a.m. with the outcome still undecided. The following year I was hired as a copyboy at NBC News, delivering wire service "copy…

I'm with Alec Baldwin on punching aggressive paparazzi photographers. I'm with him against the word police. I'm with him on the stalker. I'm with him on using an electronic device on a plane before takeoff. I'm with him on Kim Basinger playing visitation games with their daughter. What are conservatives doing demanding Baldwin's head for calling some pestilential paparazzi a "c*ck-s*cking…

Last week, I explained what the Common Core State Standards are and how, despite the federal government's saying it's staying out of the classroom standards business, there is much evidence to show that the feds are intricately linked to them. The first way I demonstrated that was by pointing out that the feds have spent $350 million of taxpayer money, funding and giving grants and waivers to…

According to some estimates, there are more than 100 million traffic signals in the U.S., but whatever the number, how many of us would like Washington, in the name of public health and safety, to be in sole charge of their operation? Congress or a committee it authorizes would determine the position of traffic signals at intersections, the length of time the lights stay red, yellow and green,…

In a weird confluence of the nation's two most pressing issues -- Obamacare and our insane immigration laws -- this week we found out that the tens of thousands of "navigators" hired by the government to enroll people in Obamacare will include convicted felons. Despite some "navigators" having already been exposed as having arrest warrants against them, the Department of Health and Human…

Corrected from earlier (see below) | Three famous men died on Nov. 22, 1963. The one getting the most attention, understandably, is John F. Kennedy. Less so the other two: Aldous Huxley, author of the futuristic novel "Brave New World," and Clive Staples Lewis. Of the three, it was Lewis who not only was the most influential of his time, but whose reach extends to these times and likely…

Columnist Michael Cohen, in an op-ed for the New York Daily News, tells us, essentially, that President Obama's lie that people could keep their health care plans if they liked them is not just defensible — because it was in service to the greater good of imposing Obamacare on an otherwise unwilling populace — but darn near laudable. Obama is to be praised for having the courage to deceive us…

In 2007, a group of governors and state education chiefs got together to try to remedy the declining and degraded U.S. public academic system. Their goal was to establish a new set of standards that better prepared kids for college, careers and their ever-changing, hyper-connected and globally competitive world. In short, as a result, the Common Core State Standards were born.