Column

Last week, in a much-discussed, open, live, televised forum, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, asked Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke the $64 trillion question. While most commentators focused on the apt question, it was Bernanke's answer that shocked me when I heard it — and ought to shock the nation much more than it so far has. Question: "Now we're told there are going to be…

Most of our nation's problems are a direct result of our being immune, hostile or indifferent to several moral questions. Let's start out with the simple and move to the more complex. Or, stated another way, let's begin with questions that generate the least hostility, moving to those that generate the greatest. If a person benefits from a hamburger, a suit of clothing, an apartment or an…

The same congressional panel that launched a preliminary inquiry into Weiner-gate this week has been diddling around with several other Democratic ethics scandals for years. These aren't foxes guarding the henhouse. They're sloths guarding the foxhole. The House Ethics Committee is now reportedly probing into Twitter-holic Democratic New York Rep. Anthony Weiner's possible abuse of government…

If I'd heard the following words, instead of reading them, I might have assumed they were being delivered by a President Obama impressionist on "Saturday Night Live." But the words were from Obama himself in his latest weekly radio address. "I wish I could tell you there was a quick fix to our economic problems," he said. "But the truth is we didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't…

The art of jujitsu is to use an opponent's weight and strength to your advantage. I believe this is what the conservatives must do in the coming 2012 presidential election. President Barack Obama's "weight and strength" is that by next year, he will have a surplus of $1 billion in campaign money and the mainstream media supporting him. He also has ACORN (or whatever it calls itself now) and…

If the big media in 2008 had dedicated the resources they are now squandering on Sarah Palin's emails from when she was governor of Alaska and probed Barack Obama's background and associations, she might now be vice president of the United States and Obama might still be a junior Illinois senator. Regardless of what you think of Palin, the vultures attacking her 24,000 pages of emails may…

"Every man, by the nature of his being, is called to generate love." So the Rev. James A. Wehner tells his seminarians, from his perch as rector of the Josephinum, a pontifical college and seminary in Columbus, Ohio. His is a message necessary to the training of priests to a calling that has been marred by scandal, but also to a society that has been afraid to talk frankly about how essential…

It's so ironic that in the very midst of the Anthony Weiner Twitter scandal, television's most shameless channel, MTV, is working overtime to make any notion of sexual restraint obsolete. This year's MTV Movie Awards aerobically established a new low. Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis are starring in the upcoming summer comedy "Friends with Benefits," yet another movie exploring the "dream…

President Obama campaigned this week for "new and innovative approaches" to America's economic crisis. So naturally, the futurist-in-chief filched his fresh, bold ideas straight from ... the 1930s. The grand new solution to the jobs deficit, according to the White House, is more FDR-style federal job-training spending. Sounding every bit like the whiteboard eggheads who keep spinning around…

Ann Coulter's chilling two-chapter recapitulation of the French Revolution is worth well more than the price of her new book, "Demonic," but that's just a bonus. Also priceless are Coulter's plethora of one-liner skewerings of the liberal mob, but I digress. What make this her best book are her incisive demonstration that the revolution was the mother of the many totalitarian "revolutions" it…

They call it BCS, Bill Clinton syndrome, and it has broken out anew in New York and here in Washington, where it was first discovered. As elaborated upon in scholarly detail in the now famous "Starr Report: The Official Report of the Independent Counsel's Investigation of the President," BCS strikes powerful figures, usually male, who experience lewd compulsions of an overpowering nature,…

There are a lot of things, large and small, that irk me. One of them is our tendency to evaluate a presidential candidate based on his intelligence or academic credentials. When Obama threw his hat in the ring, people thought he was articulate and smart and hailed his intellectual credentials. Just recently, when Newt Gingrich announced his candidacy, people hailed his intellectual credentials…

I had the honor of speaking last weekend at the Faith and Freedom Conference, at which most of the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination were the star attractions. The conference, led by Ralph Reed, brought together the nation's leading (what is called) social conservatives. Politico's reporting of the two-day event typified the tone. "The day after Haley Barbour implored the…

Official motto of the White House economic team: Those who can, do. Those who can't, fantasize in the classroom, fail in Washington and then return to the Ivy Tower to train the next generation of egghead economic saboteurs. Life is good for left-wing academics. Everyone else pays dearly. Take Austan Goolsbee, please. President Obama's "fresh-faced" University of Chicago econ professor…