Column

Last week, President Obama came to my home state of Texas calling for immigration reform. He should have also rallied citizens for tort reform, which is a hot issue right now around the country and in Texas politics in particular. I've deferred (or better, repackaged) Part 2 of my article on bullies to oppose some real-life legal bullies — those sue-happy individuals (serial litigants) who…

Politicians and political activists frequently declare the end of the world will occur if their candidate isn't elected, or if the debt ceiling isn't raised. Some conservative Christians think the end is on the way because of behavior and practices they judge immoral. Somehow the country, not to mention the planet, survives and when "doomsday" passes, the prognosticators live to predict…

If you listen to the passengers and crew who flew on American Airlines Flight 1561 last weekend, there's no doubt about what happened on their harrowing trip: A Yemeni man shrieking "Allahu akbar!" at the top of his lungs more than 30 times rushed the cockpit door twice intending to take down the plane and kill everyone on board. The clammy, sweaty lone male passenger exhibited classic…

Can you imagine how insufferable President Obama would be about his record in office if he actually had abundant positive accomplishments? Have we ever seen a starker contrast between a politician's record and his self-assessment of it? It's not as though the president just avoids or downplays his failures. It's more like he showcases them, but only after completely revising history to put…

"I heard someone say yesterday that the last years had been completely wasted as far as he was concerned. I'm very glad that I have never yet had that feeling, even for a moment," Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in April of 1944.   Horrified by the Nazi treatment of Jews, the German Lutheran pastor would join the conspiracy against Hitler and ultimately be hanged in a prison camp the next…

The Obamas want credit for bringing American culture to the White House. When they decided to celebrate poetry at the White House on May 10, it was really not a surprise they would try to make it socially "relevant" by inviting a rap music "artist" to unload some rhymes. The rapper goes by the name "Common" (real name: Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr.). He is celebrated by many on the left as a "…

It seems to me that our government had vastly more intelligence on what was going on in Obama bin Laden's ghastly hideout before sending SEAL Team 6 in last week than they are telling us. President Barack Obama told CBS that the odds in favor of bin Laden being in the compound were "at best" 55 percent. My guess is that they were closer to 100 percent. We know that from satellites overhead,…

Robert Woodson would probably wince if you called him a "community organizer." That's because for the last 30 years as president of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, he has not spent time organizing the poor around ineffective government programs and other addictions he has been helping them become self-sufficient. "You can't learn anything by studying failure," he says. "If you want to…

The public relations campaign for President Obama's latest revival of "immigration reform" makes one thing crystal clear: This is not, and never has been, about homeland security. This is not, and never has been, about economic security. It's about political security, plain and cynical. In conjunction with Tuesday's renewed White House push in Texas for a "new pathway to citizenship" for…

There is a particular media conceit that, in the garb of purported impeccable disclosure, is in fact a license for news sources to market talking points. A hilarious example of the breed can be found in an article by Anne E. Kornblut in the Sunday Washington Post. The article is about the White House's intended use of the bin Laden event and is titled "Bin Laden raid fits into Obama's 'big…

Here's a safe prediction: The "bipartisan" group of congressmen led by Vice President Joe Biden will fail to solve the $14 trillion debt crisis. Here's another prediction: The Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org/) has developed a formula, made possible by a grant from The Peterson Foundation (www.pgpf.org/), that could balance the budget in 10 years, reduce the debt to 30 percent of gross…

As much as liberals complain about conservative “misinformation”and incivility, they never seem to find it on channels like MSNBC, and we know there are small bands of liberals that wander over there. While many were watching the first GOP presidential debate on May 5, Ed Schultz invited on left-wing bomb-thrower (and 2010 congressional-seat loser) Alan Grayson to heap mud on George W. Bush.…

As if more proof were needed about the minimum wage's devastating effects, yet another study has reached the same conclusion. Last week, two labor economists, Professors William Even (Miami University of Ohio) and David Macpherson (Trinity University), released a study for the Washington, D.C.-based Employment Policies Institute titled "Unequal Harm: Racial Disparities in the Employment…

The Washington Examiner reports that it's been 768 days since the Democratic-controlled Senate passed a budget. What's the big deal? It's not like the nation is facing financial difficulties or anything. I realize it's convenient for President Obama to pretend he's a bystander on fiscal matters when it suits him and to pass the buck that never stops with him back to Congress, but how about a…