I’m aware that a lot of people, including Charles Krauthammer, who happens to be Jewish, and the editors at Time magazine, no doubt secularists, who selected him Person of the Year, are apparently nuts about Pope Francis. I’m just curious what American Catholics honestly think of him.

I don’t happen to be Catholic, but I certainly hold no ill feelings towards the Church. But if I were a Catholic, I know I’d be conflicted about a pope who doesn’t think it’s his place to judge abortions and homosexuality, but well within his purview to condemn free market capitalism, as he did during his year-end address.

To me, just about every public pronouncement Francis has made since being elected by the College of Cardinals has sounded like something I would expect to hear during one of Obama’s State of the Union harangues. I keep thinking that a vocational guidance counselor might have steered him in a different direction by suggesting he might be happier running the DNC than the Holy See.

A recent poll of potential 2016 presidential candidates had Hillary Clinton leading Joe Biden 68% to 12%, with Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Cuomo splitting 11% between them.

On the other side, Chris Christie led with 16%, followed by Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz, with 12% each, Rand Paul with 11%, followed by Rubio, Walker, Perry and Santorum, all in single digits.

To me, the good news is that the Democrats appear to be on a lemming-like suicide mission. The notion that Mrs. Clinton – who, by all rights, should be standing trial for manslaughter because she chose to make Obama look good rather than supplying Ambassador Chris Stevens with the additional security he pleaded for in Benghazi – is their dream candidate tells us all we have to know about liberals.

I do believe the GOP nominee should be a governor and not a senator. That’s because the office calls for executive experience, not just the unnatural ability to turn every conversation into a filibuster and to survive hours a day spent in the toxic company of Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin. Christie is not my choice; unless, of course, he manages to garner the nomination and it comes down to him or the harridan who told a congressional committee that it made no difference who murdered four Americans in Libya.

In one sense she was right, of course. It certainly made no difference to Obama, who has devoted well over a year to trying to cover up the tragic events, while dismissing the massacre as a phony scandal, and not two minutes to trying to track down and kill the Islamic creeps who committed the savagery.

I don’t make a regular practice of comparing myself to Nostradamus or even Criswell, but I think it’s noteworthy that not only was I the first columnist to predict that the Arab Spring would be a total disaster, but at a time when Barack Obama was telling us that Bashar al-Assad’s days were numbered, I wrote that al-Assad would still running Syria when Obama was collecting his pension. But, to be fair to the man, he never came up with a specific number. As was the case with Hope and Change, he left it entirely up to our imagination.

With April 15th being just around the corner, as it always seems to be, I’d like to suggest it’s high time we toss out all the rigmarole involving receipts, deductions and CPAs, and finally adopt the Fair Tax. That would be a national sales tax. In other words, you would get to keep every dollar you made, be it in salary, investment or inheritance, but you’d get clipped every time you made a purchase.

You wouldn’t even have to worry about squeezing the rich to pay more because it would happen automatically because they already pay more than the rest of us for their homes, cars, clothes, airline tickets and even their haircuts.

Finally, a reader wrote to me, complaining that “The real issue today is the public’s inability to spot a snake oil salesman. Worse yet is their indifference to these weasels.”

“Even worse than that,” I replied, “is that they’re not merely indifferent. Instead, they have warm feelings for those politicians dispensing candy and toys with our tax dollars. Thanks to greed, the recipients refuse to recognize that lurking behind the whiskers, it’s Satan, not Santa. And thanks to stupidity, they fail to recognize that there’s always a price tag that reeks of sulfur.