Columnist.
During the presidential campaign of 2000, George W. Bush was criticized by some conservatives for calling himself a "compassionate conservative." Some believed the term to be redundant. Now we're in the middle of the 2012 presidential campaign and candidate Newt Gingrich has called for a "humane" policy on illegal immigrants. Gingrich wants illegal residents who have been in America for 25 years to stay, so as not to "separate families." Seeking to clarify comments he made during the Republican debate on national security last week, Gingrich told Fox News, "I am for deporting all recent unattached illegals. I am for a local citizen panel to consider certification of those who have been here 25 years and have family and community (ties) and have been law abiding and taxpaying."
For more than half my life I was a 99-percenter. I kept my first pay stubs in the news business to remind me where I came from and what was necessary in order to get where I am today. In 1975, while working at a TV station in Houston, I wrote a letter to a friend in Washington complaining about my stalled career and low salary. "I will probably die here with my boots on, boots bought on a revolving charge and not fully paid for," I griped. My memory is not that good. He kept the letter and showed it to me a few years ago. We laughed.
Now it's Newt's turn. Having risen to the top in some opinion polls, the former speaker of the House is taking heat for large consulting fees paid to him by the government-sponsored mortgage company Freddie Mac for wisdom a New York Times editorial said was so simplistic it might have come from a fortune cookie. As Republican presidential candidates rise only to fall when their imperfections are brought to light, Republican voters risk disappointment in 2012 by playing the left's game on their turf and by their rules. What they must do instead is to protect their "product" at a time when the opportunity to hold Barack Obama to one term, while taking the Senate and increasing their House majority, has never looked better.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Since the congressional super committee appears unable, or unwilling, to take a lesson from Indiana or Virginia -- where Republican governors have made spending cuts and delivered budget surpluses without damaging the social safety net -- members might wish to consider Puerto Rico and what its governor, Luis Fortuno is doing. Fortuno is Puerto Rico's first Republican governor in 42 years. In 2009 when he took office, the U.S. territory had a $3.3 billion budget deficit. Three years earlier, Moody's Investors Service downgraded the commonwealth's bond rating to junk status while in deep recession.
"Success with Honor" is the motto of Penn State's athletic program. They got it half right. The alleged sexual abuse of young boys by former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky is disgusting, outrageous, and immoral. That so many at the school's highest level allegedly engaged either in covering up serial abuses, or turned a blind eye to them in order to maintain the "integrity" of the football program and its legendary coach, Joe Paterno, adds insult to unfathomable injury.
If ever there was a time when "see, I told you so" was warranted, it is now as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports this week that Iran is close to developing a nuclear weapon. That so many in the State Department over several administrations could deceive themselves into believing claims by the Iranians that their intentions are nothing but peaceful and their sole objective is to develop more sources of electricity for their country reminds me of the Munich Agreement of 1938. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler, thought they had an agreement concerning Czechoslovakia, shook hands on it, and then watched stupefied as Hitler boldly seized the country, en route to Poland, plunging Europe into greater turmoil.
In 2007 when she was running for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton told a fundraising event in Carson City, Nev., "I sure don't want Democrats, or the supporters of Democrats, to be engaging in the politics of personal destruction. I think we should stay focused on what we're going to do for America." Clinton's husband, the former president, used the phrase at the time of his impeachment proceedings for lying under oath about a sexual dalliance in the White House.
When it comes to sex, the media apply different standards to Republicans and Democrats. Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton allegedly trolled for women, using state troopers as his procurers. As president, Clinton engaged in oral sex with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. He lied about it under oath and was impeached, though later acquitted by the U.S. Senate. Other sexual accusations tainted Clinton, including one that he raped one Juanita Broaddrick. That "everybody lies about sex" and "it was just sex" and didn't affect his public responsibilities, were just two of the exculpatory statements from Clinton's Democratic defenders. James Carville slimed Paula Jones, one of Clinton's accusers, by saying you never know what you'll find "when you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park."
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- U.S. District Court Judge Catherine Eagles last Tuesday granted a request for a preliminary injunction that temporarily blocks a provision in North Carolina's new abortion-restriction law that would require women seeking an abortion to view an ultrasound image of their womb within four hours of the procedure. In her decision to suspend this one requirement, while upholding other provisions in the law pending resolution of the lawsuit by several plaintiffs, Judge Eagles said the ultrasound requirement likely violates patients' First Amendment rights. Come again?
Republican Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana last weekend won re-election with a staggering 65.8 percent of the vote in a state that remains heavily Democratic. It is, the governor's office contends, the highest percentage achieved by a candidate since the state's open primary was created. Jindal won all of the state's 64 parishes, increasing by four the number of parishes he won in 2007. One might expect this to be big news beyond the state, but most newspapers and TV media outside Louisiana either buried Jindal's win on inside pages and deep into their newscasts, or ignored it.
Forgive me if I don't join the State Department, American officials and world leaders in their euphoric Hallelujah Chorus celebrating the demise of Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. Oh, I'm happy he's dead, but I have as much faith that things will change for the better in Libya as I do in the Great Pumpkin rising from the pumpkin patch on Halloween night (sorry, Linus).
At the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Sen. Barack Obama said, "...There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America -- there is the United States of America." Those were welcome and commendable words. Unfortunately, they appear to be only words. Since then, Obama has divided us along race and class lines more than any modern president. Some of his strongest, high-profile supporters in the black community are now saying that Obama's race, alone, should be enough for black voters to vote for his re-election.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sometimes sounds as if she has cast aside any attachment to reality. Responding to a bill co-authored by Rep. Joe Pitts, Pennsylvania Republican, that would prevent federal funds from going to pay for abortions under the slowly unraveling health care law critics call "Obamacare," Pelosi said that if Republicans vote for the measure, "they will be voting to say that women can die on the floor and health care providers do not have to intervene." The Protect Life Act passed the House last week, but will likely die in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
It was said of Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, that if he won the 1928 presidential election he would take orders from the Vatican and not uphold the Constitution. John F. Kennedy famously confronted that anti-Catholic prejudice in a 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Kennedy said in part, "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the president -- should he be Catholic -- how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote..."
Once we applauded innovation. Now, politicians like President Obama, denounce the successful, maliciously labeling them "millionaires and billionaires," as if success were a flu virus that we needed an inoculation to protect ourselves from. If we penalize and stigmatize success we are likely to get less of it. If we promote and encourage the principles that can lead to success, we are certain to get more successful people and the entire world will benefit as a result.
It's Supremes week in Washington and I don't mean the Motown group once led by Diana Ross. The Supreme Court is back in session and the nine justices will consider a number of polarizing and controversial issues, not the least of which will likely be the constitutionality of "Obamacare" and its mandate that every citizen purchase health insurance. Just in time for their reconvening is a fascinating new book by Texas writer William T. Harper (for which I have supplied a blurb). It's called "Second Thoughts: Presidential Regrets with their Supreme Court Nominations."
New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie probably had more suitors than Portia in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" and yet in the end he made the right decision not to run for president. It was the correct decision on several levels. First, the media, which loves to build people up in order to tear them down, would have immediately heightened the conflict between the Republican Party's two wings. There would have been multiple interviews with Republicans who don't like Christie's position that illegal immigrants have not broken the law, or what they regard as his "softness" on gun control, by which they mean his favoring laws banning assault weapons. The website "Conservative New Jersey" brands Christie a "weasel."
Listening to some establishment Republicans grousing about the field of GOP presidential candidates should serve as a warning. Republicans, if they are not careful, are in danger of catching the same virus that infected Democrats in 2008. That would be a messiah complex, the belief that one man (or woman) can deliver us from our collective economic, social and foreign policy "sins" and bring redemption to a nation from the consequences of too many wrong-headed choices.
You know President Obama thinks he is in trouble with his liberal base when he lapses into what used to be called "jive talk" before an audience of Congressional Black Caucus members. Dropping his "g's", the president admonished the group to "stop complainin'." "Who's he talking about?" Rep. Maxine Waters, California Democrat, asked puzzled, keeping the "g." Some African-Americans have reason to complain. For decades they have given Democrats their votes, while receiving little in return, except government checks and a welfare system that has become as addictive as cocaine. In fact, the programs themselves are a kind of drug, which has doomed generations of poor blacks to a shoddy education, single motherhood, absent fathers, crime and incarceration.
There isn't much about dysfunctional government that shocks me anymore, but this story did. According to a report by the Office of Personnel Management and reported in Ed O'Keefe's "The Federal Eye" column in the Washington Post, our government has been sending checks to dead people. "In the last five years," O'Keefe writes, "the Office of Personnel Management has made more than $601 million in payments to dead federal retirees, according to the agency's inspector general. Total annual payouts range between $100 million and $150 million."
