Columnist.
Most Americans don't expect the federal government to stay out of their lives altogether. What they expect is minimal involvement: Let Washington be the last resort, the one Americans turn to only when they truly can't devise any alternative.
"This is not the end of the debate." Rep. Mark Meadows said that on ABC's "This Week" regarding the House leadership's failed health care bill, and he's exactly right.
How people feel about voter fraud often breaks down along partisan lines. Most conservatives feel that it's a serious problem, while liberals tend to scoff. They either claim that it doesn't happen, or that it doesn't happen enough to make a real difference. Tell that to William Gardner. New Hampshire's secretary of state is a Democrat who wants to rid the Granite State of what he calls "drive-by voting" — a type of fraud in which people from out of state come for a short period to vote on Election Day.
President Trump's executive order on immigration has more than its fair share of critics. Among them, apparently, is someone at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The leaked report indicating that the children of immigrants raised in America radicalize at a higher rate than their parents do was plainly meant to undercut the president's order.
When a politician promises something that "holds the promise of changing the course of human history," we naturally assume it's typical overstatement. But when President Ronald Reagan said that on March 23, 1983, in reference to his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), he was exactly right.
"If I could paraphrase a well-known statement by Will Rogers that he never met a man he didn't like," President Reagan once quipped, "I'm afraid we have some people around here who never met a tax they didn't like."
For many people outside of Britain, the Brexit vote came in like a typical news item. One minute, you knew nothing about it (or almost nothing), then it was all over the news. And now you see people reacting with great passion over the result. For me, it wasn't a surprise. Regular readers may recall that I endorsed a pro-Brexit vote two weeks ago, calling on my British friends to get control of their own government with laws from their own Parliament, not from bureaucrats in Brussels. In fact, this whole decision has been a long time coming. This was no impetuous decision. The push-pull debate over Britain's membership in the European Union has been going on since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister 30 years ago. In her magisterial book "Statecraft," she called for a trade alliance among the nations with the freest economies in the world, as an alternative to Britain's continued reliance on the supranational European government in Brussels.
It's been only 15 years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But when you look at how the terrorist threat has evolved since then, it seems as if a century or more has gone by. Things have been changing — fast. And if our response doesn't change, and just as quickly, we're practically begging for trouble. Not another Sept. 11, necessarily — but another Orlando. Another Fort Hood. Another San Bernardino. Indeed, the sheer magnitude of Sept. 11 can almost blind us to the metastasizing danger out there. Most people are aware, of course, that attacks such as the one in Orlando have occurred, and that the attacker had terrorist connections. Few people are aware that Orlando was the 86th plot of Islamist terror in the United States since Sept. 11.
Full disclosure: I'm an Anglophile. In other words, I admire all things British.
Which takes up a greater percentage of the federal budget — national defense or entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare? Even if you picked the right answer (entitlements), you may be surprised by the gap between the two. National defense accounts for 16 percent of the federal budget. Entitlements? 52 percent. Social Security alone dwarfs defense spending, taking up 24 percent. That's right: One out of every four dollars spent at the national level goes toward the mammoth New Deal program. Medicare, Medicaid and other health care spending gets 28 percent of every federal dollar.
"The last full measure of devotion." That's what President Lincoln called the ultimate sacrifice as he dedicated the cemetery at Gettysburg in 1863. It's what Memorial Day is all about: remembering those who laid down their lives to defend their families, their friends, their country. They've done it in such great numbers over the years that the magnitude of it almost washes over you. From the American Revolution, through the Civil War, the world wars, Vietnam, the Gulf War and Iraq, hundreds of thousands marched off to fight and didn't come back alive.
Do you support free speech, individual liberties and protections for private property? You must be a liberal. Did that last sentence cause you to do a double take? I'm not surprised. I've been reading a new book, "The Closing of the Liberal Mind," and it shows that much of what passes for liberalism today is, historically speaking, anything but. Moreover, many who call themselves conservative today would have been considered "liberal" if they lived in the time of the Founding Fathers.
Every Korean I know remains saddened by the division of the Korean people into a North and a South at the 38th parallel. The Korean people still dream of reunification, even as they tell me about their appreciation for the sacrifices that their friends, the Americans, made for Korea's freedom.
Americans still enjoy freedom of religion. But these days, they're expected to leave their faith in the pew or at home — not allow it to influence their behavior in the public square. The Founding Fathers didn't take that view. "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports," George Washington said. "In vain would that man claim tribute to patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness."
President Obama opened the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House this year by saying it was a bittersweet moment: It would be his last time hosting it. The term "Easter egg" is also used to indicate little surprises hidden on a website or DVD menu. Of course, those surprises are pleasant and intended to be found. As the Obama administration approaches the end of its term, however, we can expect a different type of surprise — and certainly not the friendly kind.
t's been over a year since the United States "normalized" relations with Cuba, making concessions that, supposedly, would encourage the island nation to become freer and more open. In light of President Obama's visit, however, it's clear that this policy has proven to be a failure. You would think that only by making concrete improvements in the lives of ordinary Cubans would the repressive rulers in Havana merit the first U.S. presidential visit since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.
Once upon a time, a conservative speaker was invited to a university to speak. Although many liberals on campus disagreed with him, they listened to his speech and then asked questions, leading to a discussion that left everyone better informed about current issues. At least that's how it's supposed to work. The reality, circa 2016, is this: The conservative speaker was disinvited when liberal students and faculty learned that, horror of horrors, someone who disagreed with them would be permitted to speak on campus. Their shrieking complaints scared the cowardly administrators into ensuring the speaker never even arrived.
Remember the Gold King mine spill in Colorado last August? Probably not. It was big news at the time, with pictures of people kayaking in the state's Animas River, which had turned a kind of sickly yellow from a flood of toxic waste water accidentally dumped into it by the Environmental Protection Agency. That's right — the EPA. The river had been contaminated not by a more easily demonized private company, but by the EPA itself. The agency took responsibility, a clean-up effort began, and the news cycle moved on to other things.
The year 2016 may well go down in history as the Year of the Fed-Up Voter. On issue after issue, too many of our elected officials refuse to make hard choices. They govern on autopilot, apparently hoping that some rousing speeches at election time will distract us. Take the federal budget. For years, it's been ballooning out of control. Government has grown to an unprecedented size and now reaches into virtually every aspect of our lives. It's on a dangerous financial trajectory that will have serious consequences for all of us.
For many years Korea has been known as "The Land of the Morning Calm." Sunday, Feb. 7, I could have added a postscript: "The morning calm and the afternoon chaos." I was sitting at Seoul's magnificent Incheon International Airport, waiting to board my flight back home, when the news came that the Communist half of Korea — the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the DPRK, or North Korea — had just launched an intercontinental ballistic missile from a test site deep inside its territory.
