Columnist.
One thing was missed in Newt Gingrich's victory in the South Carolina primary: Conservatives embraced a pro-amnesty candidate without batting an eyelash. This should come as a wake-up call to those who've been pushing a hard-line anti-illegal immigrant position in the Republican Party. Granted, Gingrich didn't spend a lot of time discussing his position, which favors amnesty for those illegal immigrants who have been here for a long time, have deep family and community ties, and have paid taxes and avoided breaking other laws. But that's the point. He didn't have to spend a lot of time defending his position because so few conservatives cared.
When President Obama gives his state of the union address next week, you can count on his making a big pitch for education. No president in recent memory has failed to tout expanded educational opportunity as the panacea for all that ails us -- and Obama has been the most passionate of pitchment on the issue. In last year's speech, he said, "Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine." But the fact is that dumping billions more in education will have little payoff and has arguably created more problems than it has solved.
It's bad enough when Democrats start playing class warfare, but when Republican presidential contenders begin using phrases like "vulture capitalism," it's time to be really worried. It's easy to dismiss as sour grapes Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry's attacks on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, which Romney co-founded. It's no coincidence that the attacks are getting nastier in South Carolina, site of the next presidential primary and perhaps the last chance one of the challengers has of stalling Romney's path to the nomination. But Romney's critics should be ashamed of themselves for promoting anti-business stereotypes.
My mother died this week. Death is never easy to accept, much less embrace, but it taught me that the end of life need not be frightening. She lived 90 years -- the last three of them in my home -- healthy, independent and happy, despite a life that others might have regarded as difficult, if not tragic. She was born Velma Lou McKenna in Sheridan, Wyo., in 1921. Her mother's family were pioneers who came west by covered wagon. Her father was the son of Irish immigrants and left his wife and four small children to find gold in Alaska -- and never returned.
Conservative columnist Ann Coulter has some advice for GOP presidential hopefuls: Hang tough on illegal immigration. Coulter sees illegal immigration as one of the two signature issues of the Republican presidential campaign (the other being repeal of Obamacare). Coulter predicts that if the candidates fail to be sufficiently hard-line, they'll invite future political suicide: "... Capitulate on illegal immigration, and the entire country will have the electorate of California." Her column is not only lousy advice; it speaks volumes about how little she understands immigration policy.
For more than a dozen years now, I've spent the days leading up to Christmas in search of a special gift. Not the kind you can buy at the mall or charge on your credit card but the gift of a traditional Midnight Mass. It goes back to my childhood, when I couldn't wait until I was old enough to attend Midnight Mass with my grandmother at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Denver. I was 13 the first time I got to stay up and attend Midnight Mass with my grandmother. She lived only a few blocks away from the cathedral, which we walked to alone in a gritty urban neighborhood. But because it was 1960, neither of us worried for our safety. The pews were already filled by the time we arrived near midnight, as Catholics and even some non-Catholics crammed the gothic structure to overflowing.
Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow has been a controversial sports figure ever since he agreed to do an ad for the conservative organization Focus on the Family; the spot aired during the 2010 Super Bowl. Feminists and other groups, who feared the ad would be overtly pro-life and anti-abortion, tried to keep it from running. In the end, the message turned out to be pretty innocuous, and those who tried to censor it looked downright silly. Now Tebow is once again a target for illiberals who find his evangelical Christianity somehow threatening and offensive. The latest episode involves a recent column for The Jewish Week that bashed Tebow for symbolizing intolerance. But it was the writer, Connecticut Rabbi Joshua Hammerman, who put his own astonishing bigotry on display. Hammerman titled his piece "My Tebow Problem," and indeed it is Hammerman's problem -- not Tebow's.
Barack Obama channeled Teddy Roosevelt this week in a speech in Osawatomie, Kan. Supporters are calling it the most significant economic speech of his administration. But critics rightly point out that the Teddy Roosevelt whom Obama invoked was not the beloved 26th president and standard-bearer of the GOP. Instead, it was the radicalized third-party candidate seeking a third term and the man whose progressivism was a precursor to the rise of big government in the later 20th century. What's more, President Obama's speech was so full of reckless accusations and misinformation that The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog gave it three Pinocchios, signifying "significant factual errors."
Americans notoriously care little about foreign affairs, but this week's elections in Egypt deserve our attention. The Egyptian version of the so-called Arab Spring began as a popular uprising against long-term strongman Hosni Mubarak and promised greater liberty and freedom for the most populous Arab nation. But early returns from parliamentary elections in about a third of Egypt's provinces, including Cairo, suggest that Islamists will carry the day. The implications for peace in the Middle East are worrisome.
The Obama administration this week announced new rules governing the deportation of illegal aliens. The administration's new policy, which has been in the development stage since the summer, aims to speed the deportation of convicted criminals and halt those of many illegal immigrants without criminal records. The timing is purely political; attempting to again make illegal immigration a major factor in the upcoming presidential campaign will ultimately help Democrats, not Republicans.
For the last several years, State Senator Russell Pearce has been the face of the anti-illegal immigrant movement in Arizona. But his district voted this week to recall him, ending a 10-year state legislative career that has been marked by ugly episodes. It's about time. Pearce was the chief author of Arizona SB 1070, the controversial law still being challenged in the courts that, among other things, allows law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect is there illegally. And Pearce has sponsored legislation that would attempt to deny citizenship to children born in Arizona to parents who are illegal immigrants, despite the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship.
The GOP's Hispanic voter problem has the potential to cost it the presidential election next November -- but the likelihood is that it won't. This has less to do with the party's standing with Hispanic voters, which continues to be low, than it does with President Obama's failures to revive the economy. Nonetheless, the party is concerned enough that some Republican leaders are suggesting the key to winning the Hispanic vote is to put Florida Sen. Marco Rubio on the ticket, no matter who the presidential nominee turns out to be. That's the wrong solution.
Last week, the Obama administration dropped one of the signature provisions of its healthcare plan. The CLASS Act (Community Living Assistance Services) was intended to provide affordable insurance for long-term care to individuals who, because of infirmity or age, could no longer care for themselves. But the reality that not enough healthy Americans would sign up to make it self-supporting finally doomed the program. Many opponents of Obamacare will no doubt cheer this turn of events because it confirms the view that we cannot afford to, in essence, nationalize health care. I agree --but I also recognize that the problem that the CLASS Act was trying to address is a legitimate concern for which we now have no workable solutions.
Could anyone have imagined even a few years ago that the 2012 U.S. presidential race might end up as a contest between two black candidates? I certainly couldn't have. Yet, with Republican candidate Herman Cain's recent surge in popularity, the possibility is there. This says a great deal about race in America -- all of it good. In many respects, Herman Cain's advance in the Republican primary contest is more striking than Barack Obama's rise in 2008. Unlike Obama, whose father was African and who was raised largely in Hawaii by his white grandparents, Cain is a product of the segregated South.
Like millions of Apple users around the world, I learned that Steve Jobs had died when I turned on my Mac on Wednesday evening. There his picture was, staring out from the Apple homepage when I went to my browser: his signature black turtleneck; his close-cropped grey hair and beard; his piercing, pale eyes. I felt enormous sadness -- the kind that makes your throat constrict to force back tears, and at first, I couldn't quite figure out why. I certainly didn't know Jobs. I couldn't even have told you whether he had a family or how old he was or where he called home. But I know the world would not be the same if Steve Jobs had not lived.
You'd never know it by listening to the GOP presidential hopefuls, but the Republican Party is launching a major effort to woo Hispanic voters in next year's election. The reason is simple: demographics. Unless the GOP wins a larger percentage of Hispanic votes in key states next year than it did in 2008, the White House may be out of reach, despite President Obama's unpopularity. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that new census numbers show a surge in the Hispanic voting-age population between 2008 and 2010. In Florida, with its 29 electoral votes at stake, the Hispanic voting-age population increased by nearly 250,000, whereas the comparable white population grew by barely 30,000.
As predictably as fall marks the beginning of the new school year in campuses across the country, so, too, does it usher in new attacks on standardized testing. The 2011 version comes in the form of a new book, "SAT Wars," a collection of essays that purports to be an authoritative account of the controversy over one particular test used by most selective universities in their admissions process. But far from being an unbiased account of the pros and cons of using any standardized test -- much less the SAT, one of the most thoroughly studied, modified, and continuously validated tests in history -- the book is really an attack on standardized testing per se.
The campus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison erupted this week after the release of two studies documenting the heavy use of race in deciding which students to admit to the undergraduate and law schools. The evidence of discrimination is undeniable, and the reaction by critics was undeniably dishonest and thuggish. The Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), which I founded in 1995 to expose and challenge misguided race-based public policies, conducted the studies based on an analysis of the university's own admissions data. But the university was none too keen on releasing the data, which CEO obtained through filing Freedom of Information Act requests only after a successful legal challenge went all the way to the state supreme court.
The biggest star in the Obama firmament of green-jobs companies has just imploded. Solyndra, a California-based firm that produced solar panels, declared bankruptcy this week, putting more than a thousand additional workers on the unemployment line. The Solyndra story tells you all you need to know about President Obama's ability to "create" jobs -- green or otherwise.
As the president contemplates his options for creating jobs and stimulating the economy, here's one idea he should consider: Create a new immigration lottery that would let in up to a million newcomers -- on the condition that they immediately purchase a home with cash. I know this idea is bound to infuriate some people, but it could do more to stimulate the economy than anything the Obama administration -- or the Republicans -- have come up with so far. There's no question that the depressed housing market is a major factor stalling the economic recovery. Most Americans' wealth is tied up in their homes; housing prices have continued to fall precipitously, and largely because of the huge inventory of unsold houses. Many of those houses are foreclosures.
