Columnist.
Another week, another money-grubbing Planned Parenthood baby-parts harvester exposed.
Islam-inspired hate crimes against our troops have continued unabated.
Four U.S. Marines, barred from carrying weapons at naval training facilities despite explicit ISIS threats against our military, are dead in Tennessee. Another service member and a Chattanooga police officer survived gunshots after Thursday's two-stage massacre allegedly at the hands of 24-year-old jihadist Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus called the terrorist's spree "insidious and unfathomable." President Obama bemoaned the "heartbreaking circumstance" in which the murdered Marines found themselves. "Unfathomable"? Not if you've been paying attention. Islam-inspired hate crimes against our troops have continued unabated since the Obama White House first dismissed the 2009 Fort Hood massacre as "workplace violence."
Hannibal Lecter ain't got nothing on the profit-maximizing abortion ghoul caught on tape hawking aborted baby parts as she swilled wine and nibbled on a gourmet salad. In newly released undercover footage from the pro-life Center for Medical Progress, seasoned abortionist Dr. Deborah Nucatola, who serves as national senior director of "medical services" at Planned Parenthood, chitter-chattered eagerly about fulfilling the bloodthirsty demand for "intact hearts," "lower extremities" and lungs. Price tag? "You know, I would throw a number out," she babbled breezily as she twirled her fork. "I would say it's probably anywhere from $30 to $100" per specimen.
There's a regular feature in grocery gossip magazines titled "Stars: They're just like us!" Supposedly "candid" photos show actors and starlets taking out the trash, dropping off their kids at school and walking their dogs to emphasize their Everyday Peoplehood. But we all know it's another manufactured Tinseltown myth. Routine outbreaks of celebrity tantrum-itis remind us that the denizens of the entertainment world are a spoiled bratty species unto themselves. Take pop diva Ariana Grande. This week, the wide-eyed tartlet got caught profanely bashing our country, mocking cashiers and spreading her precious spit on donuts for sale at a Lake Elsinore, Calif., shop.
The random, heartless murder of a young tourist on San Francisco's Pier 14 by a five-time illegal alien deportee who benefited from the "progressive" city's sanctuary policy has law-abiding Americans, law enforcement officials and political opportunists of all stripes up in arms. But for decades, feckless government leaders ignored the pleas of families who suffered the bloody consequences of open borders. For every Kate Steinle who died at the hands of an illegal alien sanctuary beneficiary, there is a Tony, Michael and Matthew Bologna in San Francisco.
My fellow Americans: If you see something, say something — even if it means CAIR will threaten to sue you. Multiple federal agencies and the Department of Defense are on high alert for a possible Islamic terrorist attack on U.S. soil this Independence Day weekend. They've increased security at military bases and sent bulletins to law enforcement officials across the country. The heightened stance comes in the wake of a bloodthirsty ISIS call to arms for Ramadan; multiple jihad outbreaks in Kuwait, France and Tunisia; and the arrest of at least 30 terror plotters in our country radicalized by ISIS over the past year. "Those who seek to harm this nation and our friends take no holiday," Defense Secretary Ashton Carter warned at a Pentagon press briefing Wednesday with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey.
America is still reeling from the horrific Charleston, S.C., massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that claimed the lives of nine innocent people. The last thing the community and our country need are hysterical journalists compounding the pain with inflammatory reporting on an unsubstantiated "epidemic" of black church arsons. On Monday, a Baltimore Sun lead editorial decried "a series of mysterious fires at African-American churches across the South" in the wake of the Charleston murders. The newspaper cited a "pattern" of attacks, including what it claimed was an "uptick in attacks on 37 black churches in the South" in the 1990s that "prompted President Bill Clinton to set up a church-arson investigative task force."
I have had enough of smug liberal elites wrapped in their "Celebrate Diversity" banners tearing down minority conservatives. Look in the mirror, media and academia bigots. Your own reflexive racism and divisive rhetoric are poisoning public discourse. There's nothing "progressive" about attacking the children and grandchildren of immigrants who proudly embrace an American identity. We are not "self-hating." You just hate what we believe. The most recent grenade tossed by the jack-booted Enforcers of Ethnic Authenticity came from The Washington Post this week. The Beltway fish-wrapper hyped a 2,100-word investigation of GOP Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal with a condescending quote from Professor G. Pearson Cross, who sneered: "There's not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal."
Unlike Pope Francis, I believe that air-conditioning and the capitalists responsible for the technology are blessings to the world. Perhaps the head of the Catholic Church, who condemned "the increasing use and power of air-conditioning" last week in a market-bashing encyclical, is unaware of the pioneering private company that has donated its time, energy and innovative heating, ventilating and air-conditioning equipment to the Vatican's most famous edifice for more than a decade. That's right. While the pontiff sanctimoniously attacks "those who are obsessed with maximizing profits," Carrier Corporation — a $13 billion for-profit company with 43,000 employees worldwide (now a unit of U.S.-based United Technologies Corp.) — ensures that the air in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel stays clean and cool.
Why was America so shocked by homegirl hoaxer Rachel Dolezal? The spray-tanned con artist, who resigned this week as head of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of (Artificially) Colored People, is the inevitable outcome of academia's cult of manufactured victimhood. College campuses have been grooming a cadre of professional minority fakers and fraudsters for decades. The notorious pretendians Ward Churchill and Elizabeth Warren faked their Native American status to bolster their faculty credentials at the University of Colorado and Harvard, respectively. It was a mutually beneficial racket for all poseur parties involved. Churchill and Warren basked in their tenured glory. The schools racked up politically correct points for adding the right flavors to their employment rolls.
Fifteen years ago this week, my beautiful daughter Veronica entered the world. She didn't make a sound. As I stretched out my arms to hold her in the delivery room, furrow-browed doctors and nurses instead whisked her away. I shouted after them in panic: "Is she all right? Is she going to be OK?!" Slightly underweight and jaundiced, she remained in the hospital for several days before we got the all-clear. My husband and I counted our blessings. But it wouldn't be the last time we felt the pangs of parental helplessness when it came to her health.
Constitutional conservatives don't like it. Trade unions abhor it. Obama critics hate it. Environmentalists despise it. Outside the Beltway bubble, a broad coalition of voters from the left, right and center opposes the mega-trade deal getting rammed through Congress this week by the Republican establishment on behalf of the White House. Here's why. The Obama administration, House GOP leader John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have sold out American sovereignty. Their so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission will have sweeping authority over trade, immigration, environmental, labor and commerce regulations.
It's increasingly difficult to tell the difference between Teach for America — whose leaders are at the forefront of inflammatory anti-police protests in Baltimore, Ferguson, and now McKinney, Texas — and left-wing activist groups such as Organizing for Action (President Obama's partisan community organizing army). Guess what, taxpayers? You're paying for it! Wendy Kopp founded Teach for America in 1989 after writing her Princeton University thesis on the need for a "national teaching corps" of elite college grads who would serve students on short-term stints in low-income neighborhoods. The do-gooder group has exploded into a massive, nonprofit business.
Let's set aside whether Cameron Crowe's new movie, "Aloha," is a good or bad movie. Whatever the flick's merits or demerits, it has inadvertently helped expose the arbitrary, capricious and ridiculous demands of militant identity politics. After getting hammered by ethnic mau-mauers, director Crowe issued an apology this week for casting actress Emma Stone as the character "Allison Ng" in his Hawaii-centered rom-com. Stone is the alabaster-skinned, green-eyed, red-haired beauty who played Spider-Man's sweetheart, Gwen Stacy. "Ng" is a fictional Air Force fighter pilot of Chinese, Hawaiian and Swedish descent.
A stellar group of American historians and academics released a milestone open letter yesterday in protest of deleterious changes to the advanced placement U.S. history (APUSH) exam. The signatories are bold intellectual bulwarks against increasing progressive attacks in the classroom on America's unique ideals and institutions. Moms and dads in my adopted home state of Colorado have been mocked and demonized for helping to lead the fight against the anti-American changes to APUSH. But if there's any hope at all in salvaging local control over our kids' curriculum, it lies in the willingness of a broad coalition of educators and parents to join in the front lines for battles exactly like this one. As the 55 distinguished members of the National Association of Scholars explained this week, the teaching of American history faces "a grave new risk." So-called "reforms" by the College Board, which holds a virtual monopoly on A.P. testing across the country, "abandon a rigorous insistence on content" in favor of downplaying "American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective."
How many times have you heard President Obama and his minions pat themselves on the back for their noble "investments" in "roads and bridges"? Without government infrastructure spending, we're incessantly reminded, we wouldn't be able to conduct our daily business. "Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive," Vice President Joe Biden infamously asserted. "Private enterprise," he sneered, lags behind. As always, the Beltway narcissists have it backward. Without private enterprise and free-market visionaries, public infrastructure wouldn't exist. Take the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, which turned 132 years old this week. It's not a government official whose vision built that. It's a fierce capitalist who revolted against unimaginative command-and-control bureaucrats in his home country.
Socialist genius Bernie Sanders has figured out what's really ailing America. Our store shelves have too many different brands of deodorant and sneakers. Just look at all those horrible, fully stocked aisles at Target and Walgreens and Wal-Mart and Payless and DSW and Dick's Sporting Goods. It's a national nightmare! If only consumers had fewer choices in the free market, fewer entrepreneurs offering a wide variety of products and fewer workers manufacturing goods people wanted, Sanders believes, we could end childhood hunger. Nobody parodies the far left better than far-leftists themselves.
Patent law is not something most Americans are passionate about or have ever contemplated — which is exactly why the Obama White House and Congress got away with making radical changes to our time-tested traditions of protecting the fruits of entrepreneurial inventors' labor. It's yet another progressive horror story of abandoning what works in the name of what's politically trendy. For left-wing saboteurs and their Big Business GOP enablers, this means throwing our unique patent system and its constitutional underpinnings under an 18-wheeler. So-called "patent reform" proposals continue to plague Capitol Hill. But like health care "reform" and education "reform," these government cures are worse than any purported disease. As part of his ongoing bid to "fundamentally transform" America, President Obama signed the Orwellian-titled America Invents Act (AIA) in 2011. If truth-in-advertising laws applied to politicians who front massively complex bills that do the opposite of what they proclaim to do, these hucksters would be jailed for their patently fraudulent "reform" legislation. Co-sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the law was marketed as a job-creation vehicle that would relieve a backlog of an estimated 700,000 patent applications and crack down on patent "trolls" supposedly abusing the system through frivolous litigation against alleged infringers.
In our home, we try to instill a life lesson for our kids best summed up in Latin: *Nihil boni sine labore.* It means, "Nothing good achieved without hard work." Few people I've met in my lifetime embody this motto better and more brilliantly than Tony Maglica, inventor of the iconic Maglite flashlight. The spry 84-year-old founder and CEO of Mag Instrument still traverses his 450,000-square-foot factory floor dozens of times over the course of his 12-hour workday, six days a week, beginning at the crack of dawn and ending after most of his 800 employees have clocked out. I visited his Ontario, Calif., headquarters while doing research for my new book, "Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs." Born on the tiny island of Zlarin off the coast of Croatia, Maglica came here determined to make something of himself. His first job was sewing piecework in a sweatshop at 50 cents an hour. He worked hard to assimilate, teaching himself English from a dictionary. With his wife and young child in tow, the ambitious 20-year-old tinkerer packed up a rusted, bald-tired 1947 Studebaker and headed West.
