Columnist.
"You will be shocked beyond belief, I'm sure, to learn it."
At a recent White House science fair celebrating inventors, a Girl Scout who helped design a Lego-powered page-turning device asked President Obama what he had ever thought up or prototyped. Stumbling for an answer, he replied: "I came up with things like, you know, health care." Ah, yes. "Health care." Remember when the president's signature Obamacare health insurance exchanges were going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, the remote control, jogger strollers, Siri, the Keurig coffee maker, driverless cars and Legos all rolled into one? The miraculous, efficient, cost-saving, innovative 21st-century government-run "marketplaces" were supposed to put the "affordable" in Obama's Affordable Care Act. Know-it-all bureaucrats were going to show private companies how to set up better websites (gigglesnort), implement better marketing and outreach (guffaw), provide superior customer service (belly laugh), and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse (LOLOLOL).
She's baaaaaaaack. And she's maaaaaad. First lady Michelle Obama delivered the commencement address at Tuskegee University last weekend. She'll do it again at Ohio's Oberlin College — the UC Berkeley of the Midwest, Ground Zero for racial grievance-mongering and fake hate crimes — next week. Commencement FLOTUS is not the same first lady who shows up on "Ellen" or "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" wearing her pastel cardigan, Chuck Taylors and a megawatt grin. No, this frowny-faced Michelle Obama talks and squawks like Al Sharpton in Jimmy Choo kitten heels. At Tuskegee, FLOTUS traded her affable TV persona for the divisive social justice complainer we all came to know and loathe during her husband's first presidential campaign.
A Canadian judge ruled this week that Omar Khadr poses no public safety threat. Tell that to the children of Sergeant First Class Christopher J. Speer and the surviving American soldiers who valiantly fought Khadr on the battlefield. In 2012, Khadr pleaded guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty and guilty to five charges related to the killing of Speer, a 28-year-old medic with the U.S. Special Forces. This young American hero died in Afghanistan in 2002 during an ambush by al-Qaida operatives. Just days before he gave his life, Speer had fearlessly walked onto a minefield to rescue two wounded Afghan children. It was Khadr, born and bred an Islamic jihadist by his terrorist father, who lobbed the fatal grenade in the war zone. Another American soldier, SFC Layne Morris, survived the attack, but was blinded in one eye for life. In a sealed plea deal at Guantanamo Bay, Khadr admitted to throwing the grenade. He admitted to attempted murder, conspiracy, spying and providing material support to terrorism. He signed a 50-paragraph stipulation that classified him as an "enemy belligerent because he has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States and its coalition partners" and documented his family's intimate association and friendship with al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Muhammad Atef.
"What Assata taught me" is the new "Hands up, don't shoot." For $35, you, too, can sport a politically correct black hoodie emblazoned with a fugitive convicted murderer's name. Assata's apparel is the new rage among perpetually enraged Baltimore and Ferguson social justice warriors. It won't be long now before hipster actresses and cable news progressives are Instagramming themselves wearing this latest entry in radical chic to show their "solidarity." Here's what Assata taught me: The left's sick fetish for cop-killers is still going strong after four decades of violence, bloodshed, bigotry and excuses. The timing couldn't be more blood-boiling. As the relatives, friends and colleagues of NYPD Officer Brian Moore, 25, prepare to bury their hero on Friday after he was brazenly shot in the face this weekend by a thug with a long rap sheet and a deep hatred of police, Assata's army remains as militant as ever.
It's never enough. American taxpayers have surrendered billions and billions and billions of dollars to the social-justice-spender-in-chief. But it's never, ever enough. The latest paroxysm of urban violence, looting, and recriminations in Baltimore prompted President Obama on Tuesday to trot out his frayed Blame The Callous, Tight-Fisted Republicans card. After dispensing with an obligatory wrist-slap of toilet paper-and Oreo-filching "protesters" who are burning Charm City to the ground (he hurriedly changed it to "criminals and thugs" mid-word), the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner got down to his usual business: hectoring his political opponents and grousing that America hasn't forked over enough money for him to make the "massive investments" needed to "make a difference right now."
America has an alphabet soup of visa programs for foreigners to choose from: B-1 for business visitors, B-2 for tourists, EB-5 for investors, F-1 for students, and so on. All are overwhelmed, loosely monitored and riddled with fraud and corruption. According to the recently unsealed federal indictment against him, sleazy Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., took it upon himself to add his own very special, crooked path to the U.S. Call it the 36DD Visa. The New York Post recounted this weekend how Menendez and his staff pressured the State Department to expedite the foreign tourist and student visa approval processes for a bevy of buxom foreign beauties. One of them, Brazilian actress and nudie model Juliana Lopes Leite (a.k.a. "Girlfriend 1"), had her F-1 student visa application moved to the top of the Mount Everest-high heap in 2008 as a favor to Menendez's now-indicted donor pal and accused Medicare fraudster Salomon Melgen.
Gwynnie P is down with the struggle, comrades. She may make $19 million a year, own mansions in London, New York, Brentwood, Malibu and the Hamptons, charge $550 for her Goop.com "travel backgammon set," and fly by private jet, but she feels your pain. OK, it's not as painful as her last $5,200 Thermage session in Santa Monica, but still, she really, really does feel the agony of the ordinary. Last week, the progressive princess celebrity joined the "SNAP challenge." It's basically the ice bucket challenge for bored Hollywood liberals and media-hungry Democratic politicians. For seven days (or at least for an hour or two after they publish their announcements to Twitter and Facebook), the bleeding hearts play "poor" by subsisting on a faux welfare budget.
Eight months ago, President Obama put on a grand show for the troops. Surrounded by new Secretary of Veterans Affairs Bob McDonald, assorted politicians, military leaders and a bevy of TV cameras, the commander in chief signed the "Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act." He's good at inking things. Obama condemned the "inexcusable conduct" at VA hospitals across the country (and under his own watch). He vowed to "do right by all who served under our proud flag." He promised America's veterans new "reform," "resources," "timely care" and an end to the disgraceful disability backlog.
Can we stop putting America up for sale to the most politically connected bidders yet? Where is our self-respect? Since 2001, I've warned about the systemic and bipartisan corruption of America's EB-5 immigrant investor visa program. The latest report from the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general -- which outlines the meddling and pandering of No. 2 DHS official Alejandro Mayorkas, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, Democratic bagman Terry McAuliffe, Hillary Clinton's brother Tony Rodham, former Pennsylvania. Gov. Ed Rendell and former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, to name a few -- provides yet more sordid evidence that the green cards-for-sale scheme should be completely scrapped. Created under an obscure section of the expansionist 1990 Immigration Act, EB-5 promised bountiful economic development for the U.S. in exchange for granting permanent residency (and eventual American citizenship) to foreign investors. A few years later, Congress conjured up the idea of EB-5 "regional centers" -- government-sanctioned business groups and corporate entities acting as middlemen to administer the immigrant investments and facilitate the visa peddling.
They just can't help themselves -- and their agenda-driven media enablers never, ever learn. This week, the NAACP made national front-page headlines with a local press release demanding that the feds investigate the hanging death of a local man in Port Gibson, Miss. Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP Mississippi State Conference, immediately invoked the specter of a "hate crime." In response, the Obama Justice Department flooded the zone with a whopping 30 federal agents. News outlets grabbed the bait. USA Today asked ominously: "Was it a lynching?" The discovery of ex-con Otis Byrd's body swinging from a tree by a bed sheet "brought back unpleasant memories of America's violent, racially charged past," the paper's video reporter asserted. Voice of America similarly intoned: "Mississippi hanging death raises lynching specter." The Los Angeles Times leaped into the fray with: "Why this story haunts the nation."
You've heard it from Big Government lobbyists. You've heard it from Big Business lackeys in both political parties. And you've heard it from journalists, pundits and think-tankers ad nauseam: The H-1B foreign guest worker program, they claim, requires American employers to first show that they searched for and tried to recruit American workers before tapping an ever-growing government-rigged pipeline of cheap foreign workers. The foot soldiers of the open-borders brigade are lying, deluded, ignorant or bought-off.
Tax season is stressful enough. But if you are like countless miserable Americans trapped in the Obamacare 1095-A abyss, it's hell on stilts on a Segway teetering over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. The screw-ups, incompetence and bureaucratic blame avoidance over the health insurance exchange tax forms make the healthcare.gov website fiasco look like a flawless product launch. How do I know? My family inexplicably got ensnared in the 1095-A paperwork pit. It's a government roach motel: Taxpayers check in, but they can never check out. In 2013, our private high-deductible PPO from Anthem Blue Cross got canceled because of "changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA)." Millions of others like us in the individual market for health insurance -- including self-employed people, small-business owners, writers, artists and home-based entrepreneurs -- suffered the same fate.
Political correctness is a pathological disorder. You can't say "niggardly" or "black holes" or "chink in the armor" without provoking protests or risking your job. You can't invoke the Constitution or call illegal behavior "illegal" without being accused of hatred. And now, you can't goof around at a high school basketball game in silly costumes without the world accusing you of "racial insensitivity." Last week, thanks to hyperbolic grievance-mongers and irresponsible reporters, the students of Holy Spirit High School in Absecon, N.J., garnered international headlines and Internet infamy. "Shocking moment students at Catholic school dressed as monkeys and a banana and taunted black basketball players ... and DIDN'T get punished," the U.K. Daily Mail blared last week. "Students who taunted black players at New Jersey basketball game get warning, no punishment," USA Today decried.
The Department of Homeland Security refuses to release a report on "right-wing" terrorism that somehow found its way into CNN's hands last week during the farcical White House summit on Don't Say Islamic Extremism. Your tax dollars are once again hard at work -- defaming conservatives, deflecting from worldwide murderous jihad and denying the public access to information they funded. CNN splashed the big scoop on its website: "DHS intelligence report warns of domestic right-wing terror threat." The fear-mongering piece featured a huge map of 24 alleged acts of "violence by sovereign citizen extremists since 2010." CNN's Evan Perez and Wes Bruer prominently quoted Mark Potok of the widely disgraced propaganda outfit the Southern Poverty Law Center. Potok claimed that "there are as many as 300,000 people involved in some way with sovereign citizen extremism."
At the White House Summit on Extremism That Shall Remain Unspecified Because Violent Followers Belonging To Unnamed Extremist Movement Might Take Extreme Offense And Act Extremely, the feds are touting a groundbreaking new strategy to fight terrorists. Just kidding. It's actually the same old futile strategy that big-government liberals use to cure everything: mo' money, mo' money, mo' money. Instead of killing jihadists, keeping them off of our soil, locking up their poisonous spiritual agitators and shutting off their terror-funding pipelines, President Obama called on America and the world to "invest" in unnamed immigrant "communities" vulnerable to unnamed extremism. Some of the most generous welfare states on the planet have suffered horrific jihad attacks this year. Liberal Denmark's soft-on-jihad rehab program has been a disaster. But that hasn't stopped State Department spokes-babbler Marie Harf from mewling incessantly about "combating poverty" to combat ISIS.
Being a San Francisco liberal means never having to say you're sorry. Or wrong. Take Nancy Pelosi, please. Five years ago, California's genius Bay Area Democrat declared that government unemployment checks generate job growth. Yes, really. "Let me say about unemployment insurance," she told reporters, "this is one of the biggest stimuluses (sic) to our economy. Economists will tell you, this money is spent quickly. It injects demand into the economy and is job creating." She babbled on: "It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name, because, again, it is money that is needed for families to survive, and it is spent. So it has a double benefit. It helps those who've lost their jobs, but it also is a job creator."
Before the nation's Food Nanny guilt-trips you into ditching boxed dinners on a frazzled night, know this: The first lady profited from cheese dust before she was against it. In the new issue of Cooking Light magazine, Michelle Obama takes another sanctimonious stand against processed foods. The occasion of this latest hectoring is a month-long celebration of the fifth anniversary of her Let's Move initiative. This time, she spins a slickly crafted tale of how her former personal chef challenged daughter Malia several years ago to turn a block of cheese into powder. "She sat there for 30 minutes trying to pulverize a block of cheese into dust," Mrs. Obama claims. "She was really focused on it, and it just didn't work, so she had to give up. And from then on, we stopped eating macaroni and cheese out of a box because cheese dust is not food," snob momma Obama pontificated.
Comedian Jimmy Fallon is a celebrity fraud's best friend. He's an answer to normal America's question: How do creepy stars get away with their grotesqueries? If you're lucky enough to sit by his late-night throne and join his cool-kid games, all your troubles will melt away. Funnyman Jimmy is not just a bread-and-circuses buffoon. He's the keeper of the pop culture immunity necklace. A few weeks ago, "The Tonight Show" host bestowed his boob-tube shield upon grotesque actress Lena Dunham -- a favorite repeat guest who famously declared an "obsessive crush" on Fallon. This time, they played "perverted Pictionary." The main gag involved foot-long hot dogs.
Did the 2014 midterms really happen? Less than three months after a red tide rolled over the country, the Senate Republican Rollover Caucus is back to its default position in Washington, D.C.: Hands up, bow down. Last week, senior GOP supplicant Sen. Orrin Hatch announced that he will support the confirmation of President Obama's attorney general nominee, Loretta Lynch. He praised her "qualifications" and decried the Justice Department's previous leaders who "have facilitated executive abuses by this president rather than upholding the rule of law."
