Columnist.
Hillary Clinton went down to the Senate floor on March 12, 2003, to advocate for the culture of death while claiming to oppose the culture of debt. The legislation up for debate that day aimed to prohibit a specific means of taking innocent life. As described in its first paragraph, it would make illegal that act when "a physician deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living, unborn child's body until either the entire baby's head is outside the body of the mother, or any part of the baby's trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother and only the head remains inside the womb, for the purpose of performing an overt act (usually the puncturing of the back of the child's skull and removing the baby's brains) that the person knows will kill the partially delivered infant."
The nine-second video of two federal bureaucrats the White House posted on its blog last week was notable for something it omitted. That something was very big — and putting it on display might not have fit with the apparent propaganda purpose of the video. The video itself starred EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who sat side-by-side at a table. The video starts with McCarthy and Foxx simultaneously scratching their signatures onto separate and apparently singular sheets of paper. Eight seconds into the nine-second clip, when McCarthy has finished signing her name, she looks up and declares: "Done." Foxx, who signed even faster than McCarthy, spreads his arms in a gesture that appears to say: That's it, folks. Then he echoes McCarthy: "Done." So, what exactly had these two bureaucrats done?
"I've been working for seven years now to get this thing closed," President Barack Obama said in a Feb. 23 speech explaining his latest plan to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay. Part of his plan, he explained, was to release many of the 91 prisoners then still held there. "First," he said, "we'll continue to securely and responsibly transfer to other countries the 35 detainees — out of the 91 — that have already been approved for transfer." Another part was to release even more prisoners than that.
In Philadelphia, where the Democratic Party held its national convention, the public schools spent a total of $18,241 per student in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education. In Detroit, where Donald Trump gave a speech on his economic policies this week, the public schools spent a total of $18,361 per student that year. In Washington, D.C., where the federal government makes its home, it was $23,980. What did these schools produce while spending more than $18,000 per student? Not well-educated children.
Has President Barack Obama, who leaves office in January, provided a good or bad model for those who will succeed him? Here are five ways he has disserved his office: 1. Obama has attacked the most fundamental God-given right — the right to life. Before he entered federal office, while he was in the Illinois state senate, Obama went so far as to oppose legislation that would have defined a born baby who had survived an abortion as a "person." As president, his dedication to maintaining the legality of killing unborn babies has guided everything from his Supreme Court appointments to the legal battles he has fought all the way to that court.
U.S. District Judge Jean Hamilton ruled last week that the federal government cannot force Paul and Teresa Wieland — an American mom and dad — to violate their religious beliefs by compelling them to purchase a health insurance plan that covers sterilizations, contraceptives, and abortion-inducing drugs and devices. But in making the Obama administration's case that the government should be able to do so, lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department made a telling claim: A single-payer health care system would effectively put a stop to such arguments in defense of religious liberty. In a complaint filed in 2013, lawyers Timothy Belz (who represented the Wielands) and Peter Breen (of the Thomas More Society of Chicago) first made the family's case in federal court.
The delegates to the Republican National Convention approved a platform this week that criticizes the Obama administration for running up the federal debt and calls for amending the Constitution to require the federal government to balance its budget. The amendment the platform advocates would limit federal spending to a percentage of gross domestic product and require a supermajority in Congress to approve "any tax increase." Such an amendment would be a good thing — not only because of what the Obama administration has done but also because of what Republicans in Congress have done.
Less than three months ago, President Barack Obama stood in London — beside British Prime Minster David Cameron — and issued a warning to the free and independent voters of the United Kingdom. "Crucially," a reporter asked him, "what happens if the U.K. does decide in June to leave the European Union?" Obama prefaced his answer by rationalizing his intervention in the internal politics of this longtime democratic ally. "Let me repeat, this is a decision for the people of the United Kingdom to make," he said. "I'm not coming here to fix any votes. I'm not casting a vote myself. I'm offering my opinion. And, in democracies, everybody should want more information, not less. And you shouldn't be afraid to hear an argument being made.
Were you in Olympia, Washington, and wanted to buy an abortifacient drug, there would be a multitude of places ready to sell you one. Ralph's Thriftway, a local family-owned grocery store and pharmacy, would not be one of them. "Petitioners are Christians who believe that life is sacred from the moment of conception," lawyers representing Stormans, Inc. (the family corporation that owns Ralph's) and two individual pharmacists (who do not work at Ralph's) wrote in a January petition to the Supreme Court."
It was off to one side of the train line but not too far away. The tower of an ancient church stood up in golden sunshine. Before it and beyond it rolled fields of brilliant green, crossed by hedgerows and accented by occasional trees. Stretching out in front of the church was a small village of solid stone houses. How old was that church? How old were those houses? How long had farmers tilled the fields around them? How long had this architecture — this village — stood in this rural part of England? The answers were impossible for a foreigner to immediately learn as the train from Scotland rolled smoothly and rapidly southward on its journey to London — on the Sunday after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union.
One of the fundamental questions facing Americans today is: Will our government ever secure our border? Judging by recent history, the answer would be: No.
No one will remember 2006 as one of our nation's greatest years. But how are we doing now compared to then? By many measures, not nearly so well. The economy grew faster in 2006 than it has in any year since. That year, real gross domestic product increased by a modest 2.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That was down from the 3.8 percent growth of 2004 and the 3.3 percent growth of 2005. But real GDP has not grown by more than 2.5 percent in any year since 2006.
Not long before the start of the NBA playoff game between the Golden State Warriors and the Oklahoma City Thunder on Monday night, the television screen flashed to a panoramic view of the San Francisco skyline — as seen from the East Bay. A bank of early evening fog floated into the city from the West, rolling off the unseen Pacific. High-rise buildings stood in silhouette before that bank of fog, many stretching out in territory to the south of the Transamerica Pyramid.
Speaking this week in Ho Chi Minh City in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam — at what the White House billed as a "business and entrepreneurship event" — President Barack Obama complained about the lack of cooperation he gets from the U.S. Congress. The president was responding to a question posed by a Microsoft Vietnam executive who wanted to know what Obama would do to get the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal — which Microsoft endorses — approved in the United States.
President Barack Obama next week will visit Vietnam, which his own State Department last month certified is still controlled — four decades after the fall of Saigon — by the Communist Party. "The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is an authoritarian state ruled by a single party, the Communist Party of Vietnam," says the Country Report on Human Rights in Vietnam that Secretary of State John Kerry released in April.
"[P]rogressively, our nation is being ripped loose from its mooring in natural law."
What if a state department of motor vehicles or a public school insisted that only biological females could use the restroom set aside for females and that biological males had to use the restroom set aside for males? Would that be a rational policy? Would it be just? The U.S. Justice Department is now arguing in federal court that such a policy wrongfully discriminates against people whose "gender identity" does not "align" with their biological sex.
The White House this week marked the fifth anniversary of the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden by posting a piece by National Counterterrorism Center Director Nick Rasmussen on the White House website. It was Rasmussen's recollection of being in the White House Situation Room when U.S. forces took bin Laden down. "Five years ago, I watched in the Situation Room along with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and members of the president's national security team to see if U.S. Special Operations Forces could deliver the justice that every American had been waiting for for a decade," Rasmussen wrote.
"Today, Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world." Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said that on the Senate floor March 17 after he explained what had happened six months before to a Syrian man and his 12-year-old son. "This boy was a Christian and standing above him were Islamic State terrorists holding knives," said Cotton. "In the crowd was the boy's father, a Christian minister," he said. "Methodically, the terrorists began cutting off the young boy's fingers. Amidst his screams, they turned to the minister, his father. If he renounced his faith and in their terms 'returned to Islam,' the boy's suffering would stop."
"Lawfully" does not mean "legally." Welcome to what Solicitor General Donald Verrilli told the Supreme Court on Monday is the "immigration world." Or, more accurately, welcome to the new world President Barack Obama — through his solicitor — is asking the Supreme Court to join him in declaring. It is a world that contradicts the law of noncontradiction. It is a place where something can be and not be at the same time. It is a place of illogic — and lawlessness.
