Columnist.
When people travel from Ebola-stricken nations to the United States, there is one certain way to prevent them from transmitting that virus here: Quarantine them long enough to know they are not infected. Then there is a way that puts Americans at risk: Let people travel here from stricken regions. Let them roam freely -- until they show symptoms. Then trust that you can rush them into isolation before they expose others. Which is the prudent -- and compassionate -- policy?
"You just jinxed it, Dad." My youngest son, the world's greatest fan of the Washington Nationals, has lodged this indictment against me on multiple occasions. The scene of the crime is always the same: We are at Nationals Park. It is the third or fourth inning. A Nat's pitcher is mowing down opposing batters. "Strasburg has a no hitter going," I might say. My son will then roll his eyes and throw up his hands. "You just jinxed it, Dad."
There were 107,581,000 people enrolled in government health insurance plans in the United States in 2013, the year before the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) was fully implemented. The Census Bureau published this number last week in its annual report on health insurance. These 107,581,000 pre-Obamacare government-health insurance enrollees equaled 34.3 percent of the nation's population, according to the Census Bureau. Another 41,953,000 -- or 13.4 percent of the population -- were uninsured.
So far, if measured by household income, the 21st century has not been a good one for the United States of America. In its annual report on "Income and Poverty in the United States," released on Tuesday, the Census Bureau described real median household income as stagnating for two years after declining for two. "Median household income was $51,939 in 2013, not statistically different in real terms from the 2012 median of $51,759," said the Census Bureau. "This is the second consecutive year that the annual change was not statistically significant, following two consecutive years of annual declines in median household income."
In her memoir, "Hard Choices," former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton included a chapter on the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012. But she failed to specifically explain why Amb. Chris Stevens was there that day. "U.S. ambassadors are not required to consult or seek approval from Washington, when traveling within their countries, and rarely do," she wrote. "Like all chiefs of mission, Chris made decisions about his movements based on the security assessments of his team on the ground, as well as his own judgment," she said. "After all, no one had more knowledge or experience in Libya than he did. He was well aware of the lawlessness in Benghazi, including a series of incidents earlier in the year against Western interests. Yet he understood Benghazi's strategic importance in Libya and decided that the value of a visit outweighed the risks."
If you count a generation as spanning 20 years, then approximately 36 percent of the American generation born from 1993 through 2012 -- which has begun turning 21 this year and will continue turning 21 through 2033--were born to unmarried mothers. That does not count the 40.6 percent of babies born in 2013 who were also born to unmarried mothers. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 40 percent of the babies born in each of the last six years -- 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 -- were born to unmarried mothers.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Department of Transportation, published last week an "advanced notice of proposed rulemaking" on "vehicle-to-vehicle communications." What NHTSA is proposing could begin a transformation in the American transportation system that makes our lives better and freer -- or gives government more power over where we go and when. In announcing its proposed rulemaking, NHTSA is stressing its intention to protect the "privacy" of American drivers.
109,631,000 Americans lived in households that received benefits from one or more federally funded "means-tested programs" -- also known as welfare -- as of the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau has not yet reported how many were on welfare in 2013 or the first two quarters of 2014. But the 109,631,000 living in households taking federal welfare benefits as of the end of 2012, according to the Census Bureau, equaled 35.4 percent of all 309,467,000 people living in the United States at that time.
On the last day of July, with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives serving as co-pilot, President Barack Obama flew the United States past a dubious fiscal landmark on our way toward what increasingly looks like a crash landing. That day, the federal debt hit $17,687,136,723,410.59 -- an increase of roughly $7 trillion since Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009. That $17,687,136,723,410.59 in debt works out to approximately $171,575 for each of the 103,087,000 full-time year-round workers the Census Bureau says were in the United States as of 2012.
In his opinion declaring Virginia's marriage law unconstitutional, Judge Henry Floyd of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit summarized what he perceived to be the basic disagreement between the opponents and proponents of the law. "The opponents and proponents agree that marriage is a fundamental right," the judge wrote. "They strongly disagree, however, regarding whether that right encompasses the right to same-sex marriage. The opponents argue that the fundamental right to marry belongs to the individual, who enjoys the right to marry the person of his or her choice. By contrast, the proponents point out that, traditionally, states have sanctioned only man-woman marriages. They contend that, in light of this history, the right to marry does not include a right to same-sex marriage."
The movement demanding legal recognition for same-sex marriage has made a radical and profoundly uncharitable assumption. It is this: Adult homosexuals need and have a greater right to same-sex marriage than babies have to their mothers. You cannot simultaneously claim babies have a right to their mothers and two men have a right to marry each other. Nor, of course, can you simultaneously claim babies have right to their fathers and two women have a right to marry each other.
The Supreme Court may soon need to decide whether the federal government can be considered a "state" in our federal republic in the same sense that Iowa, Wyoming and Wisconsin are states. On the face of it, this question may seem absurd. In fact, given any level of reflection, it is absurd. The federal government is not one of the states. But this absurd question was at the heart of Halbig v. Burwell, decided this week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and it could soon become a defining issue in American life.
Sam, the wealthiest man in his neighborhood, lives in a big beautiful house with a massive backyard punctuated by a large, deep swimming pool. While Sam is personally not very fond of children -- he supports abortion on demand and believes the government should force all employers to offer female workers free sterilizations -- he nonetheless lives in a neighborhood that teems with little ones. The children are particularly attracted to Sam's beautiful pool -- and, on those rare occasions when Sam is actually in his backyard, he frequently finds himself shooing these children away.
Shortly before Richard Nixon was going to formally announce that he would be running again for president in 1968, Pat Buchanan and Rose Mary Woods, two of his closest aides, presented him with an idea. "Given the multiple crises confronting the nation -- race conflict, soaring crime, inflation, the war in Vietnam, the mounting Soviet missile threat -- and the difficulty of dealing with them all at once," Buchanan writes in his new book "The Greatest Comeback," "we suggested that Nixon in a single declaration destroy the image of him as a consummate politician and tell the nation 'that the next president should be a one-term president.'" Nixon dismissed the idea of term-limiting himself. He did not want, as Buchanan relates it, to be "a lame duck from his inaugural."
Looked at from a distance, it may seem as if the Supreme Court struck a mighty blow in defense of religious liberty in the case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which it decided this week. Yes, the court ruled that a law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act could apply to "closely held" corporations, and under its terms the federal government could not force the Christian family that owns Hobby Lobby to provide insurance coverage for certain drugs and devices that violate the family's religious beliefs. But looked at more closely, the case shows how profoundly the Supreme Court has distorted our Constitution and how tenuous is our current hold on the most fundamental of all freedoms -- the freedom of conscience.
On Jan. 12, 1991, with 370,000 U.S. troops already deployed near Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, and a U.N. deadline for Saddam Hussein to withdraw from that country only three days away, the U.S. Congress voted on whether to authorize President George H.W. Bush to use force to reverse Iraq's annexation of its neighbor. The Senate voted 52 to 47 for war -- with Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa among those voting no and Democratic Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee among those voting yes. The House voted 250 to 183 for war -- with three Republicans voting no and 86 Democrats voting yes.
A dozen years ago, Congress authorized President George W. Bush to invade Iraq to prevent the regime of then-dictator Saddam Hussein from posing a threat to this country with weapons of mass destruction we later discovered he did not have. In his second inaugural address in 2005, Bush described the broader utopian vision motivating his foreign policy. "So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," Bush said.
As of this writing, Meriam Ibrahim sits shackled in the cell in the Omdurman Federal Women's Prison in Sudan that she shares with her two babies, Martin and Maya. This is the family of an American citizen -- being persecuted for their Christian faith by a foreign government. How did they end up in a Sudanese prison? Meriam's husband is Daniel Wani, a naturalized U.S. citizen, who, according to the Manchester Union Leader, moved from Sudan to New Hampshire in 1998. He was naturalized in 2005. In December 2011, according to the Daily Mail, he and Meriam were married in a Christian church in Sudan.
Five years ago, President Barack Obama traveled to Egypt -- then still governed by the pro-American, secularist authoritarian Hosni Mubarak -- to explain how he believed this Earth could at last become a paradise. "The people of the world can live together in peace," Obama said at Cairo University. "We know that is God's vision. Now that must be our work here on Earth." In Obama's view -- although he did point to the threat of terrorist groups such as al-Qaida -- the primary source of recent historical tensions between the West and the Islamic world has been the colonialism and cultural imperialism of the West.
Two Senate committees held hearings this month on the nomination of Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell to succeed Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services, the federal agency most responsible for overseeing implementation of Obamacare. In these two hearings, according to transcripts published by CQ Transcriptions, the senators and the nominee spoke approximately 49,000 words. Not one of these words directly addressed the contraception-sterilization-abortion-inducing drug regulation that Sebelius issued under Obamacare and that is now the target of more than 90 lawsuits. The closest anyone came was Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, who told Burwell he was going to ask her a question in writing in "regard to abortion coverage transparency for insurance plans offered in the federal exchanges."
