Columnist.
When President Barack Obama appeared at Notre Dame in 2009 to accept an honorary law degree and deliver the university's commencement address, he did not dodge the fact that he favored legalized abortion and that Notre Dame -- and the Catholic Church to which it belongs -- does not. Obama went so far as to suggest that the wholesale state-sanctioned killing of innocent human beings in their mothers' wombs was just one of those things that intelligent, well-educated people in a civilized society ought to be able to agreeably disagree about.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote a story about a family that discovered a diamond as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel sitting beneath a mountain in a remote corner of Montana.
What does President Barack Obama know about the economy and what the government can and cannot do to create jobs? A fair measure is the economic stimulus plan Obama pushed through Congress in his first month in office. Did it work? On Jan. 9, 2009, less than two weeks before Obama's inauguration, Christina Romer, who would chair Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, an adviser to Vice President-elect Joe Biden, published the incoming administration's analysis of the "job impact" they expected from Obama's stimulus.
Does Comedy Central have a right to free speech? Some congressional Democrats believe no association of human beings formed in the manner Comedy Central has been formed ought to have freedom of speech. Accordingly, they have sponsored constitutional amendments to incorporate this principal into our basic law. This is no joke.
President Barack Obama last week visited Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. -- a small city of 15 golf courses -- so he could preach to some of his humble campaign contributors his vision of American frugality. "So if all of you are willing to invest in the future the same way that our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents invested in the future, I'm confident America's best days are still ahead," Obama said. "But we're going to have to work for it. We're going to have to earn it. And that's what this election will be all about."
Years ago, the monks at Saint Catherine's Monastery, which sits at the foot of Mount Sinai, maintained a dormitory for visitors. It was a rustic place, where a noisy, gas-powered generator provided the only electricity. Not long after nightfall, the monks would shut the generator down, converting the Sinai desert into the darkest place on Earth. Yet it was a different sort of darkness that enveloped that monastery and that mountain. When the moon was down, the stars shone as brightly at the horizon as they did at the top of the sky. With no light seeping up from any city, and no clouds drifting by, it seemed as if the atmosphere itself had slipped away. No discernible barrier stood between earth and the infinite space above.
When Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he saw a problem he believed government should solve. Ninety-three percent of the people in the state had health insurance -- including private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid -- but 7 percent did not. Romney wanted to do something about this 7 percent -- some 460,000 people. "Because right now in my state, and probably in your states, as well," Romney explained in a Jan. 26, 2006, presentation at the Heritage Foundation, "part of your insurance premium is paying for the people who don't have insurance, because when they get sick, they do go to the hospital for treatment, they just go well after the disease has become very acute, it's very expensive to treat, the hospital provides care, somebody has to pay for that, and it is built into your hospital costs and into your insurance premiums."
President Barack Obama would like to do some things for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and President-elect Vladimir Putin that he does not want American voters to know about before they decide whether to re-elect him in November. That was the intended-to-be-secret message Obama gave Medvedev in South Korea on Monday. But Obama was caught delivering the message on tape -- and, no matter how the liberal media try to spin it, the moment is destined to become emblematic of Obama as a man and as a president.
You can attend an entire season of eighth-grade basketball games and never see a 14-year-old boy adorned with a tattoo. Turn on the NCCA basketball tournament, now down to the Sweet Sixteen, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a game where at least one player on each team is not to some degree tattooed. Sometime between his early teens, when he was in middle school, and his late teens and early 20s, when he made the college team, the tattooed athlete let some "artist" somewhere permanently embed ink in the only the epidermis he will ever have.
It was January 1991. Half a million U.S. and allied troops were deployed in Saudi Arabia ready to roll north. Backed by a vote just taken -- or about to be taken -- in Congress and a U.N. Security Council resolution, President George H.W. Bush had delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein: Withdraw your forces from Kuwait by Jan. 15 -- or else. The week before the deadline, Saddam met with his air force commander, Muzahim Sa'b Hasan al Masiri, and his son-in-law, Husayn Kamil -- the minister responsible for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Barack Obama is now achieving a vision that environmentalist ideologues could only dream about in the 1970s: He is driving Americans out of their cars. In the three decades since American voters threw Jimmy Carter out of office, there have been only two years when Americans did not drive their cars and trucks more miles than the year before. The first, according to the Federal Highway Administration, was 2008, when George W. Bush was president and the nation was in a deep recession.
The would-be suicide bomber who allegedly tried to attack the U.S. Capitol two weeks ago is living proof the people who run our government are not serious about enforcing our immigration laws. Amine El Khalifi was born in 1983. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had been in the United States illegally for more than a decade when he attended an inopportune meeting in the presence of someone the FBI would later describe as a "confidential human source." This meeting convened in the same town in which the Pentagon is located and could not have been more than several miles from the Capitol itself.
When two schools meet in a basketball game, the winner is indisputable. One team outscores the other. The same is true in certain types of academic competition. When students take standardized national tests, students from some schools outscore students from others. In the most recent round of National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, which are administered by the U.S. Department of Education, the winners were indeed indisputable. Catholic schools thrashed public schools.
In October 2009, I published a column titled, "Can Obama and Congress Order You to Buy Broccoli?" Now I need to ask a follow-up: Can Obama order grocers to give away bread? I wrote the broccoli column after Sen. Orrin Hatch raised serious questions in the Senate Finance Committee about the constitutionality of President Obama's proposal to force people to buy health insurance. "If we have the power simply to order Americans to buy certain products, why did we need a cash-for-clunkers program or the upcoming program providing rebates for purchasing energy appliances?" Hatch said. "We could simply require Americans to buy certain cars, dishwashers or refrigerators."
You can now divide Americans into two groups: Those who believe government rightfully has the power to force people to purchase goods and services they do not want and those who don't. Among the former are two subgroups: Those who believe only state governments have this coercive power and those who believe the federal government has it, too. President Barack Obama is in the latter subgroup. He signed a health care law that forces Americans to purchase health insurance.
A defining moment in Mitt Romney's post-pro-life-conversion political career came in his third year as governor of Massachusetts, when he decided Catholic hospitals would be required under his interpretation of a new state law to give rape victims a drug that can induce abortions. Romney announced this decision -- saying it was the "right thing for hospitals" to do -- just two days after he had taken the opposite position.
Did President Barack Obama's appointment of Richard Cordray to be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without a Senate confirmation vote violate the Constitution? The answer is plainly yes. Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution says the president "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint ... Officers of the United States ... but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone (and) ... The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session."
Four days after police arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to surrender her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, the young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. explained the Christian foundation of the civil rights movement he was about to lead. "I want to say that we are not here advocating violence," King said in a Dec. 5, 1955, speech at the Holt Street Baptist Church. "I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people," King said. "We believe in the Christian religion. We believe in the teachings of Jesus. The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest."
Why did the Democrats run Bob Casey Jr. in Pennsylvania in 2006 against Sen. Rick Santorum? Why did President George W. Bush win a higher percentage of the African-American vote in Ohio in 2004 than he won nationwide? Why did Proposition 8 win in California in 2008, while Sen. John McCain was losing the state in the presidential election? The answer: The middle in American politics is not where the liberal media or establishment Republicans want you to think it is. When Santorum beat liberal Democrat incumbent Harris Wofford in 1994 to win a seat in the U.S. Senate, the Allentown Morning Call ran a story analyzing the outcome. It betrayed a certain befuddlement.
