Columnist.
Anyone who listened carefully to President Barack Obama over the last two years could not avoid hearing the rhetoric of a Marxist class warrior bent on dividing Americans by their perceived economic status. Our president -- who ought to be a leader and inspiration for all Americans -- sought to motivate his supporters with alleged class-based grievances. He talked up class struggle and now has one -- if not exactly the one he envisioned. Tuesday's election was only the first battle in what will surely be the defining political struggle for Americans now alive.
First Lady Michelle Obama has called on Congress to create a $400 million-per-year program to encourage the establishment of supermarkets in places she calls "food deserts." The situation in these "food deserts," as Mrs. Obama describes it, is quite dire indeed. American children are growing fat because their parents cannot get to a supermarket -- to buy fruits and vegetables -- without undergoing the hardship of boarding a bus or riding a taxi. As a consequence, food-desert-dwelling children are forced to eat fast food and junk procured at chain restaurants and convenience stores.
The National Endowment for the Arts distributed $1.4 million in special "stimulus" grants to 37 private nonprofit "arts" organizations located in the city of San Francisco, most of which is represented by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi, however, had no role at all in determining who would win these grants or whether such grants would be distributed in her city.
The establishment media have launched a brutal attack on Carl Paladino, New York's Republican gubernatorial candidate, for this reason: Paladino spoke the truth about homosexual behavior.
American presidents have advanced redistributionist policies before, but none has used Marxist class-war rhetoric as routinely as Barack Obama.
President Barack Obama said on NBC on Monday he would like American children to spend more time in public schools. Here is a better idea: American children should spend no time in public schools.
Suppose a 40-year-old teacher wanted take his class of 30 14-year-old high school freshmen on an 80-mile daylong field trip into the next state to visit a national historical site. Do you think the school would require him to notify the parents of these children he was taking them away for the day?
In the late 1980s, the National Endowment for the Arts seemed to contend honorably for the title. Back then, the NEA funded an exhibit featuring Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ, a photo of a crucifix submerged in urine. The NEA defended the grant on First Amendment grounds -- as if the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and free exercise of religion required the government to extract tax dollars from Christian families so a federal bureaucracy could subsidize blasphemy.
It is ironic that the most boring contest ever played -- the Princeton-Yale game of 1881 -- helped make American football the world's greatest game. The college men who invented American football in the decades after the Civil War approached the game with the same imaginative spirit that drove American capitalism in that era. When their invention did not work, they simply reinvented it -- until they developed something thrilling to players and fans alike.
The only thing stupider than allowing a known foreign terrorist into the United States may be allowing that terrorist to buy guns. Current U.S. law allows this happen. It also allows known terrorists on the no-fly list to buy guns. Perhaps worse still, the U.S. government has approved background checks for watch-listed terrorists to possess explosives in the United States.
The Pledge of Allegiance says America is one nation under God, our national motto says in God we trust, the Declaration of Independence says we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights and since the time of George Washington our presidents have placed their left hands on the Bible as they raise their right hands and swear to defend our Constitution.
The Exhibition Hall at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, which opened at the end of 2008, has enshrined in marble a false interpretation of the Constitution that opens the door to an ever-expanding federal government. Two of six massive marble-faced exhibit cases at the front of the hall are inscribed with tellingly edited passages from the first clause of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Another two are inscribed with tellingly edited passages from the eighth clause of that section. (The final two exhibit cases are inscribed with the First Amendment and an edited passage from the preamble.)
Thomas Jefferson, a deist, and Alexander Hamilton, an Episcopalian, anchored opposite ends of the political spectrum in the early years of the republic but agreed on one basic proposition: The nation's laws must follow God's laws.
When measured by the number of criminal defendants charged with federal crimes by U.S. attorneys, the top five U.S. judicial districts for fiscal 2009 were all on the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, these five judicial districts are the only five on the U.S.-Mexico border -- covering its entire expanse from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean.
Elena Kagan was not only to the left of President Bill Clinton on partial-birth abortion, but a fair reading of a memo she wrote in 1996 indicates she believed Clinton was a little squishy on the issue. The memo, recently released by the Clinton Presidential Library, demonstrates Kagan was intent on preserving an absolute right to kill "pre-viable" babies -- even if it had to be done by sucking out a baby's brains.
