Columnist.
When Americans went around the table last Thursday to say what they were grateful for, ObamaCare probably wasn't one of them. Despite the millions spent in PR, the president's disaster of a health care law hasn't made it out of the basement of public opinion in months. The bottom-dwelling numbers continued in last week's polls, with barely 38 percent approval for a law that was supposed to usher in a new era of affordable care.
Who says Christmas only comes once a year? According to Senator James Lankford (R-Okla), taxpayers have been giving all year long. They just didn't know it! And now thanks to his new "Wastebook," Americans are finding out just how generous they were forced to be. Taking the handoff from long-time waste-watcher Senator Tom Coburn, Lankford's new "Federal Fumbles" tackles pricy projects that cheated taxpayers in 2015. As always, this year's top 100 projects will have you laughing at someone's expense — yours!
Planned Parenthood has always been a grim place, but last Friday, its Colorado clinic was the scene of different kind of tragedy. In a senseless shooting, one disgruntled man took the lives of three innocent people and wounded several more in a terrible atrocity that cast a somber shadow over the holiday. Regardless of what the gunman's motives may be (and the media has suggested several), we strongly condemned this violence. All of us at the Family Research Council join with the pro-life movement in praying for the injured officers and families who lost loved ones.
[Today] many Americans will gather with family and friends around a dinner table that will contain a feast that would have been the envy of many kings and princes in ages past. Despite the political, economic, and cultural challenges we face under the failed and hostile policies of the Obama administration, we are still blessed to live in the United States of America.
When the House and Senate fly back from Thanksgiving, they'll get to work carving up something else: the federal budget. Although some of the heavy lifting is out of the way with last month's two-year budget deal, GOP leaders have a big job to do before having themselves a merry little Christmas.
While the rest of the West hunkers down to shore up their security plans, President Obama has been jet-setting to Asia to talk climate change. Well, the world is heating up all right — but it has nothing to do with greenhouse gas. Regardless, the president seems intent on minimizing the crisis that even his own party seems to recognize. On the hot seat over his plan to flood the U.S. with at least 10,000 Syrians (and who knows how many terrorists hiding among the refugees), the White House's latest approach seems to be ignoring ISIS into submission.
There are plenty of GOP presidential candidates competing hard for the social conservative vote. Governor John Kasich (Ohio) hasn't been one of them. Since entering the race, the Buckeye leader has done his best to keep his distance from core values — until recently, when, like the rest of the country, he realized just how influential this half of the primary voting bloc is.
If President Obama thinks a religious test is shameful for refugees, then he has a lot to be ashamed of. His own administration has been discriminating at an amazingly fast clip over the past two months — and against the population posing the smallest threat to American safety: Christians. After its jaw-dropping findings earlier this week, CNSNews also crunched the numbers from the last month and a half and found the same disgraceful pattern of prejudice. Of the Syrians granted asylum in the U.S. since October, *only five* were Christians. The other 346 were Sunni Muslims (which, for those of you keeping score at home, is 98.6%). If that isn't a "religious test," I don't know what is. And the tragedy is this: not only do Christian refugees pose the least risk to American society, but they're also the ones in the direst need of help.
America's universities used to care about critical thinking. Now they're just critical — toward conservative thinking. Last week, we talked about Carol Swain, the African-American professor under fire for suggesting that radical Islam was a threat to security. (A theory the French would now certainly support.) Turns out, she isn't the only one making waves on college campuses.
More than four million Syrian refugees have poured into Europe since the start of the country's war five years ago. But it only took one of them to change Paris forever. Three days after the tragedy in France rocked the world, officials have confirmed that at least one of the terrorists snuck into the country posing as a Syrian refugee. That revelation, combined with fresh fears that ISIS is on the move in the West, is igniting a firestorm in the U.S., where President Obama announced his plans to open America's arms to at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016 (and as many as 100,000 if Democrats get their way).
Language is not a barrier in communicating the international outrage over the multiple terror attacks on innocent civilians in Paris on Friday. As French citizens mourned the deaths of over 130 people, leaders of other nations began rethinking their policies regarding refugees and how to deal with their own citizens who have traveled to fight alongside of ISIS. At least two of the suspected terrorists in Friday's attack had fought and trained with ISIS terrorists in Syria. As this information comes to light, Americans are rightfully asking what steps leaders in Congress are taking to ensure Americans' safety, since the policies of the Obama administration are escalating the risk.
Universities are supposed to be a place to exchange ideas — not silence them. Tell that to Vanderbilt, where a hypersensitive student body is demanding the head of a conservative black professor for daring to challenge their opinion on politics. For Dr. Carol Swain, this institutionalized prejudice is nothing new. As an African-American woman, she's been threatened, protested, and verbally abused for exposing students to other views in one of academia's elite laboratories of radicalism.
What's the worst thing a child could stumble on in school? Drugs? Gangs? Maybe bullies? Try a Bible. According to one Tennessee school district, it seems the biggest threat a student could face is seeing a copy of Scripture up close. To "spare" kids this horrifying experience, Bledsoe County Schools is booting the Gideons from school property because a single student complained.
No more excuses. That's the message from [Tuesday's] Senate news. After weeks of worrying that their budget reconciliation bill would hit a procedural wall, conservatives can finally exhale. According to leadership staff, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough gave the thumbs up to the GOP's plan to defund Planned Parenthood through the expedited budgetary process.
The most important vote on the bill to defund Planned Parenthood isn't a senator's — it's the parliamentarian's! Until now, most Americans had probably never heard of Elizabeth MacDonough, who, for all practical purposes, is the Senate's referee. The first-ever woman to hold the job, parliamentarian MacDonough will have the weight of the House's budget reconciliation bill on her shoulders when the chamber considers it as early as next week.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama met [Monday] in the Oval office for a meeting that onlookers called "cordial." The public side of the meeting seemed uneventful, as Netanyahu reaffirmed his support for a two-state solution with conditions, and Obama said he was committed to expanded military aid to Israel.
The buzz is usually about who's *in* police cars — not what's on them. But that's all changed after the explosion of the national motto bumper stickers cropping up on vehicles across the country. No one knows exactly how it started, but since mid-summer, it's become a national phenomenon. In Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Missouri, Texas, Florida, and other states, policemen are combatting the negativity about law enforcement by proudly sticking "In God We Trust" on their fleets.
The city that launched a hundred missions pulled off one of its biggest Tuesday, when Houston downed anti-freedom Proposition 1. The measure that sparked millions of dollars in ads, rallies, and public outcry was soundly rejected, blindsiding liberals who wrongly believed the country was on board with their social extremism. Now, barely 48 hours after the 61-39% drubbing, the mainstream media is still scratching its head over how conservatives pulled off such a mammoth victory.
Almost a year to the day after FRC's "I Stand Sunday" event, Houston stood all right! With one voice, voters banded together, overpowered the mayor's agenda, and took their city back. Proposition 1, the ordinance that would have punished free speech and forced a radical definition of sexuality on Houston's most innocent, went down in flames [Tuesday] night, shocking the nation with a landslide 62-38% victory.
The House Speaker may have changed, but Planned Parenthood's tactics have not. In an odd sort of congratulatory letter, President Cecile Richards reached out to Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) for the first time since his election. In hopes of veering him off his predecessor's course, Richards spends four pages defending her organization's baby parts-for-profits ring before asking the new speaker to call off his investigators.
