The Clinton and Obama reparations Abraham Carpenter Jr., a farmer in Grady, Ark., has more insight into human nature than the average sociologist. “Anytime you are going to throw money up in the air,” he told The New York Times, “you are going to have people acting crazy.”
Carpenter is quoted in an astonishing 5,000-word Times expose on the federal government’s wildly profligate program to compensate minority and women farmers for alleged discrimination. The government rigg...
Legalization of marijuana paying off The good things that should happen after marijuana is legalized are happening in Colorado. In November, voters in Colorado — and Washington state — legalized pot for recreational use. (Many states allow medical use of marijuana.)
What are the good things?
For starters, money, money, money for the state coffers. As of last week, lawmakers in Denver were still tussling over how heavily to tax marijuana sales. A leading plan centers on excis...
The danger of white America It was cool and rainy Sunday morning when the bomb ripped through the building. At 10:22, a group of children was just heading into the basement to hear a sermon at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. According to a Washington Post account at the time: Dozens of survivors, their faces dripping blood from the glass that flew out of the church’s stained glass windows, staggered around the building in a cloud of white dust raised ...
If you are able, carry your own lead We who work through colds, bad backs and low moods — however liberal we might be — have permission to resent those who could hold a job but don’t, preferring to collect disability checks unto the decades. You see them at the coffee shop, refilling their cups in leisure, or even pumping iron at the gym.
And there are more of them all the time. More than 5 percent of eligible American adults are now receiving disability payments from Social S...
Taking us to the ground for a point The air traffic controller furloughs are the White House tours of the sky.
From time immemorial, a government that doesn’t want to tighten its fiscal belt finds high-profile ways to inconvenience the public to try to turn it against spending cuts. In keeping with this so-called Washington Monument strategy, the White House canceled tours in the immediate aftermath of sequestration. In an escalation, the Federal Aviation Administration has f...
Governor should be a Mr. Fix-It RALEIGH — Now that Pat McCrory has passed the oh-so-important mark of 100 days in office, the political class in Raleigh feels obligated to offer a critique of his administration. The most common one is that Gov. McCrory is playing “small ball.”
That is, the critics say that because the governor didn’t propose a major spending program in his 2013-15 budget plan, he’s not really doing anything of consequence. Even the reform initiatives McCr...
Genes and race: Both are in play During decades of watching both collegiate and professional football, I have seen hundreds of touchdowns scored by black players — but not one extra point kicked by a black player.
Is this because blacks are genetically incapable of kicking a football or because racists won’t let blacks kick a football?
Most of us would consider either of these explanations ridiculous. Yet genes and discrimination were the predominant explanations of blac...
Obama’s nice campaign a failure If there was one thing the left was certain about in 2008 it was this: George W. Bush had catastrophically undermined America’s world reputation with his unprovoked aggression and use of torture. The advent of Obama would reverse the damage. As Andrew Sullivan wrote in 2007, among best assets Obama brought to the “rebranding” of America was “his face.” The election of Obama and his friendly approach to the Muslim world would make the United S...
Our duty is keep the terrorists out The uncle of the accused Boston Marathon bombers got the boys right. They were unable to settle into American life, Ruslan Tsarni told reporters from his home in Maryland, “and thereby just hating everyone who did.” He called the two brothers “losers.” I prefer the term “weaklings.”
As the story thickens with detail, it would seem that the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, now dead, was the ringleader. So let’s concentrate on him.
Tamerla...
An investigation into the obvious .
We are in the midst of the least-suspenseful investigation ever launched by American law enforcement. Hundreds of investigators are seeking leads around the world to discover the motive of the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
This probe is considered a foray into the unknown, and perhaps the unknowable. “Do you have any clearer idea,” the host of “Face the Nation,” Bob Schieffer, asked Massachusetts Gov. Deval Pa...
The fact-free crusade against guns Amid all the heated, emotional advocacy of gun control, have you ever heard even one person present convincing hard evidence that tighter gun control laws have in fact reduced murders?
Think about all the states, communities within states, as well as foreign countries, that have either tight gun control laws or loose or non-existent gun control laws. With so many variations and so many sources of evidence available, surely there would be so...
The plain politics of dead children Obama doesn’t care about dead children. He’s indifferent to the suffering of their parents. There isn’t a single coherent argument on his side of the case. He lies about the issue. It’s pure politics.
That’s the way the dispute would be presented if Obama’s opponents deployed the kind of demagogic language he slips on like comfortable loafers. Sounds harsh, doesn’t it, possibly even racist? Funny how touchy everyone is about the way Obama i...
Empty promises on immigration Everyone presumes that Sen. Chuck Schumer, the media-hungry Democrat from New York, wants to be the next Senate majority leader. His performance in the negotiations over the Gang of Eight immigration plan should bolster his case for an eventual promotion.
Schumer has been at the center of crafting a bill for a mass amnesty of undocumented immigrants that has high-profile, bipartisan support and a chance of becoming law. He had the shrewdnes...
No need for intergenerational war During the big health care fight, the right told older Americans that Obamacare was grabbing money from their Medicare and giving it to young people. Now it tells young workers that Medicare and Social Security are draining their take-home pay to support retirees sitting around the pool.
The story, it would seem, moves from the young taking from the old to the old taking from the young. The one constant here is the motive: to weaken public ...
