If the government had force-fed al Qaeda operatives bacon sandwiches, everyone would get the injustice. But forcing Catholic institutions to pay for the birth control, contraceptives, and abortifacients of their employees somehow doesn't set of all sorts of alarms. The Catholic bishops promulgated an objection, and call to civil disobedience, toward the Obama administration's bureaucratic fiat that private institutions pay for birth control. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag on how the bishops would have stronger standing if they hadn't for so long advocated a phony "right" to health care at other people's expense.

The Fuehrer supposedly took the sterilization debate with him to the grave. A Massachusetts judge, who earlier this month ordered that a bipolar and schizophrenic woman be "coaxed, bribed, or even enticed...by ruse" to abort her pregnancy and undergo sterilization, proves this isn't so. Though citizens of Massachusetts never approved of state sterilization, its elites served as the most fervent evangelists for eugenics--particularly for the "feeble minded." Read my article @ the American Spectator that wonders if "our bodies, our choice" still applies when we are not in our right minds?

What comes up must come down. The Newt Gingrich who emerged triumphant in South Carolina will likely depart Florida a loser tomorrow. Gingrich enthusiast Sarah Palin blames his decline on the "politics of personal destruction." If this is so, it is fitting. A politician who made his career attempting to collect the scalps of the likes of Gerry Studds and Jim Wright now is the victim of the "politics by other means" that he so masterfully practiced. Read my column @ Human Events on how Gingrich supporters have confused their candidate's penchant for attacking scandal-embroiled Democrats for conservatism.

President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address that he wants an America where everyone gets "a fair shot" and "everyone does their fair share." We all agree that fair is, well, fair. We all disagree on what's fair. But the president imagines himself as the detached arbiter of economic justice. His fair is fairer than fair. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag on how "fairness" is one of those words that tells us more about the speaker than about what is spoken.

Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina presidential primary. So did Mark Sanford, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, and any other disgraced pol jonesing for a comeback. Who says cheaters never win? A vote for the former House Speaker is a vote for "defining deviancy down," shifting the parameters of acceptable behavior. Ditching one wife after a cancer diagnosis, and another one suffering from multiple sclerosis, Newt isn't your garden-variety family values candidate. Read my column @ Human Events on how giving Newt forgiveness shouldn't require giving him votes.

Senator Scott Brown officially kicked off his campaign for reelection last night. Despite the senator from Massachusetts' iconic pick-up truck and barn coat, Brown is not the one running as a populist in this race. Elizabeth Warren, salt of the earth of Harvard Yard, has cast herself as a woman of the people. But as I write @ FrontPageMag, a millionaire Ivy League law professor fresh from the DC bureaucracy claiming the mantle of "populism" is a tough one to carry off.

Mercedes Benz expropriated Che Guevara iconography last week to sell cars at a trade show in Las Vegas. What happened in Vegas didn't stay in Vegas. Infuriated Cubans demanded an apology. Read my column @ Human Events that wonders if the people demanding an apology should have been Che Guevara's cultists appalled with their Communist hero shilling cars for capitalist Mercedes Benz.

A North Carolina task force endorsed $50,000 reparations for victims of its 20th century eugenics program. Progressives once imagined eugenics as cutting-edge science, the wave of the future even. Now everybody realizes how backward it really was. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag on how the liberal press that now inveighs against the eugenics past once played a central role in making that past.

As Americans preferred digital to physical music in 2011, I said goodbye to CDs and hello to an iPod. When wax gave way to magnetic tape, and later when magnetic tape yielded to polycarbonate plastic, the album reigned supreme. For myriad reasons, the album can't survive the digitized tomorrow. Read my article @ the American Spectator on how the iPod triumph of the song over the album brings us back to the future.

The worst bullies are those who imagine themselves as bullied. Professional homosexual Dan Savage fits that mold. Boasting of attempting to infect 2000 presidential candidate Gary Bauer with the flu, and orchestrating an internet campaign to transform Rick Santorum's last name into a word for something disgusting, the sex-advice columnist is a hate-filled crusader against hate. Read my column @ Human Events on knowing Rick Santorum by his enemies.

Eric Hoffer is often dubbed a Jewish intellectual. He was neither. But he did take up his pen in defense of Israel when it was under attack. "Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world," he wrote, for instance, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag on Eric Hoffer & Israel.

Ray Bradbury was a Depression-era, four-eyed, zit-faced, bully bull's-eye gliding through Los Angeles on steel-wheeled rollerskates forcefully demanding autographs from Hollywood's most glamorous stars. Nobody told the uncouth teenaged transplant from the Midwest that he was staring at his opposites when he cornered Marlene Dietrich, Clark Gable, and Judy Garland. Ray Bradbury was once a nerd. Now he rebels against nerds--tech-obsessed geeks to be more precise. Read my piece @ the American Conservative on how this "Luddite from outerspace" (in the words of TAC's editors) transformed from pulp scribbler to one of America's great short-story writers, from ultimate outsider to in with the "in" crowd.

Ron Paul has a way of bringing out the liberal in conservatives. They speak liberal--"racist," "extremist," "crazy"--when talking about the Texas Congressman. It's because Ron Paul makes so many conservatives look like liberals in comparison that they talk like liberals. The exposed are insecure. Attitudinal pressure passes for intellectual persuasion among the feverishly anti-Ron Paul pundits. Read my column @ Human Events on how Ron Paul makes some conservatives uncomfortable, particularly the ones uncomfortable with conservatism.

A charge that you had fathered Occupy Wall Street would send you rushing to a paternity test for a Maury Povich-style exculpation. Strangely, as protesters head for park exits, academics crowd in to claim credit. Read my article @ FrontPageMag on the conceit of intellectuals in maintaining that their thoughts are the father to another's deeds. In this case, they believe their obscure words motivated people who chant, play bongos, and wear sandwich boards but don't read.

Protestors in the Middle East demonstrated against the power and control of their governments. Protestors in the United States demonstrated to make their government more powerful and controlling. Yet Time magazine's "year of the protestor" imagines the activists fighting against socialist big-governments around the Middle East as the same as the socialist activists fighting for big government in the United States. Read my column @ Human Events on how it may be the year of the protestor in Tahrir Square, but in Zuccotti Park it is the year of the fauxtestor.

"If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth," Vaclav Havel wrote. "This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else." For writing such words, Havel ended up in a jail cell. From the very same Prague jail cell, I read those words, which had the power to transform a Communist secret police dungeon into a hostel catering to tourists. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag on how a vibrant Prague stands as one of many legacies of one of the towering figures of the twentieth century.

Our economy suffers from experts without experience. Milton Friedman, one of the twentieth century's great economists, knew the economy in part because he had worked in it. He scooped ice cream in his parents parlor and sold fireworks at a road stand. He waited tables for a meal during the Depression and hatched door-to-door schemes as a scholarship student at Rutgers. Read my column @ Human Events on how economists who haven't worked in the economy tout theories that don't work.

Saul Alinsky never joined the Communist Party during the Red Decade and never grew his hair during the sixties. Despite going against the leftist grain during two of the Left's big decades of the 20th Century, man-of-action Saul Alinsky has strangely emerged in the 21st Century as the Left's idea man. Read my article at FrontPageMag on how a amoral community organizer influenced by the mob and union thugs became an influence on our president, secretary of state, and a whole generation of ends-justify-the-means activists and politicians.

From Boston to Los Angeles, Occupy encampments are empty. Stressed-out cities have evicted their tenting tenants. The occupiers sought to change America. They should have started with changing their underwear. The stink, narcotics use, and violence within the camps displayed the America that the Occupy activists wished to bring about. Read my column @ Human Events on the end of the occupation.

Thirty years ago today, Mumia Abu-Jamal shot Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner in the back and then shot the wounded cop in the face. Earlier this week, Philadelphia's district attorney gave the former Black Panther an anniversary present by announcing he would not seek to reinstate his death sentence. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag, which notes that while the Mumiacs have moved on to other injustices Mumia has remained in the same place.

Two years ago, President Obama made headlines by meeting with Cambridge cop James Crowley in the Rose Garden. The "beer summit" seemed stiff, unnatural, and cold. Forty-four years ago, President Johnson made headlines by meeting with San Francisco longshoreman Eric Hoffer on the South Lawn. The pair hit it off like brothers from different mothers. The ability of the Democratic presidents to socialize with the common man approximates their party's appeal to the working class. So news of the Obama campaign's decision to bypass competing for the votes of blue-collar whites seems to merely affirm the direction the Democrats have taken in recent decades. Read my column @ Human Events on how the phrase "blue-collar Democrat" has gone from almost a redundancy to almost an oxymoron.

One might think that the tabloidish revelations of Barney Frank's abuse of office in helping his hooker-housemate Stephen Gobie would have humbled the Massachusetts lawmaker. It emboldened him, and the cantankerous congressman found himself immersed in more scandals with more boyfriends. Rather than own up Barney lashed out. More than thirty years after his election to Congress, Barney Frank has decided to call it quits. His constituents should have quit him years ago. Read my piece @ City Journal on how a fawning constituency only fuels a narcisisstic politician.

Last week, thousands of Americans camped out in protest of corporate greed. Occupy Wall Street? Not quite. Try Occupy Best Buy. Occupy Wal-Mart. Occupy Nordstrom's. Read my column @ Human Events on why this holiday weekend's nationwide demonstrations against high prices succeeded in its objectives whereas another tent-friendly movement hasn't even succeeded in articulating its objectives.

Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy forty-eight-years ago today. But to hear Frank Rich tell it in the New York Times Magazine, the real culprits--right-wingers--got away scot-free. The scribe imagining his political enemies behind the assassination tells us much about his obsessions but nothing about the actual event. Read my article @ FrontPageMag on how for some the pull of ideology is actually greater than the pull of reality.

Haters gonna hate. After winning four of five starts, Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow has turned around a franchise. He hasn't won over his critics. Tebow's story of survival in the womb, his home-schooled background, and his public religiousity rubs some the wrong way. But what's really at work here is that good people make bad people uncomfortable. Read my column @ Human Events on how player hating doesn't stop at the playing field's sidelines.

Jim Jones killed more African Americans than the Ku Klux Klan. Julia Scheeres, in her book, "A Thousand Lives," juxtaposes the preacher with Rosa Parks and the students who held a lunch-counter sit-in at the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's. Thirty-three years ago today, the people of Peoples Temple committed "revolutionary suicide" by drinking fruit-flavored poison. On November 18, 2011, some people are still drinking the Peoples Temple's Kool-Aid. Read my book review @ the American Conservative of Julia Scheeres' "A Thousand Lives" on the anniversary of America's worst pre-9/11 loss of civilian life.

Students collected care packages for deployed troops at Suffolk University. A law professor then announced how little he cared for care packages. "I think it is shameful that it is perceived as legitimate to solicit in an academic institution for support for men and women who have gone overseas to kill other human beings," Michael Avery wrote in a mass email. He explained that "sympathy" for such people is "not particularly rational." Read my article @ FrontPageMag.

The Colorado affiliate of the American Association of University Professors advises its members to take a job at the University of Colorado only as a "last resort." The warning comes in part in the wake of the school's dismissal of Phil Mitchell, an adjunct history professor who is also an evangelical Christian and political conservative. Read my article @ FrontPageMag that raises issues not only of political correctness but also the rights of, and wrongs inflicted upon, overused campus adjuncts.

Sterilization has a Nazi Germany ring to it. Yet progressives in the United States beat socialists in the Third Reich to the punch. Read my column @ Human Events on how one U.S. state debates the proper way to make amends for its eugenics policy.

Don't call him the Teflon don. Call him the Teflon godfather. Anonymous women accused former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain of sexual harassment. Then his popularity went up. Read my column @ Human Events on how the polls say less about presidential candidate Herman Cain than they do the public's skepticism of sexual harassment claims--and the media reporting them.

Occupy Wall Street shares more in common with the wealthiest one percent they inveigh against than the bottom one percent that they claim to be fighting for. Don't trust the ubiquitous iPhones or REI ski jackets? Then check out their arrest records, which reveal affluent homes and apartments. Read my article @ FrontPageMag details how movements speaking for the poor have always been led by the rich.

Barack Obama camaigns against a do-nothing Congress. But what ails America is a do-everything president. From running an automobile company to taxing health care to make it more affordable, President Obama efforts to make things better have only made things worse. Read my column @ Human Events on how do-everything presidents make the public long for do-nothing politicians.

Muslim fundamentalists won Tunisia's weekend elections, lift the ban on polygamy in Libya, and invade the Israeli embassy in Egypt. The Arab Spring has become an Islamist Winter. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag on how the reality of Middle Eastern democracy doesn't resemble the dreams of its Western cheerleaders.

One demonstrator was arrested for aggressively smelling a woman's feet and attempting to pass off his urine as an energy drink. Another scaled a public sculpture and demanded the police below set-aside fifteen percent of jobs for bisexuals. Yet, these outliers aren't what makes the protests so crazy. Read my column @ Human Events on how the optionally homeless clashing with the chronically homeless expose the ideas underlying the protests as delusions making a chaos out of the OWS camps.

Bassist Duff McKagan established his credentials for Guns N' Roses by dropping acid in sixth grade, contracting gonorrhea in ninth grade, and dropping out long before graduation. Then he went ahead and messed up his autobiography by going sober, raising a family, and returning to his education. Read my review of Duff McKagan's "It's So Easy" @ the American Spectator on how bad living makes a good book.

Washington, DC replacing Silicon Valley as the wealtiest area of the country speaks volumes. There is a historic shift underway from market entrepreneurs toward political entrepreneurs. Read my article @ FrontPageMag on why Occupy Wall Street's call for more power in Washington will just make the rich get richer.

This is socialism's worst year since the Berlin Wall fell. From Tunis to Damascus, people around the Mediterranean are partying like it is 1989. Chaos in Greece, an uprising in Syria, and revolutions in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt have targeted socialist governments. Read my column @ Human Events on how we call the rulers of the basketcase and oppressive nations surrounding the Mediterranean all sorts of names, but none dare call them socialists.

How could Greece's leaders have known their country would become a basketcase? By paying attention in school. Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou attended foreign private schools at a time when his homeland barred private universities and guaranteed free educations. If Papandreou paid elsewhere for what socialism offered for free at home, why did he think what failed for him would work for others? Read my article @ FrontPageMag on why the lessons imparted by state-run education aren't the ones intended.

Starship's "We Built This City" has been named the worst of the worst--again. This time, Rolling Stone readers have deemed the #1 hit from 1985 the worst song of the '80s. It's just a song. Why the visceral hatred? Is it really more horrible than Ohio Express's "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy" or Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry"? There is something more off-putting at work here than over-commercialized music. "We Built This City" is the painful mirror into the baby boomer soul. Read my piece @ the American Spectator on how Starship's schlocky hit reminded listeners that it wasn't just the hippie-chick icon singing that had sold out, but a generation of conformist rebels.

I enjoyed watching Ken Burns' new "Prohibition" documentary on PBS last week. Burns is a fine storyteller and useful fount of useless information (such as the derivation of the terms "bootlegger" and "teetotaler"). What entertained me most about "Prohibition" was watching progressives label earlier progressives reactionaries. Read my column @ Human Events on prohibition's progressive origins.

When the California Federation of Teachers demanded the release of convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal earlier this year, I thought of Daniel DeLeon. Reorienting organized labor for projects ancillary to the interests of workers was the life's work of the leader of America's Socialist Labor Party. Read my article @ FrontPageMag on how the fingerprints of this fanatic's fanatic are all over today's labor movement--to the detriment of actual laborers.

Democrats wonder how African American businessman Herman Cain could seek the presidential nomination of the Republican Party. But Jefferson Davis, Woodrow Wilson, and Bull Connor wonder how African Americans could pledge allegiance to their party? Read my article @ FrontPageMag on how the party of Jim Crow, the KKK, and "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" wants us to forget all that and blame their political adversaries.

A study by researchers at the University of Virginia concludes that cognitive function in children after watching nine minutes of SpongeBob SquarePants suffers vis-a-vis cognitive function in children who have watched that dreadful whiner Caillou. I don't disagree with the study's conclusions; I disagree with the study. Determining what cartoon makes you smart is like asking what grape soda makes you fit. Read my article @ the American Spectator that posits that even someone who lives in a pineapple under the sea wouldn't fall for such academic nonsense.

Senator Dick Durbin didn't intend for his amendment to last year's financial reform legislation to result in new debit-card fees. But it did. The Affordable Care Act, as its name suggests, intended to make care more affordable. It did the opposite. Family premiums are up 10 percent this year. Read my column @ Human Events on how political control freaks can't control the consequences of their meddling.

Greece is DTF--down to freeload. After Europe bailed it out to avoid default, Greece seems poised to bail on Europe--and its creditors. Socialism happens. Read my column @ Human Events on the resemblances between an incontinent, irresponsible, and lazy reality television star and a basketcase nation betwixt the Aegean and Ionian Seas.

Like Greece, the U.S. has seen its debt eclipse its gross domestic product. Like Greece, the United States has seen its credit downgraded. Like Greece, the United States has seen its president vaguely talk budget cuts, but offer concrete tax hikes. And like Greece, the United States has de facto defaulted: the former by depending upon others to service its debts; the latter, by devaluing its money through currency creation to purchase its own debt. Earlier this week the Greek prime minister turned back from a planned trip to the United States. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag that asks: when will the United States turn back from its trip to Greece?

The robber barons are back. The liberals who warned us against the crony capitalists in history books are the crony capitalists in front of us. Solyndra, declaring bankruptcy after taking more than a half-billion in tax dollars, demonstrates the degree to which saying "green jobs" acts to obscure the designs of robber barons. As I write in my column @ Human Events, the green in "green jobs" always referred to cash, not the environment.

Unearthed tapes of Jacqueline Kennedy reveal a rift between the first families of sixties liberalism. The former First Lady labelled Martin Luther King as a "terrible sex pest," among other unflattering descriptives. But the media isn't exploring Jackie O's accusations, or blaming her for slandering an iconic figure. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag to see how, once again, J. Edgar Hoover made them do it.

Beware of politicians bearing programs: they usually have been programmed. The stimulus failed. Rather than readjust, the president has repeated. His jobs plan is a scaled down stimulus sequel. Who hasn't heard "stupid" defined as doing the same thing but expecting a different result? Read my column @ Human Events on a programmed president who just can't seem to think outside of the teleprompter.

UPDATE: RealClearPolitics featured this article on Tuesday, September 13. It is currently their "most read" piece of the last 24 hours.

It is odd, if not invalidating, that conspiracy theories always place one's political enemies, but never one's allies, behind nefarious deeds. The devil figure for the Truthers generally turns out to be George W. Bush; for the Birthers, his successor. Read my review in the American Conservative of Jonathan Kay's Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Conspiracist Underground, a book that explains that "all successful conspiracy theories" have been "a lie that people wanted to hear."

Martin Luther King died supporting a strike of Memphis garbagemen. He is immortalized in granite by unpaid, nonunion, foreign labor. What's wrong with this picture? A lot more than that, as I write in my column @ Human Events. From rewriting Martin Luther King's words to employing slave labor to construct the memorial, the overseers of the new DC shrine to the civil rights leader miss the point.

Organized labor isn't what it used to be. Less than twelve percent of the workforce belongs to a union. But this hasn't stopped union leaders from talking to the president as if they were his boss, too. They suffer from a political hallucination that imagines their power as it was sixty years ago. Their calls for infrastructure "investments," a federal jobs program, and other boondoggles makes sense once one realizes that Washington's spending spree that has killed private sector jobs has been a boon for unions--whose dues payers are mostly government employees now. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag on how Big Labor needs Big Government now more than ever.

From Hawaii Five-O in primetime to Arthur on the silver screen, everything new is old again. "Instead of being the threshold to the future, the first ten years of the twenty-first century turned out to be the 'Re' Decade," Simon Reynolds writes in his new book, as in "revivals," "reissues," and "remakes." Read my review @ the American Spectator of Reynolds' Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. We're lamer than you think.

The chairman has spoken. At the Federal Reserve meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on Friday, Ben Bernanke stated that despite fiscal and monetary stimulus, the economy remains in the doldrums. Does he ever consider that perhaps continually pumping money into a stagnant economy has perpetuated the crisis? Read my column @ Human Events on how the printing press forever tempts politicians to spend money that they don't have and unnaturally jumpstart the economy.

A record number of freshmen will descend upon campuses in the coming days. Just in time for the first day of classes, but too late for the application process, is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's Choosing the Right College. But as I write @ FrontPageMag, choosing the right college for many of the 3.5-million-plus freshmen would have meant choosing no college at all.

The bluest town in the bluest state is on Martha's Vineyard. Think it's a coincidence that Barack Obama vacations there? The president, like everybody else in America, wants insulation from the consequences of his policies. An island of wealthy liberals gives him that. Read my column @ Human Events about how the president's trip to Martha's Vineyard is a vacation from reality.

Barack Obama isn't so good at creating jobs. But government bureaus, agencies, and offices? At this, he is unmatched. Read my article @ FrontPageMag on the Obama administration's unintentionally ironic idea that a new government department will alleviate the jobs crisis. When a president bandies around a cause of the problem as a potential solution, you know you are in serious trouble.

The folkways of tribe Rolling Stone include suspicion of contacts beyond the village, the pack constantly knocking down the alpha male, and a survival-of-the-fittest callousness that leaves a trail of broken band mates, producers, girlfriends, fans, and children. The autobiography of the band's celebrated guitarist reads as a justification for appalling conduct toward other human beings. That's rock 'n' roll, we are supposed to think, and he is a Glimmer Twin. But, as we learn in my review of Keith Richards' Life @ the American Conservative, consequences hit rock stars, too.

The stimulus proved to be a sedative. That hasn't stopped Washington's spending junkies from calling for more, more, more. Read my column @ Human Events that explores the similarities between drug addiction and government addiction.

Words are a lot like money. When misused, they lose their value. Read my article @ FrontPageMag on how before the president damaged America's credit, he damaged his credibility with Americans.

Standard and Poor's downgraded the federal government's credit rating three days after the president signed legislation raising the debt limit. Isn't that what the president warned us would happen if we didn't lift the debt ceiling? From the stock market losing ten percent of its value in two weeks to the debt reaching parity with economic output, Barack Obama, as I write in my column @ Human Events, is the catalyst of so much bad news these days.

The president labeled the debt-ceiling compromise "an agreement that will reduce the deficit and avoid default." It will do neither. It enables the government to borrow more atop its massive debt. And as I write @ FrontPageMag, it's not a phantom default but more borrowing that jeopardizes America's AAA-rating, a downgrade of which will make the cost of doing business-as-usual more costly.

Thirty years ago today, MTV was born. Its first offering, The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," proved especially prophetic. It's not just that the scenic now trumps the sonic at the music-less Music Television. But the lip-synching, synthetic instruments, and plastic clothes of MTV's first video suggested an artificial future. Read my piece @ the American Spectator on how a current repository of reality television has always kept it fake.

The New York Times labels Anders Breivik "Christian," fighting words in the media lexicon. One would have thought that "murderer" would have served as a sufficient epithet. But that just accurately describes the Norwegian terrorist. It doesn't make a political point. Read my column @ Human Events on how Anders Breivik isn't the first mass murderer converted to Christianity by the Church of the Holy Left.

The NCAA has ordered the University of North Dakota to change its nickname. The state legislature has made it illegal to do so. The University of North Dakota is between a rock and a hard place. Read my article @ FrontPageMag that wonders why Fighting Sioux but not Fighting Irish.

Impoverished times offer valuable lessons. Unfortunately, the Great Recession isn't about what we've learned. It’s about what we've unlearned. Read my column @ Human Events on how the economic downturn has made the staid establishment sound like a nuthouse.

Elizabeth Warren's rabid supporters should have learned their lesson. After demanding that the Senate confirm their hero, they were shellshocked to discover that the president wouldn't even nominate her to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Read my piece @ the American Spectator on how Warren's booster's now openly dream of her presidency after she performs the perfunctory task of unseating Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in Greece on Sunday. America arrives in a few years. The United States' debt-to-GDP ratio is where Greece's was just seven years ago. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag on how recent Greek history, and ancient Greek history, offers profound lessons for the United States.

Kennedys used to battle with the likes of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. Now that the family no longer has an officeholder in Washington, they fight each other. Two iconic family landmarks--the Cape Cod compound and the John F. Kennedy Library--serve as the catalysts for the internecine squabbles. Read my article @ the American Spectator for the back story.

Washington is hooked on spending. Like other addicts, politicians tell lies to get their fix. Jonesing for more money, they insist that raising the debt limit is the best way to limit America's debt. What the debt debate needs is an injection of honesty, not more debt. In that spirit, I outline in my column @ Human Events five falsehoods of the debt debate.

If the 9.2 unemployment rate or the dubious record of deficits for every month of the Obama presidency isn't persuasive of the administration's ineptitude, then Monday's presidential press conference provided damning proof of it. Therein, the president mouthed several economic cliches that underscore that he lacks a fundamental understanding of how markets work. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag (registration may be required) exposing three myths mouthed by the president during his press conference yesterday.

The Golden State has forbidden derogatory references to homosexuality in its textbooks and mandated classroom instruction on the "role and contributions" of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders. Read my column @ Human Events on how the thought police's greatest accomplishment is getting people to believe that censorship is really tolerance.

The four surviving top leaders of the Khmer Rouge stand trial in Cambodia for genocide, crimes against humanity, murder, and other offenses. It should have been the trial of the century--the 20th century. As I write @ FrontPageMag, the bizarre decades-too-late court case conducted by the UN and Cambodia is in a sick sense a fitting coda for the most bizarre period in human history.

Professors at Harvard University surmise in a study that the Fourth of July is a Republican holiday. Read my column @ Human Events that posits that while Independence Day is a holiday for all Americans, the pair of Ivy League academics squeamish about a celebration of independence, freedom, and patriotism tell us much about the misplaced allegiances of some of our fellow countrymen.

Al Gore is global warming's rock star. So it's appropriate that the former vice president took to the pages of Rolling Stone to resuscitate his dying issue. Read my article @ FrontPageMag (be sure to click to page 2) on how a crusade draped in science uses base scare tactics to persuade.

Whitey Bulger's miraculous streak of staying ahead of his pursuers wasn't an act of God. It was an act of government. With bribed law enforcement, a speak truth suck-up-to-power press, and his brother effectively running the state government, the Boston mobster executed a one-man crime wave with impunity for decades. As I write in my column @ Human Events, one-party government, in Libya and in Massachusetts, kills.

Euphemisms have consequences. Months after terming the bombing of Libya "kinetic military action," the Obama administration rationalizes its disregard of the War Powers Act by claiming that its war in Libya isn't a war at all. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag on how the abuse of language is just one of many peculiarities in the Obama administration's report to Congress on Operation Unified Protector.

Six weeks ago, partisan pundits dubbed the president "invincible" in his quest for a second term. Now, he looks quite beatable. Read my column @ Human Events on the top 10 reasons Obama will lose next November.

The Constitution, the more timid War Powers Act, and the even more timid John Boehner-sponsored resolution last Friday remind the president that the representatives of the people and the states, not one man, retains the power to declare war. Yet, as I write in my article @ FrontPageMag, President Obama continues his unauthorized war in Libya 80 days after he, and not Congress, launched it.

Congressman Anthony Weiner used to like cameras. Former Senator John Edwards once adored courtrooms. Now they dread them. Read my column @ Human Events about the seedy rise and ironic fall of two embodiments of the very worst--celebrity worship and litigiousness run amok--that American culture has to offer.

Every picture tells a thousand words. But Anthony Weiner's graphic graphic Tweeted to the Twitterverse last Friday night befits the abbreviated world of 140 characters or less. Weiner says the excited male in underwear wasn't him. We don't know who occupied those gray briefs. We do know that we can categorically rule out Peter North. Read my article @ FrontPageMag (make sure to click to part 2) on how every exhibitionist's dream of a voyeur comes true as a nightmare.

Barney Frank has boy troubles--again. A New York Times reporter revealed that the Massachusetts lawmaker had lobbied Fannie Mae to hire his boyfriend two decades ago. Frank sits on the House committee that oversees the governmental banking behemoth. Read my column @ Human Events that examines how Barney Frank returned much quo for Fannie Mae's quid.

When race-obsessed Cornel West invokes race in his takedowns of black conservatives, the Left cheers. Now that he has questioned the president's status as a real black man, the Left is shocked, shocked. my article @ FrontPagemag (be sure to continue to second page) on the showdown between the big man on campus and the big man in America.

Cesar Chavez gave Barack Obama his "Yes we can" slogan. Barack Obama is giving Cesar Chavez a ship. Read my column @ Human Events on how the Obama administration naming a navy vessel after a union icon won't save the sinking labor movement.

The International Criminal Court's prosecutor is seeking an indictment of Muammar Qaddafi. At first glance, the move seems justified. After all, Qaddafi has engaged in criminal acts and no court in Libya will try him. But dig a little deeper, as I do in my FrontPageMag article (make sure to click on to the second half of the piece), and there is something quite nefarious about the ICC's effort.

The Cars haven't released an album since 1987. Bin Laden, email, cell phones smaller than footballs, and much else has come to pass in the quarter century so in between records. So how is it that a band that hasn't put out new music since the Reagan presidency sounds so 2011? Read my review of The Cars "Move Like This @ the American Spectator.

Noam Chomsky doesn't buy that Osama bin Laden orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. So, he naturally doesn't like that the United States killed bin Laden without attempting to arrest him--Chomsky labels bin Laden a "victim." Read my article @ FrontPageMag on how Chomsky's take on the U.S. raid that killed the head of al Qaeda isn't the first time the MIT linguist got his facts wildly wrong.

The death of Osama bin Laden prompted Michael Moore to tweet that the terrorist had "won." Is anybody surprised? The ballcapped filmmaker blames America when we're attacked. He blames America when we kill our assailant. Read my column @ Human Events discussing why ideology makes Michael Moore as predictable as a cliche.

Killing nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11 was the crime. Killing one Arab on 5/1 who orchestrated the deaths of those 3,000 Americans wasn't a crime. Read my article @ FrontPageMag on the Left's whining and crying over the death of a dealer in death.

Once upon a time, 51 percent of Democrats said that they believed that George W. Bush had either foreknowledge of, or directly caused, 9/11. Do they still believe that the man complicit in the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history was not holed up in a compound in Abbottobad, Pakistan, but in Dallas, Texas? Read my article @ FrontPageMag that shows how partisanship can twist reality to make you believe a partisan enemy is really a national enemy behind nefarious deeds such as mass murder.

Law firm King & Spalding has defended terrorists and the makers of OxyContin. But the U.S. House of Representatives? Some clients are beyond the pale, apparently. The firm's decision to ditch its client at the behest of homosexual pressure groups highlights the willingness of those pressure groups to ride roughshod over such principles as the right to legal representation and democracy in pursuit of its ends. Read my column @ Human Events that shows that King & Spalding's cowardly attorneys weren't the first to cowar in the face of intimidation tactics over gay marriage.

Muammar Gaddafi wrote a book thirty-six years ago that goes along way to shedding light onto the Libyan leader's narcissism and socialism--and how the two go together. Like the ideology he touts, Gaddafi is a survivor--outlasting the many proclamations of his imminent demise. Read my article @ FrontPageMag on how Gaddafi's little green book, unlike him, does not endure with the passage of time.

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. This simple truth is anathema to a growing number of partisan Republicans. As I write in my column @ Human Events, the people most repulsed by the people who accused George W. Bush of masterminding 9/11 and stealing an election have become those people. This is bad for America. It may be worse for the GOP.

Atlas Shrugged has escaped its binding to make it to Hollywood. Rather than 54-years late, Ayn Rand's magnum opus's appearance on movie screens is perfect timing. As I write in my piece @ FrontPageMag, bailouts, ObamaCare, and Government Motors make ours an Ayn Rand moment.

The California Federation of Teachers have resolved that convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal should be freed. What do they know that a dozen jurors and more than a dozen appellate judges do not? Read my column @ Human Events explaining why the teachers championing this evil resolution are scarier than the cop killer they lionize.

Energy prices skyrocketing? Check. Inflation worsening? Check. A president abandoning allies in the Middle East? Check. Do you ever get the feeling that you're really living in a television program? As I write @ FrontPageMag, the rerun we are collectively forced to act in is That '70s Show. Barack Obama stars as Jimmy Carter.

What's the difference between capitulation to the Left and a conservative triumph? Just $5.5 billion, apparently. In the context of a $3.8 trillion budget, the $5.5 billion disagreement between Democrats and Republicans doesn't seem like a very big chasm to bridge. Read my column @ Human Events on how conservative celebrations over the deal to avert a government shutdown have more to do with winning a public relations war than winning a public policy battle.

Hugh Hefner turns 85 this weekend. One in a long line of preachy perverts, the Playboy founder preaches sexual liberation but keeps the playmates on a curfew and pays them an allowance. As I write @ the American Spectator, the idea of an authoritarian libertine is not as strange as it sounds.

The Nation magazine was for Muammar Gaddafi before it was against him. Back in 1970, the magazine claimed that Gaddafi's Libya boasted equality before the law and a society devoid of racism. As I write @ FrontPageMag, The Nation's premature celebration of Gaddafi fits the publication's template of mistaking despots for democrats.

What is it about socialism that attracts so many thugs, madmen, and murderers? Muammar Gaddafi is the latest in a long line of socialists to unleash the violence of the state upon his own people. As I write in my column @ Human Events, it's okay to call Gaddafi "crazy," "evil," "megalomaniacal." Just don't call him a "socialist."

The enemey of our enemy isn't always our friend. Case in point? Libya. Read my article @ FrontPageMag on how some of our ostensible allies in Operation Odyssey Dawn are our sworn enemies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and points beyond.

This is not the change for which Obama voters enthusiastically cast ballots. So, in the wake of the Libya campaign, many Obama supporters have changed their minds. Read my article @ FrontPageMag that asks why so many who once said "war is not the answer" are now saying "war is the answer."

Red-diaper baby David Horowitz famously walked away from the Left. Now he's walking away from his neoconservative illusions. The Right, which largely backed George W. Bush's nation-building efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East, would be wise to follow Horowitz's lead. Read my column @ Human Events on why admitting mistakes is a sign of strength, not weakness.

In his first month in office, Eric Holder told Department of Justice employees that Americans are a "nation of cowards" on race and that the DoJ had a "special responsibility" on racial issues. From ordering Dayton, Ohio to redefine failure on a police test because too many blacks had flunked to a bizarre new proclamation that the DoJ go after bullies provided that their victims meet certain racial classifications, Eric Holder's Justice Department has an unhealthy obsession with race. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag that shows that Justice, at least Eric Holder's, isn't blind.

Frederic Bastiat laid out the Broken Window Fallacy more than a century-and-a-half ago. But from FDR paying farmers to uproot crops to Barack Obama subsidizing the destruction of functioning automobiles, Bastiat hasn't convinced everybody that production, not destruction, fuels our economy. Read my column @ Human Events that wonders why, even after disasters break not just windows but people, economists still don't get the Broken Window Fallacy.

The Japanese earthquake and tsunami have killed upwards of 10,000 people. The problems at the Fukushima nuclear power plant? They've killed just one person, who died in a crane accident, thus far. Read my piece @ FrontPageMag, where I wonder if there is something terribly obtuse about the media obsession with one nuclear power plant when there are thousands dead from a one-in-a-lifetime natural disaster.

Republicans should abandon the president-emeritus route that they have taken with George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, and John McCain. This is because their starting line-up--Romney, Gingrich, Palin, etc.--is so flawed. This is because their bench--Rubio, Christie, Ryun, etc.--is so strong. Read my column @ Human Events, which argues that the GOP would be better off treating its vice presidential options as its presidential options.

NPR executive Ron Schiller mouthed anti-Semitic canards, called the Tea Party "scary," "racist," people, and bashed Republicans in a James O'Keefe-directed YouTube movie. As I write @ FrontPageMag, Ron Schiller's lines were too perfect and his character too despicable for this not to be a satire, right?

"If the problem was the White Citizens Council," Congressman Peter King recently explained, "it wouldn't make any sense to investigate African Americans." But the Homeland Security Committee chairman's inquiry into the radicalization into American Muslims, but not--Does anybody wonder why?--Methodists, Zoroastrians, and Jehovah Witnesses, has elicited cries of intolerance, bigotry, and fascism. Read my article @ FrontPageMag about why a hearing on Islamic radicalization has done so much to bring out the radicals.

After a forty-plus-year war, Harvard and the military have called a truce. The Cambridge, Massachusetts school is the first of what is expected to be many elite institutions welcoming the Reserve Officer Training Corps campus. Read my article @ FrontPageMag to see why Harvard's move is more face-saving gesture than anything else.

More than sixty years ago, Judith Coplon got caught red-handed spying for the reds. She just died, but she passed on her illusions to her children. The descendents of Cold War spies no longer maintain parental innocence. Instead, they hold that the Americans who pledged fealty to Joseph Stalin were guilty of saving the world. Read my column @ Human Events that posits that the Left's collective hallucination about the Rosenbergs, Ms. Coplon, and Alger Hiss didn't go to the grave with them.

I delivered newspapers between 1982 and 1987. A quarter century later, kids don't have paper routes. Adults do. That's too bad. Paper routes intill good habits in children. Not the least of which, as I note in my article @ the American Spectator, is a passion for current events.

Earlier this week at the governors' meeting, the president announced flexibility in implementation of ObamaCare at the state level. That same day, the White House told liberal allies this flexibility pertained to single-payer and government-run state plans. Why two different messages from the same White House? As I write @ FrontPageMag, a Gallup poll showing conservatives outnumbering liberals in every U.S. state demonstrates why Barack Obama so often speaks with a forked tongue.

In 1996, the Democratic backbenchers who make up nearly the entire Democratic Congressional leadership voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. Now, fifteen years later, the Obama administration won't even defend this U.S. law in a U.S. court. What happened? As I write in my column @ Human Events, the Democratic Party not only became further radicalized, it became the Undemocratic Party.

Anthony Maschek got shot eleven times fighting bad guys in Iraq. Then he came home and got heckled while speaking out for the Reserve Officers Training Corps at Columbia. If he hasn't earned the right to speak freely, who has? Despite Congress lifting its ban on gays in the military, elite colleges are inventing new reasons to continue the ban on the ROTC. Read my article @ FrontPageMag, which shows that just as gays in the military replaced Vietnam as the rationale to kick the military off campus, the military's exclusion of transgendered people is replacing gays in the military as the justification for the prohibition of ROTC.

From Cairo to Madison, 2011 is shaping up as the year of the mob. That is bad news for people who value representative government and the rule of law. We don't know where the mobs in Egypt and Wisconsin are taking the people because mobs don't know where they are going. As I write in my column @ Human Events, mobs follow. They don't lead.

What comes the day after the revolution? Much hope, but little thought, has gone into answering this question. Like Charlie Brown perpetually trying to kick the football, Americans are constantly seeing in foreign revolutions 1776 instead of 1789, 1917, or 1979. Read my column @ Human Events, which shows how past revolutions have much to say about the one just experienced in Egypt.

Despite the Muslim Brotherhood's 80-plus-year record of assassinations, terrorism, and bigotry, Brookings Institution scholars talk as though the group remains an enigma. Read my article @ FrontPageMag on why the very people who regard the mixture of religion and politics in America as incipient fascism reflexively dismiss warnings about an Islamic takeover in Egypt.

Ice at the Super Bowl? Freezing in Tucson? Snowy roofs collapsing in Massachusetts? These are the times that try a man's faith, particularly if that faith is in the Holy Church of Global Warming. Read my column @ Human Events, which explains how even anecdotal evidence against global warming has been twisted by proponents of global warming to buttress the theory.

He eclipsed his predecessors. His successors live in his shadow. In their accomplishments, George H.W. Bush (Kuwait's liberation), Bill Clinton (NAFTA), and George W. Bush (tax cuts), Ronald Reagan's successors seem mere stewards of his legacy. After all, it was his military that defeated the Iraqis, his free trade agreement adopted in 1993, and his tax-cut cause made the Republican cause. Even in Bushclintonbush's most memorable lines--"Read my lips: no new taxes," "The era of big government is over," "axis of evil"--the president derided as a dummy played the ventriloquist. Read my article @ FrontPageMag celebrating the 100th anniversary of birth of Ronald Reagan, the greatest president of my lifetime.

Hundreds dead, violent street demonstrations, a repressive autocratic regime nearing its third decade, new technology fueling the protests, and the threat of Islamic fundamentalists filling the void--one could be talking about Egypt today or Iran in 1979. More than thirty years ago, leftists imagined the Islamic revolutionaries as Persian versions of themselves. Read my article @ FrontPageMag that notes the warnings Iran issues us about Egypt.

Chris Matthews is obsessed with Michele Bachmann. Fixating upon the Minnesota Congresswoman in his broadcasts last week, the MSNBC yakker took Bachmann to task for inflating the role the Founding Fathers had in ending slavery. Fair enough, but in highlighting Bachmann's errors, as I write in my column @ Human Events, Matthews made several of his own. Ridicule Michele Bachmann? Okay. Mock the Founding Fathers? No thanks.

What made Keith Olbermann's Countdown so unintentionally special? The Special Comment, of course. The Special Comment was bad television, but so unlike the bad television that surrounded on MSNBC. Whereas, say, The Ed Show is as mediocre as its name implies, Special Comment imagined itself as grandiose only to come off as embarrassingly amateurish. It failed memorably because it failed with pretensions. Read my FrontPageMag special comment on The Special Comment.

Peter Singer writes in Time that America's incivility may have been a possible impetus for Jared Lee Loughner's killing spree. I write in Human Events that Peter Singer's intellectual defense of infanticide is a far more likely intellectual antecedent for an accused serial killer in Philadelphia than any Tea Partier was for Jared Lee Loughner's mass murder in Tucson.

Following November's debacle, the president has announced in the Wall Street Journal a review of regulations that impede growth, compromised with Republicans on maintaining current tax rates, and delivered a measured response to the Tucson tragedy. Quietly, he's injected federally-funded end-of-life counselling into the Federal Register, imposed "net neutrality" through the FCC, and circumvented Congress's rejection of cap-and-trade through EPA regulation. As I write @ FrontPageMag, the lesson the president seems to have learned from November 2 is to loudly make symbolic gestures toward the center while quietly imposing the same left-wing agenda by any means, fair or foul, available.

How might Sarah Palin's reputation have fared if she had compared Jared Lee Loughner to Martin Luther King and described him as "a man of the highest character"? Probably not as well as the reputations of the liberal politicians who heaped these superlatives upon Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones. Read my column @ Human Events on the who's who of the American Left who aided and abetted the rise of the murderer of an American Congressman.

Capitalism and racism can't long peacefully coexist. Businessmen motivated by racial solidarity rather than profits won't stay in business. Read my Martin Luther King Day column @ Human Events on how the free market undermines racial discrimination.

Terrorist Mohamed Atta's driver's license headshot became one of the world's most viewed images. The picture showed a hard, steely-eyed, malevolent figure. Jared Lee Loughner's mug shot has been nearly as ubiquitous. It reveals a vacant-eyed, awkwardly-smiling killer, whose eyebrows and hair have, a la The Wall's 'Pink,' gone missing along with his mind. The former is the face of evil; the latter, the picture of crazy. Yet, as I write in my article @ FrontPageMag, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton equated the act of a lunatic with the decades-long campaign of jihadists on Arab television.

The easiest way to become a left-wing hero is to kill somebody. It worked for John Brown, Joe Hill, Huey Newton, and Leonard Peltier. The Left's history of venerating murderers makes its current stand against "violent rhetoric" comically self-serving. As I ask in my column @ Human Events, where's the Right's Sacco and Vanzetti?

Don't let the facts get in the way of your narrative, Sherriff Clarence Dupnik. In the wake of the horrific mass murder in Tucson, Arizona, Pima County's top lawman set off a wave of wild speculation blaming the tragedy on conservative rhetoric. As I write @ FrontPageMag.com, accused gunman Jared Lee Loughner not only is described as a left-wing radical by people who knew him, but, far more importantly, is crazy.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has offended the guardians of PC once again. This time, his reading that the 14th Amendment does not grant protections against discrimination to women has sent his critics into a fit. But as I write in my column @ Human Events, the feminist heroes of Scalia's critics shared his interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

Why do funnymen lead such sad lives? Is political correctness a gift to or the death of comedy? Do jokes have sell-by-dates? Read my review of Paul Johnson's Humorists @ City Journal that tackles these and other questions.

"Don't ask, don't tell" is history. So the ROTC ban should follow, right? Wrong. As I write in my article @ FrontPageMag, academia's war on students serving their country predated the controversy over gays in the military. At some campuses, that war will continue.

The 112th Congress opens today with a reading of the Constitution in the House of Representatives. Members should pay special attention to Article 1, which outlines the powers entrusted to Congress that Congress has outsourced. From the Fed to the EPA to the FCC, the Obama Administration has bypassed Congress, and the Constitution, to impose its increasingly unpopular agenda. But as I write in my column @ Human Events, the powers a lazy and masochistic Congress has given away were not theirs to give.

It was a bad December for the Kennedys and their former political playground. From the Temple of Ted losing its battle to gain $30 million in earmarks to Patrick Kennedy's departure from political office marking the first Congress without a Kennedy in a half century, the political dynasty had a rough month. Massachusetts, the Kennedys' longtime political base, lost a House seat--their fifth in as many decades--due to Census reapportionment. Read my article @ FrontPageMag on the decay of the Kingdom of Kennedy.

'Tis the season--for bombs delivered in underwear and shoes. Does such a threat call for a human rights-based or national interest-based foreign policy? Read my column @ Human Events on Jamie Glazov's Showdown with Terror: Our Struggle against Tyranny and Terror.

"Conservative" is so popular that many people who share very few of the underlying principles flock to the label. "Liberal," on the other hand, has become an insult. Even liberals don't like being called "liberal." Today, liberals prefer "progressive"; tomorrow, they will recycle some other label once the current one, too, becomes an insult. Read my article at FrontPageMag on how liberalism became a political 4-letter word.

In the wake of a federal judge ruling ObamaCare's individual mandate unconstitutional, the Obama administration is invoking failed New Deal-era legal challenges to Social Security as a historical parallel. But as I write in my column @ Human Events, the successful cases invalidating the National Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act seem more germane. The federal government's powers aren't boundless; they are limited by the Constitution. And the idea that the government can punish an individual for economic inactivity, e.g., not purchasing health insurance, doesn't appear in that document.

John Boehner cried on Election Night. He cried on 60 Minutes. And he's not the only one bawling. From Glenn Beck to Tim Tebow, famous men have reduced themselves to blubbering children. The limelight has become a reason to, rather than a reason not to, cry. Read my article @ the American Spectator that gawks at how America has gone from a society that cringes at grown men crying to one that rewards it--all in my lifetime.

The day before boycotting last week's presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize for China's Liu Xiaobo, the Kremlin suggested that the Norwegian Nobel Committee might want to consider Julian Assange as an honoree. If Russia really wishes to influence the committee, it should ditch the boycotts and smart-aleck suggestions. Instead, as I argue in my piece @ FrontPageMag, Russia should drop the human-rights pretensions and resuscitate its Stalin Peace Prize.

Obama did not raise taxes, and now the noisy minority talks of running a primary challenger against the president. I never knew they liked the outcome of Ted Kennedy's challenge to Jimmy Carter as much as I did. Read my column @ Human Events on the cannibalistic Left, always hungry to eat one of their own.

Move over Joe Hill, Tom Mooney, and Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Left has a new folk hero in Bradley Manning, the Army private who transferred his country's secrets to a clique of Euro-based America haters. As my article @ FrontPageMag details, Bradley Manning is just the latest in a long line of goats America haters have confused for heroes.

Thirty years ago today, Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon. Whereas during the ten years prior to Lennon's assassination fans obsessed over his past by demanding a Beatles reunion, for the thirty years since they have mourned his unrealized future. Read my article @ the American Spectator that celebrates that unlike Elvis or Michael Jackson, John Lennon enjoyed life's encore.

Who came up with the current policy banning practicing homosexuals from serving in the military? The media doesn't want to ask, the Democrats don't want to tell. The Democrats shouldn't be ashamed of the Clinton-era compromise. As I write in my column @ Human Events, the prudential law affirms that what we do in our bedrooms is a matter neither to ask nor tell about.

The institutional arrogance that characterized the New York Times' decision to publish secret U.S. diplomatic cables is by now familiar to its readers. It's certainly familiar to readers of William McGowan's new book, Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America. Read my column @ Human Events on Gray Lady Down, which depicts a newsroom drenched in "subtle and not-so-subtle anti-Americanism, anti-bourgeois hauteur, hypersensitivity toward 'victim' groups, double standards, historical shallowness, intellectual dishonesty, cultural relativism, moral righteousness and sanctimony."

When North Korea said they killed four South Koreans in self defense last week, nobody outside of the prison state believed it. But sixty years ago, when North Korea claimed that its southern neighbor had started the Korean War, numerous American intellectuals uncritically repeated the canard. As I write in my column @ Human Events, North Korea's American flunkeys have strangely morphed from political droolers into thinkers of great repute--at least on campus.

The Pilgrims who launched Plymouth Colony overcame religious persecution, a trip across the Atlantic, a harsh winter, disease, and the threat of hostile natives. As my column @ Human Events demonstrates, they also overcame socialism. Just don't tell this to The New York Times.

Never-satisfied radicals believe that President Obama hasn't governed far enough from the Left. Unrealistic hopes leading to demoralization is nothing new for American leftists. From New Harmony to Jonestown, leftists envisioned Eden only to experience a hell on earth. That's the danger of living in a world of ideas instead of living in the world. Read my column @ Human Events that explains why the hope and change rhetoric that propelled Obama's campaign undermines his presidency.

I am pro-choice on Four Loko. I want Four Loko to be safe, legal, and rare. The zealots among us wish to dictate what we can and can't put into our bodies. Keep your morals off my Four Loko! Read my article @ the American Spectator about my quest to drink the mythic and soon-to-be-extinct libation sensation.

You can't print your way to prosperity. You can print a dollar into a dime. The Fed's $600 billion influx of dollars into the economy will make the dollars in your pocket less valuable. Read my column @ Human Events to understand how the Fed is taking America back to the future--the 1970s.

Libraries and video games go together like Lady Di and Flavor Flav. But to hear librarians tell it, video games are high-church, intellectual endeavors. Today, nearly 2,000 libraries across America will host National Gaming Day, a massive video game tournament and celebration. Tomorrow, The Jersey Shore on a loop in the main reading room and Lady GaGa played on the intercom? Read my article @ City Journal to understand that when the ostensible defenders of culture bow to the vulgar, is later than you think.

They're called the dumbest generation. But the young essayists in the Jonah Goldberg-edited Proud to Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation do not exhibit the signs of Xbox overload or text-message grammar. Read my review of the book in The American Conservative, where I discuss whether "professional conservatives" have imposed conformity on conservatives or the success of the Right has ensured a cacaphony of conservatisms.

Time called Republicans "endangered species." Newsweek proclaimed "the end of conservatism." Somebody forgot to tell conservative Republicans that they had gone extinct less than two years ago. As I write in my column @ Human Events, liberal journalists who mistook wish for reality in incessantly proclaiming the death of conservatism have the most egg on their faces in the aftermath of the Democratic Party's Black Tuesday.

Democrats are blaming big money, even though they have raised more of it than Republicans. Democrats are blaming fearful voters, even though they need those voters to win tomorrow. As I write in my column @ Human Events, the series of excuses offered in advance of Election Day is the strongest indicator that Democrats are in for a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Tuesday night.

From one state possibly changing its official name to several states seeking to hit back at ObamaCare's health-insurance mandate, the ballot questions (all 155 of them) before voters this fall range from the bizarre to the consequential. Yet, aside from California's bid to legalize pot, any talk about the initiatives and referenda gets drowned out by the chatter over neck-and-neck political races. Many of the ballot questions will have repurcussions beyond state borders--with quite a few of them taking direct aim at the president's policies. The ballot propositions represent a populist conservatism on the offensive. As my column @ Human Events suggests, liberals have the wrong answers for ballot questions.

Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg are aghast that Bill O'Reilly noticed the presumed coincidence that all of the 9/11 hijackers happened to have been practitioners of the Muslim faith. Knowing that liberals can so quickly forget that Muslims killed nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11 makes their poor memory regarding much of the last century easier to understand. From eugenics to spying on Martin Luther King, from the internment of Japanese to dropping the bomb on them, liberals forget that the American history they are ashamed of today was liberal policy yesterday. Read my column @ Human Events on why liberals are constantly undergoing self-serving fits of amnesia and projecting their embarrassments upon political enemies.

Christopher Columbus discovered two continents. Any assessment of the Genoese seafarer that doesn't begin with that fact misses the forest for the trees. Yet, 518 years after Columbus first stepped foot on land in the Bahamas, the navigator's detractors call him a slaver, a murderer, and worse. A more apt label, as I demonstrate in my column @ Human Events, is hero.

The magic of dupery alchemizes Stalinists into civil libertarians, war-mongering worshippers of Che, Mao, and Ho into peace activists, and Communists into civil-rights activists. Paul Kengor has written a whole book on the phenomenon: "Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century." Read my column @ Human Events, which wonders if the real dupes aren't misguided liberals apologizing for totalitarians but the conservatives who believe that they act in good faith.

To compound the beating Democrats take on November 2, redistricting for 2012 will mark an 18-seat House of Representatives shift from Blue States toward Red States. Why are right-to-work, no-income-tax, red states gaining seats through reapportionment at the expense of closed-shop, tax-heavy blue states? Read my article @ the American Spectator to understand why Americans are voting with their moving vans.

Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell has been called a gaffe-prone liar who fudged her educational background. Such seeming impediments to elected office never stopped Joe Biden, the man whose Senate seat O'Donnell seeks. Read my column @ Human Events to see why journalists who ignored Joe Biden's lies are engaged in a feeding frenzy over Christine O'Donnell.

Before his election to the United States Senate, Ted Kennedy never even bothered to vote for Democrats--save when his brother's name appeared on the ballot. So Jimmy Carter's accusation on "60 Minutes" that Ted Kennedy sabotaged the 39th president's health-care bill for political gain shouldn't come as a surprise. As I write @ the American Spectator, Ted Kennedy was a party cannibal who regularly devoured fellow Democrats for personal gain. And the worse he treated Democrats, the more Democrats loved him.

If Republicans had listened to liberals in 1980, they would have never nominated Ronald Reagan. Thirty years later, liberals scoffed at the slate of tea-party influenced candidates capturing Republican nominations. Read my article @ Human Events explaining why the candidates you want to face on the ballot in November aren't the ones you want to see in Congress in January.

Barack Obama told the world that he is for the planned Ground Zero mosque and against the threatened Florida Koran burning at Friday's press conference. Is there a subject upon which the Talker-in-Chief hasn't offered an opinion? Two years ago, Obama had America hanging on his every word. Now even his supporters wish he would hit his internal mute button occasionally. Read my column @ Human Events explaining that Silent Cal has a lot to teach Wordy Barry.

The future of organized labor looks bleak this Labor Day. Read my column @ Human Events about how labor unions, organizations founded to protect workers, have priced their members out of jobs.

On Wednesday, James Lee took three Discovery Channel employees hostage at corporate headquarters. On Monday, Discovery's Animal Planet airs a marathon of "Whale Wars," a reality television show starring Paul Watson in which environmentalists ram whaling ships and otherwise endanger people in their workplace. In my column @ Human Events, I ask just what is the difference between the gunman in Discovery's lobby ("Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around") and the lunatic starring on its hit reality show ("Don't bring any more humans into being").

Album sales experienced their worst week ever in August. The music industry blames their customers. Their customers blame the music industry. As I write @ the American Spectator, years of pushing horrible music on the public has resulted in terrible consequences for the recording industry.

Saul Alinsky's methods have impressed Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and, strangest of all, numerous tea party activists. Nearly four decades after his death, the community organizer is hotter than ever--despite the fact that nobody really knows what a community organizer does. Read my column @ Human Events to discover why the Rules for Radicals author didn't follow any rules.

For Democrats up for reelection this fall, there's no time like the past. Don't talk about Barack Obama. Talk about George Bush. Don't address concerns about building a mosque at Ground Zero. Dismiss the objections as "McCarthyism." Opponents of gay marriage? They're the same people who unleashed dogs and fire hoses upon black people in the South. That's the Hot Tub Time Machine School of American Politics, which I dissect in my column @ Human Events.

When Ray Bradbury was a boy, a magician informed him that he would live forever. This Sunday America's most popular and prolific short story writer turns 90--old by human standards, just getting started by the standards of immortals. When Bradbury was young, he cared too much about what critics thought of him, seeking to erase the pulp origins of his stories, running from the sci-fi label, and writing a few tales that flattered the political leanings of the literati. Now that he is an old man (by mortal standards), he could not care any less what anyone thinks of him. Read my celebration of Bradbury's birthday @ the American Spectator.

I didn't need a massive FBI file to convince me that Howard Zinn was a Communist. The massive tome he wrote was fairly persuasive on that point. For those who remain unconvinced, why would numerous unconnected people tell the FBI that Howard Zinn, then an unknown, was a member of the Communist Party? Read my piece @ City Journal that posits that like Zinn's A People's History of the United States, his '50s responses to questions from the FBI just don't add up.

The 1980s had a good 1990s and a better 2000s. More than two decades after its demise, the 1980s are more popular than ever. The decade lives in that Madness song on your iPod, during incessant cable-television airings of Sixteen Candles, and on eBay through a constant auction Atari 2600s. And it lives in Rob Sheffield's "Talking to Girls about Duran Duran: One Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut." Read my review @ The American Spectator.

Calling the president "Hitler" used to be a beloved avocation for the American Left. But the rules have changed now that a Democrat is president. Read my column @ Human Events that explains how yesterday's Bush Haters have hilariously become today's O-bots lecturing the rest of us on the proper rhetorical decorum when addressing Mr. President.

The internet stimulates our brains but anesthetizes our minds. A combination of psychology, pop culture, technology, education, and myriad other fields, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is an important book about a timely subject. Read it. But before you do, read my review of it @ the American Spectator.

True believers did not stop insisting that former State Department official Alger Hiss and journalist I.F. Stone were completely innocent of being Soviet spies once the evidence piled to Everest levels. Howard Zinn's FBI file, then, is not going to convince the Left that the "people's historian" was really the Kremlin's historian. Read my column @ Human Events that demonstrates that the Left is too heavily invested in the group lie on postwar domestic subversion to bail out now.

From honoring Van Jones with an Image Award to hosting Leonard Jeffries at a "unity summit," the NAACP has compiled an embarrassing track record of extremism in recent years. So why does anybody take seriously a group that has hosted Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan as keynote speakers when it lectures the Tea Parties about its extremists? Read my top-10 list of NAACP extremism @ Human Events.

"A racist is somebody who is winning an argument with a liberal," or so goes a popular bumpersticker slogan. The Tea Partiers and the backers of Arizona's new law curtailing illegal immigration can attest to the wisdom inherent within that bumpersticker philosophy. But as I explain in my column @ Human Events, the liberal tic of crying "racism" is backfiring on issue after issue.

The NAACP has so promiscuously hurled charges of racism at political opponents, like the Tea Partiers, that it has devalued the term. But decades ago, when the NAACP really stood for fighting discrimination and not merely for pushing a political agenda, it had to purge its sole African American founder for many of the sins it currently ascribes to the Tea Partiers. Read that ironic story @ Human Events.

Remember when Newsweek lambasted skeptics of man-made global warming as "the denial machine" in an infamous cover story that even their own writers ridiculed as propaganda? Well, just three summers later, the weekly has changed its tune. And as my column @ Human Events explains, this isn't the first time Newsweek has had an about-face on climate change. The golden age of the greens has faded to black.

The more connected we are through technology the less connected we are to other human beings. So argues William Powers in Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. Read my review @ City Journal.

For anyone who understands the history of the Black Panthers, New Black Panthers getting away with thuggish tactics does not surprise. Their forebears regularly got rewarded, rather than punished, for their criminal enterprises. But, as I detail in my column @ Human Events, in contrast to allegations of mere voter intimidation, the "old" Black Panthers were getting away with rape and murder.

Robert Byrd served in the Ku Klux Klan and filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So why are leading Democrats eulogizing him as a great American? Read my inaugural "Decoding the Left" column in Human Events to discover why being a Democrat means never having to say you're sorry. The dirty secret of the Democrats is that the party of Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson was once the party of George Wallace, Theodore Bilbo, and Bull Connor.

When Hugh Hefner, a man who has been stuck in an adolescent male fantasy for more than five decades, heralds something as an advance for women, people might want to take his praise with a grain of salt. Fifty years ago, the FDA gave its imprimatur to The Pill. A half-century later, Hefner, Gloria Steinem, Hillary Swank, and others have celebrated The Pill's birthday as a crucial step in the liberation of women. But, as I write in my article @ the American Spectator, The Pill counter-intuitively opened the floodgates of abortion and illegitimacy--which, a study by the Pew Research Center demonstrates, has skyrocketed since The Pill's initial availability.

The Manson Family, Heaven's Gate's Hale Boppers, and Leopold and Loeb all lack academic defenders. But not Jim Jones' Peoples Temple. Rebecca Moore has made a career as an apologist for the political cult whose 1978 act of "revolutionary suicide" resulted in the deaths of more than 900 people. My article @ City Journal exposes the San Francisco politicians who fawned over Peoples Temple--and the academic who follows in their footsteps more than three decades later.

The federal government has already allocated almost $40 million to fund an Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate in Boston. Massachusetts representatives seek about $30 million more in the next budget. Read my piece @ the American Spectator, which asks why, with all of the money the Kennedys have and all of the money the Kennedys can rave, must the votaries of the late senator take from the taxpayer.

There are trendy movements and there are transformational movements. Two new books, Jason Mattera's Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation and Michael Graham's That's No Angry Mob, That's My Mom: Team Obama's Assault on Tea-Party, Talk-Radio Americans, discuss the potentially transformational, and certainly conflicting, major mass-movements of our times. Read my review @ the American Spectator.

In the late 1970s, the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart was the domain of Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, and Chic. Then The Knack's "My Sharona" came along and became the top song of 1979. It conquered disco and rescued rock 'n' roll. Doug Fieger, the man who co-wrote and sang "My Sharona," died earlier this week. Read my piece @ the American Spectator on the rise, fall, and curious contemporary relevance of The Knack's "My Sharona."

Patrick Kennedy has labeled the man who now sits in the senate seat his father held for 47 years a "joke." Does not that designation fit the eight-term Congressman better than it does Scott Brown? Read my piece @ the American Spectator and discover why Rhode Islanders don't find the joke of sending a mentally-ill recovering drug addict to Congress very funny anymore.

Scott Brown didn't just beat Martha Coakley. He erased Ted Kennedy's imprint on the Bay State, used the bluest state to flash a red light at ObamaCare, embarrassed the president of the United States, and sent Democrats running scared around the country. If Democrats aren't safe in Massachusetts, they aren't safe anywhere. Republicans winning in Massachusetts is the political equivalent of "When a Stranger Calls": "Yeah, Mr. President. We've traced the call. It's coming from inside of your house." Read my article @ City Journal explaining why Republican victory in Massachusetts will either serve as harbinger or alarm bell for Democrats. Wake up, or get a rude awakening in November.

Tomorrow, the History Channel airs "The People Speak," a series based on Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." Today, Big Hollywood features Howard Zinn, Intellectual Moron, an evisceration of said book based on my longer piece in "Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas." Read the piece here.

Do not adjust your television set. The teams gracing your big screen this weekend sporting odd color schemes and unfamiliar uniforms are NFL franchises, not high school clubs. The first time I watched teams play with throwback uniforms I thought it was cool. By the time the experience had reached the triple digits, the novelty had worn off. Read my article @ the American Spectator explaining that, while nine times out of ten a throwback conjures up tradition, the NFL's marketing gimmick undermines it.

Ayn Rand's detractors saw horns emerging from her head. Her acolytes saw a halo. Titles aside, two new biographies--Anne C. Heller's "Ayn Rand and the World She Made" and Jennifer Burns's "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right"--depict a mere mortal whose life was more complex than an angel or devil. Read my book review @ City Journal that demonstrates why readers of this pair of biographies can be grateful that Ayn Rand was more human than the characters she created.

Twenty years ago this Monday, the greatest political development of my lifetime occurred: the opening (which precipitated the closing) of the Berlin Wall. For Westerners, the Berlin Wall served as the symbol of Communist oppression. In the Communist Bloc, the Berlin Wall functioned effectively as the survival mechanism of the German Democratic Republic. Twenty percent of the East German populace--more than three million people--had escaped in the decade or so preceding the Wall's construction. Had the rate of exodus continued, East Germany would have ceased to exist by about 1989. Read my contribution to City Journal's symposium celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, alongside remembrances by Claire Berlinski, Judith Miller, Roger Scruton, and Guy Sorman.

Since the issue of gay marriage arose in the 1990s, the Senate voted 85-14, and the House voted 342-67, for the Defense of Marriage Act that President Bill Clinton signed into law. Gay marriage has been before the voters in 31 states and 31 states have rejected it. Strangely, proponents of same-sex marriage, who have yet to win a single popular vote on the matter, insist that opposition to gay marriage is a losing position. Read my piece @ the American Spectator that explains why gay marriage isn't divisive but rather the most unifying major issue in American politics.

Twenty-eight-years ago, I saw Captain Lou Albano along with the Moondogs wrestle Tony Garea, Rick Martel, and Pedro Morales in a half-empty Boston Garden. A few years later, Albano teamed up with Cyndi Lauper and Vince McMahon to defeat wrestling's pop-culture reputation as a vestige of 19th-century carnival barkers and travelling sideshows. The "Rock and Wrestling Connection," the bizarre pop-culture cross-pollination that still leaves me scratching my head, strangely catapulted, rather than killed, the careers of those involved. Read my piece @ the American Spectator celebrating Captain Lou Albano, who died yesterday, and remembering professional wrestling, which died for me a long time ago.

A choked-up Nancy Pelosi suggested that Joe Wilson's interruption of the president is the type of rhetoric that may lead to violence because she saw such rhetoric lead to violence in San Francisco in the 1970s. But it wasn't conservative rhetoric fueling the violence of Jim Jones, the Black Panthers, Sara Jane Moore, and the multitude of political thugs who unleashed chaos upon the Bay Area in the 1970s. Read my piece @ the American Spectator to get the history that Nancy Pelosi leaves out.

Eighty years ago, Will Durant started writing The Story of Civilization. About 65 years later, I started reading it. This seemed right. If a man could devote 45 years of his life to writing the history of the world, I could devote two years of my life to reading it. More than a decade after finishing the eleven-volume Story of Civilization, I have finally gotten around to writing about it. The October 5, 2009 issue of National Review, available now to those with a digital subscription, features my lengthy article on Will and Ariel Durant, the apostate historians. Read it here @ National Review if you have a digital subscription. Get with the program, or just buy it at your local newstand, if you aren't digitally subscribed.

When Massachusetts public opinion drifted left, Ted Kennedy followed--on the Vietnam War, taxes, abortion, and a whole host of issues. Where Ted Kennedy walked, Democrats followed. What ensured Ted Kennedy's political longevity in Massachusetts undermined the Democrats' ambitions as a national party. Read my piece @ City Journal the Democratic Party's long, strange trip tagging along with Ted Kennedy.

"I used her, she used me, but neither one cared," Bob Seger sang in Night Moves. His lyric could also describe the awkward convergence of Catholicism and Ted Kennedy on display this weekend. Once synonymous with the Church, the Kennedys--through personal scandal and the embrace of political issues such as abortion--have transformed themselves into the first family of the Church of Liberalism. Read my article @ the American Spectator on why the Church's role in Ted Kennedy's funeral has liberal and conservative Catholics crying foul for very different reasons.

Why was Ted Kennedy so long the man conservatives loved to hate? Because the rules didn't apply to Ted Kennedy. He got Cs and gained admission to Harvard. He never bothered, save for his brief time in the Army, to get a proper job before he won election to the Senate. He feverishly attempted to cover up drunk driving a woman to her death, and his dronish followers sought to make him president. Read my piece @ the American Spectator to discover why the late Massachusetts senator "need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life."

Towering political figures are remembered in one line. George Washington was the father of his country. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. Ted Kennedy? Read my piece @ Human Events to discover how America's third-longest-serving senator should be remembered.

Guess who trades on his famous name to make millions from interests with business before his father's powerful senate committee? Ted Kennedy Jr.'s "consulting" businesses have pocketed almost $400,000 from Bristol Myers Squibb--and millions more from other health-care and union interests. Ted Kennedy, Sr. is the chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Ask not what you can do for your name; ask what your name can do for you. Read my piece in the City Journal about the power of a last name.

Ted Kennedy helped engineer a change in Massachusetts law that stripped the governor of the power to fill senate vacancies. That was five years ago, when a Republican served as governor. Now that a Democrat is governor, Kennedy wants a redo--lest a Republican win election to the seat that he wishes to bequeath to one of his Kennedy heirs--just as it got left to him by his brother Jack. Read my piece @ the American Spectator, detailing how Kennedy's drive to empower Governor Deval Patrick to name his successor is just the lastest unprincipled about-face by the Bay State's senior senator.

Ted Kennedy's face is on the cover of Newsweek, his words propel the HBO documentary "Teddy: In His Own Words," and his name is on the lips of every Democrat seeking to enact a state-run health care plan. The senior senator from Massachusetts is seemingly everywhere--everywhere but the United States Senate. Read my piece in the American Spectator explaining how absentee senator Ted Kennedy risks undermining his political legacy by treating his senate seat as a family legacy.

Thirty years ago, Western intellectuals, inebriated by the anti-Americanism of the revolutionaries, looked upon the Iranian Revolution and saw themselves. When something quite different from responsive democracy, oil socialism, and commitment to peace materialized in Iran, the cognoscenti emerged with egg on their faces. Read my article @ City Journal to understand why those aghast at the anti-Americanism of the Persian theocracy risk making the same mistake by projecting their values upon today's revolutionaries rebelling against the Iranian old guard.

Mark Rudd led the 1968 takeover of Columbia University, rioted at 1969's Days of Rage in Chicago, participated in a bombing campaign that took the life of his best friend in 1970, and spent the better part of the '70s evading the FBI. Then he grew up. Read my review @ First Principles of Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen, which details Mark Rudd's 1960s and the hangover that followed.

The feds indicted the Speaker of Massachusetts's not-so Great and General Court earlier this week on corruption charges. Following Speaker Felony Tax Evasion and Speaker Obstruction of Justice, Speaker Kickbacks is the third speaker in a row of Massachusetts's house of representatives indicted by the feds. Read my article @ the American Spectator demonstrating that Massachusetts's corruption problem has much to do with Massachusetts's competitive elections problem.

Slain San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk abused his political office by aiding and abetting Jim Jones's kidnapping, and subsequent murder, of a six-year-old boy. He purportedly staged a hate crime to enhance his victim status in the eyes of San Francisco voters. He routinely called political opponents "Nazis." So why has the California senate passed a bill seeking to name today as "Harvey Milk Day" in the Golden State? My article @ City Journal juxtaposes Sean Penn's Academy Award-winning portrayal with history's Harvey Milk, finding the celluloid hero quite different than the real-life goat.

Five years to the week that it forced gay marriage upon the Bay State, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard arguments in a case that could be as much the bane to economic conservatives as Goodrich has been to social conservatives. Town Fair Tire v. Massachusetts, if upheld, will nullify the commerce clause--the Constitution's provision making the United States a giant free-trade zone--and throw prosperity out the window. Read my article @ the American Spectator demonstrating how the greedy tentacles of Taxachusetts have reached across state lines for taxdollars.

Think legalizing marijuana will make America more free? Not quite, as proposals before state legislatures aim to double the price of marijuana through onerous taxes, create a bud bureaucracy, burden dealers and growers with paperwork and exorbitant licensing fees, and threaten unlicensed dealers with excessive jail time. Read my article at TakiMag that points out that decriminalization, that happy limbo where stoners need fear neither lawmen nor taxmen, is the best that marijuana enthusiasts can realistically hope for.

The late anchorman Peter Jennings eulogized I.F. Stone as "a journalist's journalist" upon his 1989 passing. From Harvard to Berkeley, journalism programs have named fellowships and awards for I.F. Stone. This week's revelation from scholars Alexander Vassiliev, John Earl Haynes, and Harvey Klehr that the archives of Soviet intelligence (atop past incriminating evidence from a KGB general and the Venona intercepts) identify this "journalist's journalist" as an agent of the Soviet Union puts Stone, and his fan club, in another light. Read my piece @ the American Spectator to learn why the exposure of liberal icon Izzy Stone as a Communist agent tarnishes not only Izzy Stone, but his media admirers as well.

Massachusetts has become its Taxachusetts caricature in the Town Fair Tire case. The case revolves around the state's presumptuous presentation of a $108,947 tax bill to three Town Fair Tire stores in New Hampshire for failing to collect and remit sales taxes on its Massachusetts customers. The brash move violates the Constitution's equal protection and commerce clauses, not to mention Massachusetts statutes. But it will put a lot of money in Massachusetts's coffers, which, I suppose, is why the frustrated Bay State politicos have gone after merchants in sales-tax-free New Hampshire. Read my article on this absolutely jaw-dropping case at Forbes.com (or in the Spring issue of City Journal).

It is difficult to discern what Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books objects to most about the Great Books: the rejection of relativism that deems some books truly great, or the marketing of great books to mediocre minds. In a smug, condescending book that often sneers but rarely speaks, Alex Beam looks down on autodidact Mort Adler, University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins, and Encyclopedia Britannica publisher William Benton from below. Read my review at ISI's First Principles.

Ayn Rand's been dead for more than a quarter century, but her books are more alive than ever. Whether one judges by the booming sales of Atlas Shrugged, libertarian weird beards "gulching" to avoid taxation, or corporations relocating to the real-life Galt's Gulch of Zug, Switzerland, the Russian-born novelist's ideas have proven amazingly resilient. Five years after dubbing Rand an "intellectual moron," I, alongside the likes of Joseph Bottum and Burt Folsom, explore the relevance of Ayn Rand in the age of Obama in a symposium @ NRO.

For David Frum, it's not the failed president he dubbed "the right man," or the far-fetched utopian military crusades he advocated as "an end to evil," but Rush Limbaugh who is to blame for the Republican Party's sorry state. Read my article @ the American Spectator detailing how the Robespierre who once attempted to drive "Unpatriotic Conservatives" (read: Iraq war opponents) out of the conservative movement now laments conservative intolerance of "squishes" (read: him).

Lemon, Furman, Roe, and other legal bizarreries caught conservatives off guard in the early '70s. Then the Right organized. Read how it happened in my review in First Principles of Steven M. Teles's The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.

You can be a rock star. You can be a world saver. You can't be both, as Bono proves on U2's latest underwhelming effort No Line on the Horizon. Read my piece at the American Spectator detailing how the release of U2's much-hyped No Line on the Horizon confirms the Irish foursome's jump from relevant it band to greatest hits act.

Last week, the Washington Post revealed that Lyndon Johnson instructed the FBI to investigate aide Jack Valenti's sex life. It's just that they didn't spin it that way. Read my American Spectator piece to understand why, from Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman to John Kennedy, you can't blame liberal presidents for civil liberties abuses. The devil made them do it.

Conservatives aren't as skilled at reading books out loud as their liberal counterparts. Don't believe me? Just ask the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, or better yet, read my article at the American Spectator noting that before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth won a Grammy on Sunday, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Franken, Christopher Reeve, and Jane Fonda took home "spoken word" Grammys, too.

Fifty years ago today, paperboy Don McLean delivered "bad news on the door step." Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa on February 3, 1959. It would never be the same again. Before Jimi Hendrix, or Sid Vicious, or Kurt Cobain, '50s teenagers experienced it first with Buddy Holly. Read my article @ the American Spectator that explores the history and meaning of this giant cultural demarcation point.

The New Deal didn't end the Great Depression. It exacerbated it. Only a masochist would want to repeat the New Deal. Yet, that's just what a chorus of liberal journalists sing for--a 'new' New Deal. Roosevelt couldn't spend America out of the doldrums in the 1930s. Obama won't be able to do so today. Read my article at TakiMag that compares the Hoover-Roosevelt New Deal to the Bush-Obama 'new' New Deal, bolstering the maxim that everything old is eventually new again.

Governor David Paterson has made his choice. Now he has to live with it--and the Kennedys. For four generations, the political dynasty has refused to play nice with fellow Democrats who don't do their bidding. From experiencing primary challenges to discovering secret support of their Republican opponents, Democrats can attest best the vengeful nature of the first family of Massachusetts politics. Read my article at The American Spectator to find out what awaits the New York governor who dared bypass Caroline Kennedy.

Dynastic politics at its worst? Check. Inarticulateness that makes Britney Spears sound like Winston Churchill in comparison? Check. Voting-booth apathy by a wannabe senator? Check. Like Uncle, Like Niece, my piece at CityJournalOnline, explores the eery similarities between Ted Kennedy's rookie run for the Senate in 1962 and Caroline Kennedy's neophyte bid for a Senate seat in 2009. Read it, and weep.

For Kennedys, working your way to the top is the route for suckers; starting at the top, that is more like it--the Kennedy Way. The Kennedy Way allowed Ted Kennedy to avoid gainful employment, save for a stint in the U.S. Army, before becoming a U.S. senator. Now it pushes Caroline Kennedy to cut the line of public servants in her power grab to become a U.S. senator from New York. Read my article at the American Spectator on why a hereditary claim to a political office in New York should offend democratic sensibilities as much as a monetary claim to a political office in Illinois.

Funding Fathers: The Unsung Heroes of the Conservative Movement, a book by Ron Robinson and Nicole Hoplin, is a story of how lone men with big wallets can change the world. Books chronicling the history of the conservative movement focus on academics, activists, and men of action. Here, for the first time, is a history of the money behind The Consience of a Conservative, Ronald Reagan, Regnery Books, the Heritage Foundation, and other iconic institutions, books, and leaders of the conservative movement. Read my City Journal review here.

Axl Rose, you had me at "I see your sister in her Sunday dress." Then you had to go ahead and ruin it with piano ballads, dictatorial purges, lavish videos, and delays, delays, delays. Read my Paradise City Lost at the American Spectator to understand why to love Guns N' Roses is to hate it in its present form.

FlynnFiles is generating much buzz this week, particularly regarding my piece on the Jonestown cultists whose devotion to fantasy and contept for reality was so great that they killed themselves rather than their socialist ideas. Later today, in the third hour I am told, I will appear on The Savage Nation to discuss intellectual morons and other assorted poseurs. Tune in if you don't already. The Corner, MichaelSavage.com, and TakiMag linked to the Jonestown piece, Glenn Beck seized on it for a monologue, and the article appeared in full at FrontPageMag.com (read it here).

Barack Obama holds his victory celebration in Grant Park tonight. Two of his earliest political supporters held a celebration of violence and nihilism in Grant Park thirty-nine-years ago. Read my special Election Day article in City Journal on the long, strange trip of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who have gone from children of privilege in the 1950s, to Weatherman rioters in Grant Park in 1969, to Grant Park celebrants of their friend's winning of the highest office in the land in 2008. Even in victory Obama can't escape his loser friends who have dogged him the whole campaign.

Bay State voters decide this November whether to retire the "Taxachusetts" moniker permanently through Question 1, a ballot initiative that abolishes--not cuts, or tweaks, or trims, but abolishes--the state's income tax. My piece at Forbes.com notes the singular direction of taxes in Massachusetts over the last century, arguing that with the introduction of an income tax, gasoline tax, sales tax, lottery, and cigarette sin-tax to add to the ancient property tax, it's time for Bay Staters to go in the opposite direction and vote goodbye to just one of its many onerous taxes.

From Nevada to Michigan to Ohio to Missouri to points beyond, Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) workers are running afoul of the law by registering phony voters. This year, Barack Obama's campaign funded the number one force for electoral fraud to the tune of more than $800,000. In the 1990s, Obama ran ACORN's Project Vote outfit in Illinois. In the U.S. Senate, he's been the mighty oak which grew from ACORN, remembering his roots by championing ACORN's agenda. Read my City Journal review of John Fund's timely Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, which details how some activists want to count every vote--again, and again, and again.

Forty years ago this week, Tom Hayden implored activists outside of the Democratic National Convention: "Make sure that if blood is going to flow, it will flow all over this city." It did. Yesterday, during another Democratic National Convention, Hayden's mouth once again inadvertantly aided Republicans. "I have met and like John McCain, but he bombed, and presumably killed, many people in a war I opposed," Hayden offered. "If I can set all that aside, I would hope that Americans will accept" that Obama's Weatherman friend Bill Ayers has changed, too. Outside of the 2008 Democratic National Convention activists hope to "Recreate 68." That's the last thing Barack Obama wants. Read my City Journal article wondering why anyone, particularly left-wing activists, would want to "Recreate 68."

When did the Constitution start saying that the president got to declare war? Where does the commerce clause give all three branches of the federal government the power to regulate interstate commerce, let alone intrastate commerce? Why did federal judges read specific legal prohibitions on busing as empowering them to command busing? Such questions are tackled in Thomas Woods and Kevin R.C. Gutzman's Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush, which I review today at the American Spectator.

Once an African American secured a major party's presidential nomination, did you think religion and not race would dominate the national conversation? From Reverend Wright to a "What He Believes" Newsweek cover to crude rumors of a Muslim upbringing to an upcoming appearance with John McCain at Rick Warren's megachurch, Barack Obama's run for the presidency has been chased by religion at every turn. I'm a believer, Obama professes. But a believer in what? In my article featured on TakiMag (read it: articles > blog posts), I show how the presumptive Democratic nominee's belief in the social gospel, federalizing local charitable initiatives, and, yes, immanentizing the eschaton makes his faith as much a political as a religious creed.

In 1968, the New Left cost the Democrats the presidency by rioting at their convention and urging young people to shun voting. In 2008, the not-so-new Left may cost Barack Obama the presidency by their vocal support. Read my piece in City Journal online about the '68 rioters, Communist schismatics, and Weatherman terrorists who give Barack Obama the the type of support every candidate wishes for their opponent.

The racism of the American past that the Left uncourageously crusades against from the present is the Left's history as well. Robert Owen's New Harmony commune that effectively launched the American Left banned African Americans. The Communist Party ejected Japanese Americans from its rolls after Pearl Harbor. The Democratic Party countenanced the Theodore Bilbos and John Rankins, but just one black member of Congress before World War II. In my National Review Online article on the Left, racism, and the historic Barack Obama campaign (click and read), I tackle the Left's version of American Exceptionalism that posits that leftists have always held superior attitudes on race vis-a-vis their fellow countrymen.

Republicans appointed six of the seven judges that found in California's constitution a right to same-sex marriage. Roe, Kelo, and so many other outrageous U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the last forty years were authored by Republican appointees. Read my article in TakiMag that wonders if automatically rewarding the GOP with votes to curb the judicial activism of the courts they have shaped does not in fact invite such courthouse affronts against the people and the constitution.

I wrote A Conservative History of the American Left in part to conserve the history the Left would rather discard. With that in mind, I produced for FrontPageMag.com the Top Ten Skeletons in the Left's Closet. From the assassination of three U.S. presidents by communists to leading Democrats fawning over the pre-Jonestown Jim Jones, the list details the history that the American Left wants you to forget.

Jack Reed and Louise Bryant passionately argued for free love. Their diseased genitals offered a convincing rebuttal. In the American Spectator Online, I break a story more than ninety years in the making--how historians and Hollywood whitewashed the consequences of two left-wing icons practicing the liberal principles that they preached. Eighty-eight years ago, the Bolsheviks buried Jack Reed in the shadows of the Kremlin. For nearly that long, American admirers of Reed's have buried evidence--open to the world at Harvard University's Houghton Library--that demonstrates not only the pitfalls of free love, but the mendacity of one of the most nominated films in the history of the Academy Awards.

In 1964, Carl Oglesby was married with children, living in what he calls a "see-Spot-run" neighborhood, and working a white-collar job in the defense industry. In 1965, he was the president of Students for a Democratic Society, trading bourgeois tranquility for a life of protesting the Vietnam War, bedding movement sex symbols, cutting folk albums, and quixotically trying to forge an alliance between the New Left and the Old Right. Read my review of Carl Oglesby's Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement in the City Journal's online edition.

Senator Joseph McCarthy did not correctly finger a single Communist, but a multitude of them, writes Stan Evans in his explosive book about the most controversial senator in the history of that august body. Read my review of M. Stanton Evans's Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies on ISI's new web journal, First Principles, and discover why Cold Warriors who took on domestic subversives in fact instead of in books fare poorly in the books written about the period.

Barack Obama's "Change We Can Believe In" is a euphemism for more of the same--the same big government, identity politics, paternalism, and anti-Americanism that the Left has been pushing for more than a century. Read my lengthy article on TakiMag, which explores the paralells between the biography of the man who would be president and the history of the movement that he represents. To perpetuate the man and the movement, much forgetting is in order.

Three years after its advisory vote to bar military recruiters from the city's public schools and colleges, San Francisco has finally come around to honoring the military--Stalin's, not America's. Last weekend, the city unveiled a monument venerating the so-called Abraham Lincoln Brigade who shipped out in the 1930s to inflict Communism on the Spanish. Read my piece at The American Spectator's website detailing the American Left's continued obsession with honoring the dishonorables who served Stalin.

When Congressmen David Bonior, Mike Thompson, and Jim McDermott travelled to Iraq in 2002, Saddam Hussein's intelligence operatives picked up the tab, the federal government alleges. Read my piece on National Review Online on how the trio's ideological tourism carried on a shameful tradition of junkets to totalitarian nations by leftists willing to excuse the misdeeds of America's enemies.

Thirty-eight years ago, Cathy Wilkerson and her friends plotted to blow up soldiers at a dance at Fort Dix. Instead of killing servicemen and their dates, the Weathermen blew up Wilkerson's father's Greenwich Village townhouse. How did the sons and daughters of privilege become amateur revolutionaries? Read my review of Cathy Wilkerson's memoir Flying to Close to the Sun at First Principles, ISI's new webzine.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of my interview with Howard Phillips are now online. The Conservative Caucus chairman discusses Republican misses on the Supreme Court, the state of the conservative movement, the sharp left turn of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, pulling Fidel Castro's beard, the George W. Bush presidency, schooldays at Boston Latin and Harvard, and much, much more. Read the entire can't-miss interview with this principled conservative here.

David Horowitz’s The End of Time is a beautiful book about death. My review of the latest work of this unlikeliest of senior citizens can be read at TownHall.com.

What contemporary history of America highlights that just seven percent of Africans brought to the New World were enslaved in the United States? Or that as Standard Oil’s prices dropped their market share rose to a monopoly level? Or that Joseph McCarthy underestimated the scope of Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government? None that I know of, other than Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States, which I review on FrontPageMag.com.

Employees at each of U.S. News and World Report's top twenty-five national universities overwhelmingly favored John Kerry over George W. Bush in the 2004 election cycle. Giving ratios of employees at selected schools totaled 9-1 at Duke, 20-1 at Yale, 43-1 at MIT, 302-1 at Princeton, and infinity at Dartmouth, where not a single employee appeared on Federal Election Commission reports as donating to the Bush campaign. I've just completed a major study called Deep Blue Campuses (read it here) for the Leadership Institute's Campus Leadership Program. On campus, the talk is diversity. The reality is conformity.

W.E.B. Du Bois declared in 1920, "Absolutely segregate the races and sections of the world." Thirteen years later, the NAACP would eject him from the organization he helped found because of such statements as "I fight Segregation with Segregation." After traveling to Nazi Germany in 1937, he returned to America with largely glowing reports, penning an article called "The German Case Against the Jews" that excused anti-Semitism in the Third Reich by labeling it "a reasoned prejudice." At mid-century Du Bois propagandized that North Korea was attacked to launch the Korean War, that "Harry Truman ranks with Adolf Hitler as one of the greatest killers of our day," and that Stalin was a "great" and "courageous" man. In the early 1960s, Du Bois renounced his American citizenship and formally joined the Communist Party, declaring communism "the only way of human life." Why, in 2005, would John Kerry push the United States Senate to honor this man? Read my Human Events article that broke this story today to learn more about the extremist John Kerry seeks to honor.

Did William Rehnquist swear in the wrong man on Inauguration Day? That's what many protesting the start of George W. Bush's second term believe. Pre-election taunts of "accidental president" and "re-defeat Bush" allowed Bush-haters to benefit from the illusion that they represented the majority. November 2, one might think, would have shattered that illusion. It didn’t. In my piece on National Review Online, I discuss the Left's dismissal of the painful truth in favor of a comforting myth.

In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse argued that true tolerance meant censoring the Right, while Noam Chomsky preached that to engage in debate with the Right on certain issues was to lose one's humanity. Ideas have consequences. The post-sixties Left currently dominating the campuses has put the words of these intellectual morons into action in a recent round of newspaper thefts and acts of intimidation. Read about the current state of free speech in academia, and what can be done to defend against campus assaults on free speech, in my article on NewsMax today.

The military is one of the most popular institutions in America but one of the least popular on campus. This is a direct consequence of stacking faculties with people politically alienated from the society that surrounds them. If the campus repulsion to the armed forces seems so foreign to us it is because we are so foreign to the people teaching at these institutions. Read my NewsMax article detailing how two of the institutions most corrupted by the Left--academia and the courts--have combined to kick military recruiters off of law school campuses.

Hamilton College has hired Susan Rosenberg, an advocate of "collective violence" against the U.S. government, to teach a writing class next semester. Caught with several hundred pounds of explosives in 1984, Rosenberg was serving a fifty-eight year prison sentence until President Clinton pardoned her on his last day in office. The hiring of the unrepentant Rosenberg, unfortunately, is not an isolated example of a college bringing on board a faculty member largely because of the faculty member's criminal past. My NewsMax article explains why setting off bombs, aiding terrorists, kidnapping, and even murder are no obstacle to steady employment at a number of U.S. academic institutions.

The biopic Kinsey fails both as biography and motion picture. Against a backdrop of strawmen and stereotypes, Bill Condon's Kinsey emerges to slay ignorance. The real Kinsey did more to perpetuate sexual ignorance than any other figure of the past century. Perhaps in tribute, this fawning movie adopts Alfred Kinsey's dishonesty in telling the Indiana University professor's story. "Artistic license" whitewashes Kinsey's extreme masochism, tolerance of pedophilia, and stacking his sample group with prison inmates and homosexuals, but it fails to make the movie interesting or entertaining. Read what the film starring Liam Neeson leaves out in my review of Kinsey on Accuracy in Media's site.

The U.S. map is red but America's campuses are deep blue. I examined Federal Election Commission records and found donations to John Kerry wildly outpaced donations to George W. Bush. My amateur inspection found that Harvard employees gave 32 times more money to Kerry than to Bush. The disparity was 270-1 at Princeton, 32-1 at Cornell, 22-1 at Penn, 11-1 at Yale, 7-1 at Brown, and 5-1 at Columbia. Get this: because I could find no Dartmouth employee that had donated to President Bush's reelection efforts, John Kerry received an infinite amount more from the faculty and administrators at the Hanover, New Hampshire school than his opponent. I detail my findings, and why a politically alienated academia is bad for education, on NewsMax.com.

Alfred Kinsey circumcised himself with a pocketknife, compulsively pierced his genitals, and partook in peculiar activities involving a noose and his groin. But the Indiana University professor's unsettling personal behavior is not why his mid-century reports on human sexuality are so controversial today. My piece on TownHall.com explains why Kinsey's dishonest scholarship, rather than the bedroom behavior that motivated that scholarship, serves as the primary basis for objecting to Kinsey and the hagiographic film by the same name that hits theaters across the nation on Friday.

On 9/11, nineteen young men sharing the same Islamic faith and Arab heritage hijacked four planes and killed nearly 3,000 people. To prevent future hijackings, the federal government demands that its airport security forget past hijackings. Specifically, government rules dictate that airport screeners treat elderly black women the same as twenty-five year old Muslim men. My review of Michael Smerconish's Flying Blind wonders if the government's indulgence of political correctness in favor of some passengers' convenience comes at the expense of other passengers' safety.

If there's one thing that short-circuits the mental wiring of leftists, it is the name George W. Bush. For the last four year's, George W. Bush's enemies, by their immoderation, have succeeded driving Americans into the president's arms. On November 2, the Bush-haters have the opportunity to turn passion into votes. My article on TownHall.com explores the strange world of the Bush-haters, wondering if the president could have been handed a better set of enemies had he the opportunity to invent his opposition.

English animal-rights leaders have given their imprimatur to protests targeting the children of biomedical scientists. Where did they get such ideas? One inspiration for animal-rights extremism, my article on TownHall explains, is Princeton University Professor Peter Singer, who gives his okay to parents killing their newborns but objects to schoolchildren lunching on turkey sandwiches.

The most dangerous delusion is the idea that man is perfectible. The goal is unattainable, but the crimes committed to achieve it are very real. The belief in heaven on earth led to the horrors of the gas chamber, the gulag, and the killing fields. Today, it leads to theocratic screwballs randomly beheading Westerners in hopes of creating Allah's earthly kingdom. If you really believe that the ideology you follow will bring utopia, I write today on TownHall, then all is justified in its advancement. That's scary.

Communism is dead in Bucharest, Phnom Penh, and Managua. It lives in Madison, Berkeley, and Chapel Hill. My article at NewsMax.com explains how American colleges and universities are honoring prominent Communists by naming scholarships, academic chairs, and buildings in their honor.

Are pedophiles a persecuted group deserving society's tolerance and protection? A small, but growing, number of college professors say yes. Pro-pedophile academics are attempting to give their vile beliefs a scientific air by invoking famed researcher Alfred Kinsey as the source of their "scholarship." But as I discuss in my article on NewsMax, Kinsey, like his present-day admirers, is a frightening example of how much harm intellectual morons can unleash with a lie.

Dan Rather still doesn't believe the Texas Air National Guard documents disparaging President Bush that he broadcast are forgeries. So why, and to whom, did he apologize? Rather's lame act of contrition Monday night didn't kill the Rathergate story. My NewsMax article shows that it's only just begun.

Employees of America's oldest college, Harvard, have given 97 percent of their donations this presidential election cycle to the Kerry campaign and about three percent to the reelection effort of George W. Bush. At America's second oldest college, William & Mary, employees have given 100 percent of their donations to John Kerry. The uniform support of John Kerry by college professors and administrators, as my article on NewsMax demonstrates, evokes the lopsided vote tallies in Castro's Cuba or Hussein's Iraq. Folks, where's the diversity?

When scientist Stephen Hawking was confronted with proof that his theory was wrong, he sided with truth over self-interest. When the facts went against the assertions of environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, leftist guru Noam Chomsky, and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, they simply ignored the facts. TownHall.com features my article comparing a real scholar with numerous pseudo-scholars.

Dan Rather is giving Dans a bad name. I'm fighting back to redeem the pride of Dans everywhere. Read my take on the Rathergate affair on TownHall.com.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of my ultimate interview of the Ultimate Warrior is now online. Read Warrior's behind-the-scenes take on Hulk Hogan, Sting, Vince McMahon, and other wrestling heavyweights. Plus, Warrior talks politics, gives one of the best definitions of conservatism I've read ("preserving those things that have worked throughout time"), and dishes out weight-training advice.

Lady Margaret Thatcher, Vice President Richard Cheney, and over 800 dignitaries paid tribute to President Reagan at a state funeral inside the Capitol. Outside, a twenty-one gun salute, formations of jets screeching above, and companies of marching soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines honored the 40th U.S. President. Perhaps Reagan's greatest adulation came from the everyday Americans lining the route of his funeral procession. Read my article at FrontPageMag.

The nation mourns President Reagan's death. The hardcore Left cheers. On the day of Ronald Reagan's passing, activists at an International ANSWER rally outside the White House celebrated the death of America's 40th President. Read the article at National Review Online.

My take on the Million Mom March appears on National Review Online today. Click here to read the article.

Howard Dean had the organization, the passion, the volunteers, key endorsements, saturation media coverage and even the money. Yet he still lost Monday's Iowa caucuses. Why? Full article published at Newsmax.com.

A review of The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values by Tammy Bruce. Originally published in the American Enterprise online.

Who is the most influential historian among young people? Filmmaker Ken Burns? Could it be the Democrats’ court historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.? Biographer David McCullough? How about the late Stephen Ambrose, whose triumphant view of American history has brought alive such colorful characters as Meriwether Lewis, Crazy Horse, and George Custer? Full article published at FrontPageMag.

The 2002 Republican sweep was historic. For the first time since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, a first-term president’s party increased its numbers in Congress during an off-year election.

Why did the Democrats fare so poorly? Full article published on Newsmax.com.

Despite the intellectual pretensions of those who practice it, anti-Americanism is reflexive and mindless. Patriotism, despite its bad reputation amongst the intelligentsia, is a rational sentiment for an American to hold. This is the thesis I prove in my new book, Why the Left Hates America. Full article published in Front Page Mag.

Roughly 100,000 people crammed 20 city blocks in New York City this Saturday. Bearing signs proclaiming "Bush Is a Terrorist," "Oil Is Murder," and "Change Regimes in the U.S.," demonstrators blocks away from the base of the rally strained to listen to the amplified remarks of Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, and other familiar activist luminaries.

While this demonstration and hundreds of others garnered page-one coverage across the globe, the attitudes and beliefs of the actual protestors received scant attention. Full article published at Newsmax.com.

DAVID HOROWITZ’S INSTINCTS were right in attempting to take out an ad in the Daily Californian. If you’re a conservative, paying for your right to speak is just about the only way for your ideas to reach a large audience on a campus as inhospitable to free thought as the University of California-Berkeley. Conservative views, after all, are scarcely to be found amongst the faculty, officially invited guest lecturers, or on the op-ed page of the Daily Cal. When conservatives do speak out at Berkeley, they are shouted down and threatened. Full article published on Front Page Mag.

WHAT HAPPENED to David Horowitz at Berkeley was an aberration. No, the censoring of his ideas was not out of the ordinary. As evidenced by last semester's student-mob action to prevent Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking in the city of Berkeley and the shouting down of a talk given by this writer and the subsequent book-burning of a booklet that I had authored, censorship is quite common at Berkeley. Full article published at Front Page Mag.

One of the more controversial, and powerful, figures of the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt was Harry Hopkins. FDR Biographer Robert Sherwood noted that even partisans of the President "disliked Hopkins intensely and resented the extraordinary position of influence and authority which he held...According to Herb Romerstein and Eric Breindel, authors of The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors...Hopkins, arguably the man with the greatest sway over our 32nd President, was an agent of the Soviet Union. Full article published in Accuracy in Academia's Campus Report.

On Saturday, April 29, more than 500 people converged upon the sleepy town of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Their purpose was to protest Antioch College, which was honoring convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal at its commencement. Full article published on National Review Online.

When searching for examples of state-sponsored barbarities, intellectuals are quick to point to the Spanish Inquisition or its Protestant imitation, the Witchhunt. How could anyone, modern academics wonder, persecute another for their beliefs? These same intellectuals, ironically, are often the very people who served as cheerleaders for political persecution and mass murder on a scale unmatched in human history. Full article originally published in Accuracy in Academia's Campus Report.

Intellectuals are often hesitant to provide a truthful presentation of society, people, or events becuase doing so often undermines their preconceived ideological notions about how the world works. Because of this, elites often shy away from presenting their ideas in a non-fiction format. Instead, they opt for the stage, the silver screen, television, or novels. The Leftist worldview that fails miserably in practice works remarkably well on Broadway and in Hollywood. Full article originally published in Campus Watch.