The fourth quarter 2023 crime report from the FBI, the federal government’s keeper of crime data, is unreliable at best and deceptive at worst. The FBI’s preliminary 2023 data show murder declined by 13.2% across the country and violent crime dropped 5.7% compared to 2022 levels. Various news headlines have reported the FBI’s numbers unquestioningly, […]
When it comes to the historic chaos at our borders, it is easy to focus on footage of caravans of migrants illegally crossing the southwest border. Make no mistake — these crossings alone are incredibly compelling evidence that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is disregarding and abusing our immigration laws. However, an even […]
Last week, the National Organization for Women objected to women’s sports being reserved for females only. NOW needs to change its name — maybe from NOW to the National Organization for Misogyny, because it definitely does not represent women any longer. Not only is the organization advocating males in women’s sports, it is trying to […]
We owe many of our expectations of the presidency to the office’s first occupant, George Washington. He set the precedent on many matters, including his being called “Mr. President,” to his only serving two terms. Washington also set standards for exercising certain presidential powers. On April 5, 1792, he issued the first presidential veto of […]
It’s finally happened. After months of whispers that President Joe Biden is disgusted with Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, on Thursday, America’s commander in chief demanded “an immediate ceasefire” during a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. That halt in combat operations is “essential,” according to Biden, “to stabilize and improve the humanitarian situation and […]
Why would a multibillion-dollar healthcare company fire a white male executive for no cause, only to replace him with a black woman weeks later? Because the company’s Diversity and Inclusion Executive Council told them to, that’s why. And while the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has held that the fired executive is entitled to […]
My fellow veterans in the Facebook veterans group warned me not to write about the E4 Mafia. I should have listened. My most recent column contains errors so obvious that I absolutely deserve the ”What the hell is the matter with you?” messages from readers. I should have made sure I understood the NCO ranks […]
There’s probably a nicer way to put this, but I’m just going to come out and say it: People in the ancient world suffered from major anxiety disorders. It’s fashionable these days to think of the ancients as repositories of great wisdom. We’re not supposed to use words such as “primitive” and “ignorant” to describe […]
Last month, the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez published his seventh novel, Until August. (The pedantic might suggest that at a slim 110 pages in suspiciously large type, it is more accurately described as a novella, but never mind.) There would be nothing especially remarkable about this, save that Márquez died almost exactly a […]
“Armed with a black belt in karate and a Ph.D. in philosophy, Patrick Swayze …” — do we even need the rest of that sentence? Could the capsule summary of the original 1989 Road House append any predicate that wouldn’t be awesome? “Ups production at the local cardboard factory.” “Attends George H.W. Bush’s inauguration.” “Gets […]
As a measure of how lefty my upbringing was, we had a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hanging on the kitchen wall. My parents were ’60s activists-turned-urban pioneer social workers, my father a charter member of Missouri’s New Left, and my mother a Greenwich Village folkie by way of the bus from Jersey. And […]
Lyndon Johnson once observed that “power is where power goes.” In his new book, Jared Cohen deftly explores what the most powerful men in the world do after the power is gone. Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House examines the post-presidential careers of seven very different former […]
There is a moment in Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography of Ian Fleming in which one of the James Bond author’s female friends, not conquests, is quoted as saying that he harbored the ambition to be “the Renaissance ideal, the Complete Man.” Shakespeare has taken the second part of this for the subtitle of his study. […]
