USC lecturer Darry Sragow dismissed California Republicans as "really stupid," "racist" and "angry old white people" before his political science class last fall. Those remarks wouldn't be news - except that student Tyler Talgo secretly videotaped Sragow, and the bias-watchdog group Campus Reform posted 15 minutes of excerpts from the 2 1/2-hour class, which the Drudge Report picked up. That turned Sragow into a chew toy for cable news pundits. As a Republican, I found ...
Attacks from abroad - Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - have united us. Yet domestic atrocities lately seem only to deepen our divisions. The bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City was seized upon to savage government critics like Rush Limbaugh. After the murder of six innocents, including a 9-year-old girl, and the wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and a dozen others in Tucson, Ariz., by a certifiable lunatic, Sarah Palin was charged with moral ...
Country music star Brad Paisley is either an idiot or a genius. If he wrote the song "Accidental Racist" to stir a whirlwind of (mostly bad) publicity, he's a genius. But the negative cultural consensus strongly suggests he should have never been dumb enough to try to write a racial-harmony song.
Turf wars can be the silliest of all scuffles, and no place does silly with more zeal than Texas.
I happened to be sitting in the Fox News bureau between "hits" on Tuesday morning, when the news broke about the stabbing at Lone Star College in Houston. Watching it unfold in real time, I couldn't help but think (as I'm sure all of us did) about the Newtown, Conn., massacre and the families flying to Washington and the fear that the parents of the Texas college students must be feeling.
When the Transportation Security Administration announced that it will allow passengers to carry small knives on planes effective April 25, my reaction matched that of Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., who has called the policy change "misguided and, frankly, dangerous." It's impossible to think about the ban on knives on planes without remembering what prompted it - the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
As recently as 1956, nearly 39 percent of blacks voted Republican in that year's presidential election. After the Civil War, Abe Lincoln's Republican Party easily carried the black vote - where blacks were allowed to vote. Unwelcome in the Democratic Party, most blacks voted Republican and continued to do so through the early part of the 20th century. It wasn't until 1948, when 77 percent of the black vote went to Harry Truman, who had ...
The legendary British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died, and the national media tried to pay their respects, not only for breaking Britain's "glass ceiling" with a "bruising" political style, but for transforming Britain and helping wind down the Cold War.
The Associated Press announced last week that it no longer sanctions the term "illegal immigrant" in its stylebook. Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll explained that the AP has decided it is wrong for reporters to use the word "illegal" to describe a person, but it's OK to use the word to "describe only an action, such as living or immigrating to a country illegally."
That America created only 88,000 jobs in March, less than half the number anticipated, was jolting news, indicating the recovery that the White House has boasted about may not be at hand.
Thanks to the industrializers of American agriculture, we finally know why the chicken crossed the road: to run away from the factory farm.
An invaluable bit of advice often shared within the military community is to never, ever, underestimate your enemy. The annals of history are replete with those who have ignored this axiom.
The philosopher George Santayana wrote: "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." That is what we're doing.
Whom does Barack Obama want to please more - out-of-work adults who would love a high-wage job building the Keystone XL pipeline or tony venture capitalists who travel cloistered in private jets when they're not complaining that Washington doesn't do enough about global warming?
DEAR DIDI: My dog runs out the door when I answer it. How do I keep him from doing this? -Doggy Mommy in Manteca
California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom likes to be out front on issues. As San Francisco mayor, he approved same-sex marriages in City Hall even though they weren't legal. He pushed for a first-of-its-kind ban on city pharmacies selling cigarettes. Likewise, he signed the Special City's first-in-the-nation ban on groceries giving away plastic bags.
It is that time of year again.
When you get right down to it, the political targeting and stalling of tax-exempt applications by the IRS was an effort to defund the tea party. Rick Santelli, one of the tea party founders and my CNBC colleague, was the first to make this point. I've taken it a step further: The IRS was taking the tea party out of play for the 2012 election, as it looked to avoid a repeat of 2010 and another tea party landslide.
My state of Texas seems to have an inordinate share of nincompoops in public office. But it's only fair that office holders from other states be considered before deciding which one is the nincompoopiest of all.
"The American people are weary. They don't want boots on the ground. I don't want boots on the ground. The worst thing the United States could do right now is put boots on the ground in Syria."
As a journalist, I am not supposed to admit this, but: I sympathize with the Obama administration's frustration over national security leaks. After a spate of leaks last year - notably, The Associated Press' reporting that national security officials foiled an underwear bomb 2.0 attempt last May - Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein joined Republicans to denounce the Beltway's proclivity for leaking classified information. "This has to stop," quoth DiFi. "When people say they ...
The Obama scandals started piling up on top of each other in the last few days. The civil servants who testified on Benghazi were heartbreaking. Then the IRS admitted a punitive agenda against tax exemptions for groups with "tea party" in the name or groups that "educate about the Constitution."
Monumental gifts to museums are coinciding with the erosion of arts programs at the nation's public schools.
Last Sept. 11, a terrorist attack left four Americans dead at the Benghazi, Libya, diplomatic mission. The next day, a State Department official wrote in an email, "The group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al-Sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists." Days later, however, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice went on Sunday talk shows and blamed an anti-Islam video for the violence, even though others in her own department knew better.
Three young Cleveland girls missing and presumed dead turned up alive and in good health. A hero of the story is a neighbor, Charles Ramsey, a black man who helped free the girls from the home in which they were apparently imprisoned for some 10 years.
It sounded like a freedom-of-religion case when a Columbus, Texas high school relay-race team was disqualified from the state track championship because Derrick Hayes pointed heavenward after his team won the race. That would seem odd in a red state like Texas. It turned out that officials were so strict, they warned runners to make no hand gestures after the finish line. Hayes had apparently pointed forward, and then upward, and for that he was out.
Amy Meyer was curious. Then she was appalled. Then she was charged with the "crime" of using a cell phone to video what appalled her.
Federal unemployment benefits for 400,000 Californians out of work since last fall recently dropped 18 percent, a $52 cut out of weekly checks that average $297. Similar cuts are rolling out in other states.
The report from the Arlington, Va., Police Department is, on its face, hardly newsworthy:
Obamacare was supposed to be a big success by now, according to predictions made by liberals who railroaded it through Congress in 2010. Instead, as admitted by one of its leading architects, Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, it's heading for a "train wreck" later this year.