America lost a true icon today, when Neil Armstrong, simultaneously taking for the last time both small step and giant leap, departed this world at the age of 82. The former Navy pilot and astronaut, who left the first human footprints – as well as messages of goodwill and prayers to the Almighty from U.S. presidents and world leaders alike – on our moon, inspired generations of Americans and citizens of the world with both word and deed.
Read More »As the time draws near for Mitt Romney to announce his running mate [Note: Read this important essay from Dan McLaughlin on that pick], the Obama campaign is sending out emails requesting any and all dirt on prospective VP picks, which can be submitted via subject-specific contact pages on its website. Those receiving the send-us-your-dirt treatment include Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, New Jersey Governor Chris | Read More »
President Obama’s latest clarification-inducing comment came Wednesday, and it’s eyebrow-raising to say the least. Speaking on employment and the economy, the silver-tongued president declared, “Just like we’ve tried [the Republicans'] plan, we’ve tried our plan, and it worked. That’s the difference.” Moe, who has graphically shown the fallacy of Obama’s “it worked” claim, summed up his rebuttal by declaring that “the only way that you | Read More »
Years ago, our own Dan McLaughlin defined ”swiftboating” as “Accurately quoting a Democratic politician’s own words.” By that definition, President Obama is being swiftboated up a creek without a paddle right now, as constant repetition of his own words has the campaigner-in-chief and every attack dog he can muster working day and night to “clarify” his remarks on small business. For review, here’s the president’s direct | Read More »
The latest evidence that Little Lord Farquaad New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg’s brain is melting into a puddle of hot goo came courtesy of a Monday night appearance on Piers Morgan’s CNN “show.” This time, the pint-sized billionaire with a taste for cradle-to-the-grave control over the proletariat suggested that “police officers across this country…stand up collectively and say ‘we’re going to go on strike’” | Read More »
At 7am Sunday morning, Pennsylvania State University president Rodney Erickson released a statement announcing that the statue of Joe Paterno that has stood outside Beaver Stadium since 2001 would be removed. By half-past eight, the job was finished, and a football legend cast in bronze no longer adorned the stadium grounds. Removing the statue was the correct move, and one that had to be made | Read More »
That’s the three-word message I have for the folks who are using last night’s massacre at an Aurora, Colorado cineplex as an excuse to fuel their hatred of political opponents, to push pet issues like gun control, or simply to babble stupidly. This message is applicable to random unhinged tweeters who are calling for the arrest of Rush Limbaugh. It is applicable to those currently | Read More »
In 2008, the Obama campaign raised and spent more money than has ever been spent in a presidential election, coming up with the “parallel public financing” crock* to cover for reneging on an agreement with John McCain to take real public financing once they realized just how much money they could raise, both at home and abroad. The 2012 edition of Obama for America was supposed | Read More »
In case you missed it, the June jobs report is out, and the numbers are not good (though the Obama administration had a ready-made – and well-worn – excuse ready to go at a moment’s notice; more on that below). As Daniel Horowitz wrote here this morning: The headline number of the establishment survey is that only 80,000 net jobs were created last month, about | Read More »
Republican members of the House Oversight and Senate Judiciary Committees have been turning up the heat on Attorney General Eric Holder over his obstructive and misleading testimony about Fast and Furious, the operation in which the ATF coerced American gun dealers into selling firearms to Mexican cartels, and then allowed them to “walk” across our southern border (all without a whisper to the Mexican government). After being | Read More »
Attorney General Eric Holder appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday morning to answer questions about several ongoing issues. These include the federal government’s lawsuit against Florida to prevent the state from culling its voter rolls of noncitizens and others who legally don’t belong, as well as the ongoing investigation (led in part by a Holder appointee and former Obama donor) into a recent spate | Read More »
Yesterday morning, President Obama made time on his busy schedule to give brief interviews to reporters from several “swing” states. The markets hit included Roanoke, VA; Jacksonville, FL; Greenville, SC; Sioux City, IA; Green Bay, WI; Colorado Springs, CO; Reno, NV; and Fresno, CA (note: if all of these states are actually in play, then Obama is obviously in a bigger world of hurt than | Read More »
THE REIGN OF RAMESSES III has long intrigued scholars and laypersons alike, both because this pharaoh’s reign took place during a watershed period in history, and because of the remarkable preservation of his majestic “Mansion of a Million Years” at Medinet Habu. With Ramesses III: The Life and Times of Egypt’s Last Hero (University of Michigan Press, 2012), volume editors Eric H. Cline and David | Read More »
THE ISOLATIONIST MODEL of looking at ancient civilizations, from Pharaonic Egypt to Kassite Babylonia to Classical Greece, has increasingly fallen out of fashion in recent years as more and more scholars have begun to realize, and to study, the deep interconnections between ancient civilizations, particularly from the Late Bronze Age onward. In The Mediterranean Context of Early Greek History, Nancy H. Demand, professor emerita of | Read More »
IMAGINE A GOVERNMENT agency designed for the specific purpose of investigating and preventing the unlawful use, manufacture, and possession of firearms. Now imagine this agency engaging in an operation that not only goes against that purpose, but actually seeks to accomplish the opposite, by actively encouraging the sale of firearms to people whose ties to organized crime and gun violence are well known– and that | Read More »
The voluminous Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia, which boasts five sections, 52 chapters, and 54 authors, truly covers every topic that can be dealt with in 1,174 typewritten pages. Unfortunately, the attempted geographic and temporal scope – the entirety of the Anatolian peninsula over the course of nearly 10,000 years – would require several volumes this length to cover in full. As a result, some | Read More »
I’ll leave further commentary to our excellent lawyers, but here’s the video: The CNN legal correspondent’s comments included the following: This was a train wreck for the Obama administration. This law looks like it’s going to be struck down…All of the predictions including mine that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong. …The only conservative justice who looked like he | Read More »
Updated below the fold Ever since the ‘Affordable Care Act’ was passed through a combination of parliamentary maneuvering, state-level kickbacks, and Congressmen being willing to sacrifice their seats for its passage, the left has sought to distance the horrendously unpopular monstrosity of a law from its chief cheerleader, President Obama. This has included railing against people online and in mainstream media, like ABC’s Jake Tapper, | Read More »
THE BASIC HISTORY of World War II’s European front is (or should be) well known to every western adult and schoolchild. From the offensives that brought the majority of the European continent under Axis control, to the D-Day invasion and Operation Overlord, to Hitler’s unthinkable campaign to exterminate Jews and other “undesirables,” the general flow of the first half of the 1940s has been the | Read More »
As we hit the 10 1/2 year mark in Afghanistan, the state of trust and confidence between the coalition and the Afghan people is at perhaps its lowest ebb, and support for the war effort is wavering across the political spectrum. Given this, it appears time to reconsider the current status of our effort there — what have we accomplished, and what do we still | Read More »
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