I carried a gun in New York City for more than a decade — back when there were thousands of murders a year and the Bronx led the nation in killings. On at least four occasions, that gun saved my life, and in a couple of instances, the lives of people who were with me at the time.
Obama: The Pieces Of The Puzzle Come Together
Recently, I came across a syndicated column from November 1979 that seemed to point 30 years into the future toward an obscure campaign issue that arose briefly in the 2008 presidential campaign
Truth is the Ultimate Gaffe
Gaffe, a word that temporarily came to be associated with political misstatements, has returned to its origins as a social faux pas, such as saying something at a dinner party that everyone knows to be true, but that know mustn’t be said out loud.
FACT CHECK: Are rich taxed less than secretaries?
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama makes it sound like there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries.
“Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires,” Obama said Monday. “That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that.”
The data tells a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.
A Nutshell History of Climate-Change Hysteria
At a time when the push is on to subject humanity to more crazy, shortsighted progressive environmental programs (read carbon regulations) to “save the earth” from its human population, a brief look at progressive airy predictions of the past is in order.
Enlightenment from the campus teach-ins of the 1960s and early 1970s slowly invaded conventional college classrooms so that the hippie-generation mentality of the time eventually became the hip academic norm. But, excitement over such topics as the planet’s imminent collapse from too many people and too much ice quickly waned when population increases yielded no global food fights and Mother Earth began to melt her once-advancing ice caps.
1st Amendment Protects ‘Hurtful’ Speech, Court Says
The First Amendment protects free speech even if it is as hurtful as signs at a Marine funeral proclaiming “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in a decision that was one of the court’s most significant on freedom of expression in recent years.
The Westboro Baptist Church celebrated the death of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder in Iraq with signs such as “God Hates You,” along with antigay messages at his funeral in Maryland in 2006. The late Marine’s father sought damages for emotional distress, but the court ruled that he had no case.
Vivian Schiller and the Party Line at NPR
The Juan Williams/NPR flap isn’t going away — and shouldn’t. Basically, Williams was fired for not toeing the party line at NPR. A number of observers, including Williams himself, are protesting the hypocrisy of NPR not dismissing the likes of Nina Totenberg for wishing AIDS upon the family of the late Jesse Helms. Of course, that’s no surprise. Totenberg’s hate speech doesn’t qualify as hate speech in the liberal lexicon. Totenberg toes the party line at NPR. She’s a good apparatchik, safe among the party hierarchy.