Fort Hood massacre shows how political correctness can kill
November 13, 2009
The massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, last week has shined a harsh, unremitting light on the hold that "political correctness" has on the American military. There is an eruption of commentary on the appalling results of ignoring disturbing things so as not to appear "discriminatory." It struck me the other day that the big picture unveiled by the murders of 13 Americans and the wounding of more than two dozen others, soldiers and civilians, last Thursday is simply this: Political correctness kills. As I got ready for my show on Tuesday, I Googled the phrase and discovered that a large number of other people had been exploring the concept. No wonder.
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Not the first president to break promises
November 6, 2009
"The doer is always conscienceless; no one has a conscience except the spectator." - Goethe
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Massive fraud makes Medicare a lousy model
October 30, 2009
In what must be considered a monumental understatement, Attorney General Eric H. Holder told CBS News' "60 Minutes" that more oversight of Medicare funds is needed. I'll say, considering what we have learned about the scope and ease of stealing billions of dollars from the American taxpayer by means of fraudulent claims for care that never happened. To Mr. Holder's credit, his agency has been frantically cracking down on this thievery for some time now, resulting in the indictments of dozens of criminals in Miami, Detroit, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Still, this is merely the tip of what turns out to be a gargantuan iceberg.
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Perpetual war is here — and Americans are getting used to it
October 9, 2009
A new poll shows a substantial majority of Americans have resigned themselves to the reality of our nation's perpetual foreign wars. They don't like it, but they see it happening and know there is nothing they can do about it. The poll, conducted by Clarus Research Group, showed that 68 percent of us agree with idea that we won't either win or lose the war in Afghanistan, now eight years long, but will instead just remain there. The image of flies and flypaper again swirls in my head, just as it did at the time of the invasion of Iraq. We invaded these places and now we're stuck there, and President Barack Obama is likewise stuck, not on flypaper, but on the horns of a dilemma: Does he send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, as his area commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has publicly demanded, or does he change strategies a la Joe Biden and rely more on special ops and drones to harass the Taliban and kill whatever members of al-Qaeda we can find?
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Increasing uneasiness over Obamacare
October 2, 2009
To change something that isn't what you'd like into something else is not necessarily to "fix" it, if that something else comes laden with significant new unwelcome negatives. That, in a nutshell, is the problem with the proposed remodeling of our health care system. As Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute put it on my show this week: "Congressional leaders and the White House are pushing through their aggressive agenda to remake our health sector as though they are oblivious to the fear and outrage outside the Beltway and the pleas of the American People to apply the brakes."
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Can a test be meaningful if failure isn't allowed?
September 25, 2009
I don't know which is more annoying: folks who grouse and grumble about what's going on - like me - or people like those who tell us that the results of Maryland's new required exams to graduate from high school are a success. Here's a set of tests, in English, algebra, biology and government, designed ostensibly to boost the level of learning needed to receive a diploma, administered to more than 60,000 students, and only 11 fail to graduate solely because they could not pass them. I understand the political need to dumb down the tests, or in the delicate wording of a Washington Post story on the matter, "the compromises educators face in balancing what is politically palatable against raising academic standards." But the degree of the dumbing down is quite remarkable.
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The awful prospect of turning war over to machines
September 18, 2009
"Once in a while, everything about the world changes at once. This is one of those times."
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Eight years after 9/11, bin Laden seems closer to his goals than we are
September 11, 2009
None of us will ever forget where we were and what we were doing that fateful morning eight years ago today, when the hijacked airliners flew into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. I was just leaving the house for work when my wife called out for me to come back inside. The first plane had just struck its target, and for a moment we didn't know if it was an accident. All doubts disappeared seconds later when we saw, live on television, the second tower struck by another plane. In that amazing moment we knew that life would never again be quite the same. Then came the third attack, the one on the Pentagon - and the worries about what was next.
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Anger over big government, high taxes is reshaping politics
August 28, 2009
Editorialists at major American newspapers have a history of magical thinking when it comes to taxing us. How many times have we read editorials urging higher taxes as the preferred solution for any perceived governmental budget problems? Liberals have a catechistic response to most any demand for greater social spending: Raise taxes and get on with it. They seem ignorant of one of the basic laws of economics, which is that taxes discourage production. The more a thing is taxed, the less you get of it. This is why the huge expenditure of money by the federal government in the name of "stimulus" cannot possibly make up for the wealth destroyed by the taxes extracted from the productive economy to pay for it.
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Short attention spans and short memories
August 20, 2008
Nicholas Carr thinks that Google is making us "stoopid." In a recent piece in The Atlantic, he says those of us who constantly surf the Net can't concentrate properly anymore -- that instant access to virtually all information reduces our attention span. Mr. Carr says he can no longer immerse himself in a book or a long article, something that used to be easy for him. Has this happened to you? I thought so. It's happened to me as well.
