Job seekers line up at an “Amazon Jobs Day” fair in Fall River, Mass., August 2, 2017. (Brian Snyder/Reuters) Last month the unemployment rate sank to an amazing 3.6 percent, the lowest rate since 1969. Unfortunately, the labor market is in worse shape today than it was 50 years ago. An important difference is that

George Papadopoulos leaves after his sentencing hearing at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., September 7, 2018. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters) The State Department and an Australian diplomat grossly exaggerated Papadopoulos’s claims — which were probably false anyway. Chicanery was the force behind the formal opening of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. There was a false premise, namely:

A Qatar Airways Airbus A350-900 takes off in Colomiers, France, in 2017. (Regis Duvignau/Reuters) Qatar is circumventing a trade agreement intended to ensure fair competition in international air travel. President Trump is in the middle of a growing number of trade disputes. On Sunday, he promised to dramatically raise tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese

Judge Brett Kavanaugh (CUA Law School via YouTube) 1993—In Baehr v. Lewin, the Hawaii Supreme Court rules that traditional marriage is presumptively unconstitutional and orders the state to demonstrate a “compelling state interest” for denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In 1998, the people of Hawaii respond by amending the state constitution to confirm that

A pro-life marcher holds a sign outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., March 2, 2016. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters) One of their aims is to provoke thinking about the moral dimension of extinguishing a being with a visibly beating heart. While constitutional lawyers, ethicists, and theologians — in descending order of importance in the abortion debate

President Trump prepares to leave a note at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, May 22, 2017. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters) Left-wing smears overlook his numerous pro-Israel, pro-Jewish words and actions. Psychological projection has become a key characteristic of the Left. If Democrats and their serfs in the liberal media complain about something, they most likely do it

Palestinians do weird things. A few days ago, the Palestinian Authority (PA), which rules most of the West Bank, refused to accept the tax revenues it is owed by the Israeli government. Today, Hamas, which rules all of Gaza, launched more than 200 rockets into Israel. Both of these are, on the surface, self-defeating steps that make no sense.

Attorney General William Barr testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, May 1, 2019. (Aaron Bernstein/Reuters) Washington finds a bugaboo. I  can’t think of a better illustration of our partisan divide than the reactions to Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Democrats are furious at Barr’s defense

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the APEC Summit in Danang, Vietnam, November 11, 2017. (Jorge Silva/Reuters) President Donald Trump said Friday after a phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin that Putin has no desire to involve Russia in the spiraling political crisis in Venezuela. “We talked about many things. Venezuela was

Workers prepare boxes for shipment inside of an Amazon fulfillment center in Robbinsville, N.J., November 27, 2017. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters) Economic growth exceeded expectations in April as the market added 263,000 new jobs and unemployment sank to its lowest level in 49 years, according to Labor Department data released Friday. The 263,000 new jobs easily surpassed

(Carlos Jasso/Reuters) Yesterday I wrote about the Kansas Supreme Court’s lawless ruling in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt, which for the first time in history located a right to abortion in the Kansas Constitution.  Today, I examine the role that commission-based methods of nominating state judges — a.k.a the Missouri Plan — have had in causing the Kansas

Then-state senator Catherine Pugh speaks during a TV interview near the City Hall in Baltimore, Md., in 2015. (File photo: Sait Serkan Gurbuz/Reuters) Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh resigned Thursday amid a mushrooming corruption scandal. Pugh’s resignation is effective immediately, her attorney Steve Silverman said at a press conference that she herself did not attend. “Dear

Someone needs to teach Representative Omar of Minnesota the meaning of irony. This freshman representative who spent so much time castigating Israel and repeatedly making anti-Semitic remarks had the audacity this past week to claim that she is fighting against anti-Semitism.  This same woman who continually tries to perpetuate the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews being

(Andrew Kelly/Reuters) During a debate in the Alabama House of Representatives over a proposed abortion ban, one Democratic representative made an astonishing remark about why he opposed the bill. “It ought to be a woman’s choice,” said Representative John Rogers of Birmingham. “I’m not about to be a man and tell a woman what to do

Attorney General William Barr testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, May 1, 2019. (Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters) Is it already August? That’s usually the Beltway silly season appropriate for such a ridiculous non-scandal as the Great Bill Barr Summary of Findings Outrage of 2019. As everyone knows, Bill Barr released a brief letter summarizing the

President Donald Trump at the State of the Union shakes hands with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in Washington, D.C., February 5, 2019. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Pool via Reuters) Some time ago, President Trump’s team produced a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan, which was really a $200 billion infrastructure plan with some wishful thinking attached. The

Vladimir Lenin’s pamphlet What Is To Be Done? published in 1902, provided a draft proposal for the Communist revolution of 1905 and the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Based on NikolaiChernyshevsky ’s 1863 novel of that title, which argued for the creation of working cooperatives (an early version of the “soviets”) and total dedication to

Pete Buttigieg speaks during a town hall meeting in Fort Dodge, Iowa, April 16, 2019. (Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters) The Women’s Care Center receives an award from Notre Dame, one year after Mayor Pete Buttigieg vetoed its new location. South Bend, Ind. — In 1984, a student approached her professor at the University of Notre Dame and

Five of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, say that if elected they would revive the JCPOA—the Obama administration’s gravely flawed nuclear deal with Iran that gave Iran a nuclear sunset clause, allowed it to keep developing ballistic missiles and centrifuges, concocted a ridiculously inadequate inspection regime, and freed

On today’s episode of The Great Books podcast, National Review’s John J. Miller discusses Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with Deidra Birzer of Hillsdale College. Find the episode here. Radio Free California Episode 70 finds Will Swaim and David Bahnsen discussing how the California government is doing its best to wreck the state, from

(Carlos Jasso/Reuters) The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a state law banning drug-induced abortions is unconstitutional, the Associated Press reported. The Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice had challenged the 2014 law, which banned the “off label” use of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone, on the grounds that it forced doctors to rely on a sub-optimal, antiquated drug

Rep. Ilhan Omar participates in a news conference in Washington, D.C., February 7, 2019. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters) Immigrants see what is right about the West. That’s why they come. And then too many critique the very system they left their homelands to join. The harshest critics of the West in general and the United States in

Outside the New York Times building in Manhattan, 2008. (Gary Hershorn/Reuters) My fellow Americans, in the interests of soothing the worries of New York Times real-estate writers, please stop moving around. Stay exactly where you are, forever. White people are moving into previously black neighborhoods in the cities. Many urban blacks are moving into white

After Congresswomen Ilham Omar’s and Rashida Tlaib’s incendiary anti-Semitic rants directed at Jewish Americans and American ally Israel, the Democrat House “progressive caucus,” led by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, rallied around to protect and support them. The progressive media chimed in, supporting the Islamist congresswomen. Even after Rep. Omar dismissed the 9/11 attacks as “someone did something,”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, accompanied by other top Republican leaders at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., November 14, 2018. (Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters) On April 6, the Daily Beast posted a piece by Chris Kang accusing Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of “destroying the Senate” and “light[ing] norms on fire for short-term advantage” in the

NRA executive vp and CEO Wayne LaPierre speaks at the NRA annual meeting in Indianapolis, Ind., April 26, 2019. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters) Indianapolis, Ind. – A long-simmering dispute between NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre and now-departing NRA president Oliver North exploded into the open Friday night, as the NRA’s Board of Directors suddenly forced to

A banner at the NRA’s annual meeting in Indianapolis shows (from left) CEO Wayne LaPierre, legislative director Chris Cox, and president Oliver North, April 27, 2019. (Bryan Woolston/Reuters) Indianapolis, Ind. — As the most dramatic National Rifle Association annual meeting approaches its conclusion, the organization’s board of directors is now forced to confront several interconnected

Justice Sonia Sotomayor 2009—In a terribly muddled speech to the ACLU of Puerto Rico, Second Circuit judge Sonia Sotomayor offers a blanket defense of freewheeling resort to foreign and international legal materials in determining the meaning of American constitutional provisions. Nominated a month later to the Supreme Court by President Obama, Sotomayor at her confirmation

Former Vice President Joe Biden talks to the media in Washington, D.C., April 5, 2019. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters) Anita Hill wants Joe Biden to apologize.  While he’s thinking about it, I hope he considers sending one to Justice Thomas, for what Thomas courageously described as “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves,

I thought Joe Biden’s announcement video was interesting. Not for anything intrinsically of note in the content. The central theme was that “America is an idea,” one of the most thoughtless tropes in American life. In keeping with this, much of the rest of the brief video was clichéd, lowest-common-denominator American political rhetoric. But in