President Obama

The Obama administration has found the policy equivalent of alchemy. Employees of religious organizations will receive contraception coverage. And neither the individuals nor the groups will have to pay for it. It’s magic. Otherwise known as making the insurer pay. On Friday, February 1, the Department of Health and Human Services announced its new rule [...]

In Civics 101, we learn about the venerable mainstay of democratic republics—the separation of government into Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches.  Properly employed, this separation should result in a beneficial “balance of power,” preventing usurpation of power by any particular branch.  Working as expected, the legislature makes the laws, the executive enforces them, and the [...]

The rebellious fervor of the Sixties, with its rejection of traditional standards and authorities, seemed a sudden break from what came before. At a deeper level, however, those developments simply brought to fruition what had long been in the works. What happened at that time was a further step in a centuries-long process of social [...]

At the top, at least, the Obama campaign was premised on a clear vision of citizenship.  As a matter of course, the President spoke words of good will toward his fellow Americans, promising that those who heard him were joining him in a great enterprise.  He gestured toward our responsibility to our neighbors and our [...]

Television and the blogosphere were alive the day after the election with conservative pundits calling for the GOP to forget social issues, to walk away from abortion and marriage, because these issues lost Romney the election. Big time political consultant Mike Murphy said on MSNBC that the GOP does not know how to appeal beyond [...]

Our quadrennial spectacle of electing a president brings out the relationship between political order and the nation’s cultural and social order. Take the question of “rights,” which is a concept at the heart of the American experiment.  Based on the nation’s revolt from England, and deeply grounded in the mother country’s common law tradition, rights [...]

By now everyone paying attention to the presidential race has heard of the tasteless double-entendre ad the Obama campaign has put out, comparing voting for the President to losing your virginity.  I am trying—I am failing—to imagine the astonishment if someone had suggested the like to the leaders of the Democratic party of my youth [...]

During a campaign event in 2011, a feminist stopped Barack Obama in mid-speech to ask him if he supported free contraceptives. Obama replied: "Darn tootin'!" According to Obama's secularist philosophy, this invented right to free contraceptives trumps the First Amendment's right to religious freedom. If religious employers object to financing the sex lives of their [...]

It would be both dishonest and absurdly ironic (since my October 17 article in Crisis was about intellectual integrity) if I were to fail to point out and correct a rather serious oversight that it contained. I stated that the Church teaches that to vote for a candidate who supports abortion is to be complicit [...]

Lord Peter Wimsey, that aristocratic and debonair sleuth, remarked that “The first thing a principle does is to get someone killed.” He said so in the middle of Dorothy Sayer’s delightful book Gaudy Night, which, aside from being an entertaining mystery story is a book about intellectual integrity. What he meant was this: the moment [...]

He blasted big business, Wall Street, big oil, General Motors, “excess profits,” “millionaires” and the “wealthy.” He called out the “corporation executive” for not paying his “fair” share. He attacked “GOP” tax cuts that “spare the rich” and “benefit millionaires.” He advocated wealth redistribution from greedy “corporations” to “health insurance” and “public works projects.” He [...]

In Charlotte last night, President Barack Obama gave a characteristically well-delivered speech that energized the party faithful and fired up his base. The man is a terrific speaker. If Mitt Romney manages to replace him in the Oval Office, he won’t because of a triumph of oratorical skills. Romney may, however, do so because of [...]

I grew up in an Italian neighborhood, so my first understanding of bigotry was that it referred to a very large tree (“Hey, dat’s a big-a tree!”). Now, many years later, I know that it really means supporting traditional marriage. Like President Obama, I have “evolved.” I have advanced on the semantic spectrum from being [...]

America anxiously awaits the Supreme Court’s decision on Obamacare. At the core of the decision is a simple question: Is the “individual mandate” in Obamacare constitutional? And thus, is Obamacare constitutional? Several times during the debate and deliberation, my mind harkened back to the words of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Remarking on [...]

Can a viral video on the internet bring the world’s most wanted criminal to justice? This question is at the core of a video viewed more than 77 million times during the last week. Who is this most wanted criminal, and should people in the United States care? His name is Joseph Kony. The video [...]

Big -- but perhaps not surprising -- news from the White House today: President Barack Obama has ordered the Justice Department to drop its defense of a central part of the 1996 law that bars official federal government recognition of same-sex unions - a long-sought goal of gay-rights activists. Attorney General Eric Holder sent letters [...]

I have a fascination with America's train system -- maybe because it stinks, and I can't figure out exactly why this country still has such an antiquated and ineffective passenger railway. Whether it's the regional trains or Amtrak, they're all bad. Amtrak's Acela trains, which carry people up and down the northeast corridor -- our [...]

The story about President Obama's support for infanticide as an Illinois state senator came immediately to mind last week when a Philadelphia abortionist was arrested on eight counts of murder. One of the counts faced by Dr. Kermit Gosnell includes the death of a woman following an abortion at his office. The other seven were [...]

At a restaurant in Jerusalem last August, I listened incredulously as two prominent Israeli journalists explained to me that President Obama did not care about a second term. Obama, they told me, was going to forge ahead toward an Israeli-Palestinian agreement with total disregard for any political fallout. It was Obama's nature, they each asserted, to put [...]