By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
As he struggles to find momentum in his second term, President Obama is setting a dubious record for the slowest pace in assembling a new Cabinet.
So much for fancy flowers, champagne brunches and new electronic devices.
Mother's Day approaches, and children are decorating cards with ribbons and lace and wrapping boxes of chocolates. Just how we celebrate depends on the length of our memories.
If President Obama has been slow to respond to reports that chemical weapons have been employed in Syria, thereby crossing his "red line" and creating a "game-changer" for U.S. policy, he's not the first chief executive to procrastinate on the issue.
In his continuing campaign to subvert the Second Amendment, President Obama recently unveiled one of the oldest tricks in the demagogue playbook. Speaking in Colorado, he declared that since America is a democracy, people had no reason to fear "the government is going to come take my guns."
President Obama and I have very different notions of what a family is. For liberals, the family can apparently be everything from "Heather Has Two Mommies" to "Daddy's Roommate" to Hillary Rodham Clinton's "It Takes a Village." In the opinion of electoral majorities in Kansas and 40 other states, however, that does not a family make.
In a town short these days on good political manners, let alone magnanimity, Washington would do well to recall the remarkable contribution of former President Herbert Hoover to the nation's bipartisan history. The 31st chief executive, a Republican, was the only one to write a biography of another one, Woodrow Wilson -- number 28 and a Democrat. Hoover not only was admiring in his book, but he accomplished the endeavor when he was in his eighties.
In 1798, when John Adams was president of the United States, the feds enacted four pieces of legislation called the Alien and Sedition Acts. One of these laws made it a federal crime to publish any false, scandalous or malicious writing -- even if true -- about the president or the federal government, notwithstanding the guarantee of free speech in the First Amendment.
March 15 is the 100-year anniversary of the presidential news conference. Woodrow Wilson had been in the White House less than two weeks when his private secretary, Joseph P. Tumulty, ushered 125 reporters into the Oval Office for what was the beginning of a love fest between traditionally adversarial parties.
I am indebted to Amity Shlaes for gently correcting a joke of mine that dates back to July 8, 1972. On that day in the New York Times, I joshed that President Calvin Coolidge "probably spent more time napping than any President in the nation's history" and therefore was a successful president.
Who is the only president buried in Washington, D.C.? How many presidents served in the military? Here's the answers and more about America's commander in chief.
Here is an uncomfortable pop quiz: Who has killed more children, Adam Lanza or Barack Obama? We'll hold off on the answer for a few paragraphs while we look at the state of governmental excess -- including killing -- in America.
In recent years, the American left has increasingly styled itself "progressive." This trend reflects the public repudiation of the moniker "liberal" -- a term U.S. social democrats had previously expropriated and shorn of its original commitment to economic liberty -- but also harkens back to the early-20th century Progressive Movement that sought to expand the federal government's role vis-a-vis the states, businesses and individuals.
President Obama won re-election last month by a larger margin than even his most fervent supporters had expected, though with fewer popular votes than he received in 2008. Most commentators initially opined that not much had changed in Washington. The president would remain in the White House for another four years, the Democrats would keep control of the Senate, and the House would stay in Republican hands. Most Republicans re-elected to both houses of Congress had publicly pledged not to vote to raise taxes under any circumstances. Most of those Republicans have adhered to that promise -- until now.
Unless action is taken soon, the United States is set to undergo one of the largest series of tax increases in the past half-century. The rapid rise in U.S. federal government spending over the past decade has been even more troubling.
President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1919: "In the last analysis ... a people are responsible for the acts of their government."
Former president Truman, with whom Hoover developed a close relation, was a bit more succinct: "I am reading your biography of Wilson," he wrote, "and I like it."
