Is Obama’s red line still red line?

January 20, 2026

One of the most embarrassing moments of the Barack Obama presidency came in the context of the Syrian civil war. In August 2012, Obama vowed that “a red line for us,” which would thereby necessitate some sort of American intervention, “is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” The 44th president continued: “That would change my calculus.” Except it didn’t. A year later, former Iran- and Russia-backed Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad crossed Obama’s “red line,” launching a lethal sarin gas on his own people. Hundreds, ...

Martin Luther King’s message still powerful

January 20, 2026

In pausing to reflect on the Christ-centered teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this year, I reread his sermon “Loving Your Enemies” that he delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, which is now Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. Scholars have not pinpointed the exact date King gave this eloquent and time-transcending message, but most agree he spoke to the Dexter Avenue congregation in mid-November of 1957. King took his text from Matthew 5:43-45, in which Jesus says, “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But ...

Reliance on ‘mind’ assaults U.S. Constitution

January 16, 2026

In a scene in Robert Bolt’s famous play “A Man for All Seasons,” about the treason trial of St. Thomas More, More argues with the attorney general of Wales about the law. The attorney general says he’d cut down all the laws in England to get to the Devil. More reminds him that the laws were written to protect us from those who’d cut them down, because, More asks, when the Devil turns round and seeks you, where would you hide, the laws having been flattened? Answer: nowhere. The recent statement of President Donald Trump in an interview with The New York Times that on the ...

I’ve got addiction down to a tea

January 16, 2026

The advice to “Write drunk, edit sober” is often attributed (probably incorrectly) to the hard-drinking Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Here’s my own riff on that advice. I could not have written five novels or 150 columns without swilling my beverage of choice between sentences. No, not bourbon, not Scotch, not absinthe. Just plain old tea. What gasoline is to an internal combustion engine under a car’s hood, tea is to the writing engine inside my skull. It keeps me chugging along. I have a friend who wrote two terrific novels years ago. Then he ...

When fathers fail, birth rates collapse

January 16, 2026

Where are the babies? Social conservatives keep asking what’s happened as the U.S. fertility rate crashes to its lowest level ever. But the answer should be another question: Where are the fathers? And by fathers, we do not mean men who merely spread their seed and then take off, but men who hang around and provide moral and financial support to their children. The common but wrong answer is that it has simply become too expensive to raise children: If you just bring down the prices of things then family life will become more attractive to young couples. This is the affordability ...

It’s time to crack down on welfare fraud

January 15, 2026

Why pay taxes when so much of your hard-earned money goes to fraudsters instead of doing good? Government bureaucrats and elected politicians scream in outrage when any effort is made to crack down on fraud by requiring proof of where the money is actually going. They wring their hands that safeguards will delay the funds and warn of children going hungry or families in need. Meanwhile, all of us taxpayers, saddled with paying for the scammers, are routinely ignored. Until now. The enormity of the Minneapolis welfare rip-off is sparking a nationwide rebellion against welfare ...