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I’ve got addiction down to a tea

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

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

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 ...

Private ownership, capitalism make life better

“Replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism!” says my new socialist mayor. Sounds so nice ... No more greedy capitalists hoarding wealth. People share. It’s the socialist dream. What will replace capitalism and individualism? One model is the commune - that socialist system where people share, rather than greedily chasing money. In my new video, TikTokers claim capitalism is “ending.” They sing about the beauty of communes. One asks, desperately, “Where is my commune?!” Good question. They’re hard to find because they keep ...

2026 Iranian revolution could reverse ‘79 debacle

The 1979 Iranian Revolution was one of the most stinging U.S. setbacks of the Cold War era. A longtime ally that the U.S. depended on as a pillar of regional security, the shah, gave way to a theocratic regime based on hostility to America. The revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy and seized our diplomatic personnel in November 1979. If that wasn’t enough of a national embarrassment, a dramatic rescue attempt by the U.S. military in April 1980 ended in abject failure at a staging area in Iran dubbed Desert One. As the Islamic Republic totters on the precipice, struggling ...

$1.5 trillion defense budget is needed

Finally, the United States will follow through on its NATO commitments. That’d be the cheeky interpretation of President Donald Trump’s announcement, via Truth Social, that he wants the U.S. defense budget to be $1.5 trillion. This would represent a stunning 50% increase over the current budget and put the U.S. right around 5% of GDP, the target level that NATO countries recently adopted at Trump’s insistence. The details and follow-through will matter, but on its own terms, the Trump declaration is of epic significance. Such a historic buildup would meet the moment — ...