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I had difficulty deciding what to write about for today’s column. It’s kind of been a slow news week, which means there are going to be a million columns about the fact Hillary Clinton took five questions from reporters. It’s sad when just the fact that a candidate for president took questions is more newsworthy than anything she actually said, but I figured everyone else would have that one covered by now. Then it hit me. Well, actually, tragedy hit. While doing show prep on Monday morning, I saw some sad news on Facebook: Two guys I graduated high school...

What happens when the public does not wish to live out the utopian dreams of its elite leaders? Usually, the answer for those leaders is to seek more coercion and less liberty to force people to think progressively. Here at home, President Barack Obama came into power in 2009 with a Democratic Congress, a sympathetic press, and allies in Hollywood, academia, unions, and philanthropic and activist foundations. Yet all that support was not sufficient to ensure "correct" public attitudes about Obama's agenda on health care, entitlements, taxes, guns, abortion and cultural issues. In the 2010 midterm elections, the Democrats...

It's Memorial Day week. You can tell as you flip through the local paper; Memorial Day notices appear as sales headlines and attention grabbers. "Memorial Day Sale" and "Pre-Memorial Day Sale." Pretty soon, we'll see post-Memorial Day sale advertisements. Sales and barbecue are the two things that many people think about when Memorial Day is mentioned. What else? Well, for many Americans, it's the weekend that the pool opens and summer begins. But it means more than that. Memorial Day began soon after the Civil War as Decoration Day. It was the day the graves of the fallen members of...

In December, I wrote a post about a groundbreaking new study published in Science,which had profound implications for the gay rights movement. The study’s researchers claimed that a mere 20-minute conversation about the importance of marriage equality could convince same-sex marriage opponents to support gay rights. People who spoke with straight canvassers demonstrated a slight boost in tolerance;those who spoke with gay canvassers demonstrated—and retained—an even more significant boost in support for gay rights.Does that sound too good to be true? It was. The study was co-authored by Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University,and Michael J....

Some of you are probably done with ABC News over the George Stephanopoulos embarrassment. Of course, you wouldn't be wrong to boycott ABC News. You might be a fool not to. If you have any pretension to intellectual honesty, you either boycott ABC News over this Stephanopoulos mess, or you take a pair of hairy donkey ears and pin them to your temples. It's possible that you wish to keep on watching the ethically challenged ABC News but you'd really like to skip the hassle of searching for authentic hairy donkey ears. In that case just wear a kilt, a...

Here’s an impressively dishonest headline in the Washington Post: White bikers, black thugs: Why Texas looked to relax gun laws after biker shootout. The supporting evidence? While the rest of America tried to make sense Monday of the weekend shootout at the Waco Twin Peaks — and learned of a whole biker subculture featuring sometimes-violent turf wars — the Texas legislature debated a bill that would expand the rights of licensed gun owners to openly carry weapons in public. To be fair, this wasn’t the first time the Texas state Senate took up the matter of expanded gun rights. At...

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, before we get going here today, I really, really need to offer you a sincere apology for the last hour of the program yesterday. I mean, it was an absolute bomb, and it was because for the first time in I don't know how many years, I abandoned totally my professionalism, and I allowed myself to be totally distracted by a bunch of stuff that was happening that had nothing to do with the program, off the air stuff. I even alluded to it a couple of times during the program, but the bottom line is...

RUSH: Well, look at this. So they declassified the documents found in bin Laden's compound when we went in there and killed him. And of course the Drive-Bys are focusing on the documents that showed he continued to hate America and was continuing to plan acts of terror against us, but there's other stuff in this treasure trove that interests me. Greetings, folks, and welcome. Great to have you back with us. Rush Limbaugh at 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com. The National Intelligence Director has declassified some of these documents, and there...

>RUSH: Mr. Snerdley went out and found this piece I referred to earlier that is in Salon.com. I'm sorry, Slate. Well, Slate, Salon, what the hell is the difference? Okay, it's at Slate.com, and it's written by a guy named Jamelle Bouie, who is a Slate staff writer covering politics, policy, and race. He's African-American. What he's actually doing is reacting to a piece that he ran into on Politico. And the title of his piece here is: "Republicans Are Not on the Edge of Extinction. He says: "The GOP is an aging party, but it isn’t about to die...

RUSH: Okay, we have more boring news from Hillary Clinton today. And The Politico, by the way, Politico has an interesting story about this that I think puts a lot of this in perspective. I do not have The Politico story right in front of me. I didn't bother to print it out because once you know it's in The Politico you know what it's gonna say. I saw it referenced on another show on TV, and it said whoever was talking about The Politico story was quoting from it and said Hillary is not running for president. (interruption) You've...

RUSH: I still say keep an eye on O'Malley. I have never said that Hillary is a guaranteed lock on anything. I've never thought it. I've been proven wrong. There were times I didn't even think she would run that she did. I very seldom, I have to admit, when it comes to Hillary, Hillary's the biggest drag on my accuracy, my opinion audit, Hillary Clinton's the biggest drag because I always get her wrong. And I'm still. And I get her wrong because I just can't believe what I'm told about her. I just can't believe any of it....

This claim from national security adviser Susan Rice stands in such contrast to reality that Foreign Policy’s Paul McCleary gave it the subheadline, “Really? Really?” Speaking to a group of Iraq War veterans who began the day wondering how the US and Iraq could possibly have lost Ramadi, a city for which Americans bled to pacify, Rice tried a novel approach to the question — complete and utter denial of reality. McCleary notes, “Susan Rice whiffs” in the main headline: Even before National Security Advisor Susan Rice started speaking Tuesday night, at a poignant German Embassy photography exhibit of soldiers...

RUSH: I should have printed this out. It was right before the program started, and it was time-crunch time and I didn't have time to print it out. It's a story about a black Republican who thinks that the Republican Party is going to save itself and is going to triumph once again by doing two things: accepting the welfare state and immigration. And if the Republican Party does that, by 2024, by 2028, if the Republican Party hasn't come to grips with those two things, it will not exist. And this African-American, I don't even know if he's a...

Determining actionable intelligence, assessing threats (current and emerging), implementing lines of operation to counter threats and forestalling damaging surprise (a process that includes accounting for enemy deception operations) are persistent national security challenges every presidential administration, from George Washington's to Barack Obama's, has confronted. Some administrations have confronted them more effectively than others. Effectively addressing these challenges demands many things from a commander in chief, but steady leadership is foremost. Steady leadership eludes checklist definition, but its key traits are sound judgment, morale-sustaining presence in crisis and the ability to focus on essential goals. Abraham Lincoln is a case study...

President Barack Obama is negotiating a multilateral trade agreement with the governments of 11 nations. These include Malaysia and Vietnam -- as well as Japan, Brunei, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru. This so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership would govern most of the commercial relations between the nations that sign it. "With over 20 chapters under negotiation," explains a Congressional Research Service report published in March, "the TPP partners envision the agreement to be 'comprehensive and high-standard,' in that they seek to eliminate tariffs and nontariff barriers to trade in goods, services, and agriculture, and to establish or expand...

Last week, President Obama held a summit on poverty at Georgetown University. There, he explained that unrest in major American cities could be traced not to lack of values, but to simple lack of cash -- and that lack of cash, he suggested, could be attributed to simple lack of luck. "The top 25 hedge fund managers made more than all of the kindergarten teachers in the country," Obama stated. "You pretty much have more than you'll ever be able to use or anyone in your family will ever be able to use. There's a fairness issue involved here." He...

Malcolm X, the famed Civil Rights leader and minister of the Nation of Islam, would have turned 90 years old this week. While America annually marks the significance of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is only in Black communities nationally, and locally in Harlem, that we mark and celebrate the birth of King’s most formidable racial adversary. Undoubtedly this has something to do with the very forthright and unflinching manner in which Malcolm X talked about race in the 1960s. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, as Malcolm X was otherwise known, did not have any hope that white...

Gregory Fenves recently got a big promotion, from provost to president of the University of Texas at Austin. A raise came with it. Instead of his current base of about $425,000, he was offered $1 million. And he rejected it — as too much. “With many issues and concerns about administrative costs, affordability and tuition, such a salary will affect the ability of the president to work with the Texas Legislature,” Fenves wrote to a university official, in an email obtained by The Austin American-Statesman and published last week. He suggested, and agreed to, $750,000. That’s hardly chump change. But...

The Republican presidential field is talking tax reform. (Beware the deceitful cries from the left of “tax cuts for the rich.”) Several candidates favor some kind of flat tax on income and at least one, Mike Huckabee, likes the “Fair Tax,” a proposed levy on consumption, which seeks to do away with most or all other federal taxes. The former is often portrayed as a system where the poor are disproportionally burdened and the latter as one where a federal monitoring agency, such as the IRS, is no longer needed. Neither portrayal is accurate. The debate boils down to whether...

Since the landmark 2008 Heller v. District of Columbia case, which Second-Amendment lawyer Alan Gura argued before the Supreme Court, anti-gun officials in the nation’s capital have spent every waking hour trying to avoid doing what the high Court ordered be done: allow District residents to exercise their right to keep and bear arms. Gura has been fighting them every step of the way; and on Monday, was victorious once again, as a United States District Court granted his injunction to stop the city from requiring concealed carry permit applicants to demonstrate a “good reason to fear injury to his...