In 1856, the Whig Party ran former president Millard Fillmore for president of the United States.

What happens when we run out of taboos?

The West has the capacity to win a war on radical Islam. But it won't.

Self-betterment used to be the motto of Western civilization. That's because Western civilization used to be based on the premise that man is more than animal.

President Obama and his ilk quest for a return to hopier, changier times -- times like the 1960s. And so they will take us all back to the future. Sadly, our future will then be no more than a reversion to insanity of our past.

Last week, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush announced his intention to "actively explore" a run for president.

On Monday, Australian police stormed the Lindt Chocolate Cafe in Sydney, where an Islamist terrorist named Man Haron Monis had taken dozens of hostages and held them for 17 hours.

This week, Rolling Stone printed an editor's note retracting one of the most highly praised pieces of investigative journalism in its history. That piece, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, alleged that several members of the University of Virginia fraternity Phi Kappa Psi, had raped a 19-year-old student named Jackie, including with foreign objects, as she lay on a floor covered with broken glass. The article resulted in the university suspending the fraternity's activities, and national outrage over the so-called "rape culture" on campus.

After a grand jury in St. Louis, Missouri, voted against the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of 18-year-old black man Michael Brown, President Obama gave a short address to the nation.

On Monday night, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch announced that Officer Darren Wilson, who is white, would not be indicted in the shooting death of black 18-year-old Michael Brown. McCulloch explained the falsehoods permeating the original media accounts of the shooting; he explained that Brown had, by all available physical and credible witness evidence, charged Wilson after attempting to take his gun from him in Wilson's vehicle.

Brown was a black teenager; therefore, he was the Innocent Black Victim. The parts have already been written; Wilson was merely unlucky enough to land the starring role.

An educational crisis has struck Minneapolis' public schools: Black students have a tenfold higher chance of suspension or expulsion than white students. And superintendent Bernadeia Johnson wants to "disrupt that in any way that I can."

On Tuesday, Republicans won a historic electoral victory, sweeping away a Democratic Senate, replacing Democratic governors in blue states like Massachusetts, Maryland and Illinois, and reversing Democratic state legislatures in Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, Maine, West Virginia and New Hampshire.

On the way to the airport the other day, my Uber driver, an elderly Russian chap, turned on a Top 40 radio station. Not being one to complain, I actually sat and listened to the lyrics.

The Republican Party simply doesn't get it.

On Monday, The Daily Mail reported that NBC's chief medical correspondent, Nancy Snyderman, had a hankering for a bowl of soup from Peasant Grill in Hopewell Boro, New Jersey.

On Friday night, a Huntington Beach man, 43, was walking back to his car after the Los Angeles Angels played the Kansas City Royals in the American League Division Series. Three men accosted him, and then proceeded to beat him senseless. He is currently in critical condition at a local hospital after police found him unconscious.

Last week, President Obama spoke to the United Nations about the growing threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In the course of that speech, he discussed a wide variety of threats to Western civilization, ranging from Ebola to global warming, from chaos in Syria to China's incursions in the South China Sea. The speech seemed unfocused, meandering. But it held together thanks to one common thread: Barack Obama believes that words solve everything. Particularly his own.

"I am not ashamed," a young woman says into a camera. "I am not ashamed." The woman is Leyla Josephine of Glasgow, and she is a self-described feminist performance artist. She is reading a poem titled "I Think She Was a She" -- a poem lauded by The Huffington Post as "unapologetic. ... She ardently declares her power over her body as she reminds us that a woman exercising her right to choose is not uncommon -- and should never be shamefully brushed under the rug."

"This is behavior that is happening at the grassroots level that is born through years of our culture like raising men to want to not be like women and using language like 'sissy' and 'you throw like a girl' that demean women. ... [We need to focus on] really reprogramming how we raise men."