The horrific scenes on a London street yesterday where Islamic terrorists butchered an unarmed soldier left me with more questions than answers. But maybe not the obvious ones.

‘Humans are great at self-delusion,” the polymathic philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb has observed. I’m confident he’d agree that the humans who populate the foreign-policy community are no exception.

Gay activists love to point to the changes in public opinion regarding same-sex marriage, announcing triumphantly that this is a sign of moral and even spiritual advancement. In reality, it is part of a larger trend towards immorality, a sign of moral bankruptcy and spiritual apostasy.

Some of the journalists on the left have as their concern the salvaging of the Obama presidency before it enters into what would quickly become the longest second term in history, a prolonged drip, drip, drip of revelations and paralysis.

If you were to suddenly appear this weekend at the numerous barbecues or pool parties, without any knowledge of our nation's history, it might be hard to understand the real meaning of Memorial Day.

Government is now so huge, powerful and callous that citizens risk becoming proverbial serfs without the freedoms guaranteed by the Founders.

They don’t just make one mistake; they make a series of mistakes, they obfuscate, then lie, then lie about the lie… and then it’s time to cue up a two-week Obama vacation or for Hillary to bang her head accidentally and be unavailable for comment.

Would you like to have a "skinny" health insurance policy? Probably not. But if you're employed by a large company, you may get one, thanks to Obamacare.

How does President Barack Obama, a man of such keen intelligence, with such promise to "change" America, find himself in so much serious trouble?

Yesterday I read an interesting article in Newsweek about the connection between tornadoes and climate change.

President Obama gave two commencement addresses in one to graduates of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., last weekend. It would be easy for this conservative to critique the political and social elements of his speech. Instead, I choose to focus on the inspirational part.

Inquiring minds with extra time on their hands this morning are plodding through the Full Transcript of Bernanke's Testimony To Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress looking for the usual collection of half-truths, distortions, and outright lies it usually contains.

Big corporations don’t care about the tax rate, but Politicians sure care. Why doesn’t someone explain to John McCain that HE is part of the tax problem in this country. . . Not Apple. John Ransom also spoke with Erika Holzer about her newest novel, Freedom Bridge. It is more relevant in today’s world than you would think.

California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom likes to be out front on issues. As San Francisco mayor, he approved same-sex marriages in City Hall even though they weren't legal. He pushed for a first-of-its-kind ban on city pharmacies selling cigarettes. Likewise, he signed the Special City's first-in-the-nation ban on groceries giving away plastic bags.

Wow. I thought I hit on the key issues in my post on the anti-Apple demagoguery, but Senator Paul hit the ball out of the park.

For all the complaining the left has done about those shadowy outside political groups subverting the democratic process, we recently learned that no one has the means to undercut freedom of expression quite like an enthusiastic government agency.

This is another of the many annoyances with which the Chinese and South Koreans cope. In many of its external economic transactions, North Korea acts as a rogue and criminal enterprise.

In the world of White House politics and the politics of handling the White House press corps, the president's press secretary is the most visible target and often the first to fall when the media turns on an administration.

The most vivid memories aren't those carved in stone but the ones etched in the mind. Memory deepens with the years, the way a river carves through rock, slowly creating canyons, revealing old layers, unveiling pain you'd kept decently covered before, bringing it all back. Sometimes the river cannot be contained and will overflow its banks.

Washington DC was a busy place yesterday with the IRS scandal moving to the Senate while Tim Cook was under the microscope for saving money on taxes but not breaking laws. Apparently, Apple uses a subsidiary in Ireland that doesn’t have to pay taxes to that nation because it’s managed from outside and doesn’t have to pay taxes to America because it’s not an American company.

Where are we now in this morass of Obama administration scandals? We have the Associated Press imbroglio.

In its new report on how to reduce drunk-driving deaths, the National Transportation Safety Board states its goal in the title: "Reaching Zero." The agency thinks it is irreproachable to try to ensure that no one ever dies in an alcohol-related accident.

It would appear the underlings are all falling in line in order to protect the commander-in-chief. In fact, I’m quite sure that if Obama was asked about the Associated Press phone hacking situation, which has quietly slipped away from the front pages of the newspaper; he would definitely pull a Sergeant Schultz (“I know nothing.”)

For years, Iowa law relied on a rather reasonable bit of biological reality: it takes a man and a woman to make a baby. From that fact, the state reasoned that for questions of paternity, the answer would involve someone commonly called a “father.” So when the state recorded births as a matter of public record, it (rather logically) looked for a man as the non-birth parent.

Campus stalwart has spent decades helping students see beyond the shadowlands.

Even though you'll have your hands full with the new baby, there are some administrative things you should take care of right away.

Considering that the steady decline in your productivity and the sudden spike in your snarky attitude did not result in the firing you so richly deserve, it's clear that if you want a position where you don't have to work at all, you will need to work a lot harder.

At first I thought the IRS scandal was leaked to distract from the Benghazi scandal. But that didn't make sense because the IRS scandal is a more obvious abuse of power than the White House lying about the murder of four Americans in Libya.

As the Obama scandals surround the White House, some conservatives are suggesting that -- finally -- the media are "getting tough" on Obama. Don't count on it. All our modern experience suggests tough reporting on a Democratic president is more of a temporary sensation than an ongoing trend.

If you are going to spend much time in Africa, you will be taking anti-malaria pills. A common medication has the brand name Malarone.

Carol Platt Liebau and Eliana Johnson aren't exactly Woodward and Bernstein --yet.

If Richard Nixon were alive today, he would likely be fielding midnight phone calls from Barack Obama. Not since Richard Nixon was driven from office by the Watergate scandal four decades ago, has the American public been privy to such an unfolding spectacle of scandal and corruption in a presidential administration.

This time of year, as college students return home for the summer, many parents may notice how many politically correct ideas they have acquired on campus. Some of those parents may wonder how they can undo some of the brainwashing that has become so common in what are supposed to be institutions of higher learning.

Who is Judy Faulkner? Chances are, you don't know her -- but her politically connected, taxpayer-subsidized electronic medical records company may very well know you. Top Obama donor and billionaire Faulkner is founder and CEO of Epic Systems, which will soon store almost half of all Americans' health information.

My kids moved out! I have two empty rooms in my apartment. Maybe I can rent them? A tourist visiting New York City could have a different experience, and save hotel money. I'd make money. Wouldn't it be great?

Dr. Henry Miller, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Gregory Conko, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in their Forbes article "Rachel Carson's Deadly Fantasies" (9/5/2012), wrote that her 1962 book, Silent Spring, led to a world ban on DDT use.

The Senate Mensheviks have raked Apple Computer over the coals on its practice of keeping tons and tons of money offshore. This is money that the Mensheviks sorely need, so they can squander it on things that won’t make life better for anyone outside of K Street.

Although there's still a great deal to be learned about the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House like so many ominous dorsal fins in the surf, the nature of President Obama's bind is becoming clear.

As new revelations underscore the administration's epic incompetence in its handling of the Benghazi disaster and IRS abuses, some Republican voices in the House and Senate, along with pundits of every persuasion, have begun to speculate about "the I word" — impeachment.

I really don’t feel this is a job-move issue. I think you guys just need to establish some fair and reasonable emotional distance between yourselves and your family.

People have thrown in the towel on gold in favor of momentum trading in stocks. It seems nearly everyone is a momentum trader now, one of the consequences of inept central bank bubble-blowing policy.

Political affiliations aside, everyone should be worried about the IRS scandal. John touched base with a tea-party activist, and talked about the impropriety on display at the IRS. Also: John McCain grilled the CEO of Apple over their tax “avoidance” practices. (Because the problem couldn’t possibly be the tax code, it is obviously Apple’s adherence to the law.)

I was sitting in a classroom in McCosh Hall at Princeton University one spring day in the late 1970s, when I learned something that helped me understand the artistic genius of Jerry Garcia.

America has major problems.

The Senate is holding a Kangaroo Court designed to smear Apple for not voluntarily coughing up more tax revenue than the company actually owes. Here are a few things you need to know.

Japanese government advisor Iijima had meetings with senior North Korean officials, including Kim Yong Nam. Kim is Chairman of the presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly and acts as the head of state for protocol purposes.

In 2011, China had a gross domestic product of $7.3 trillion dollars, second only to America's $15 trillion GDP output -- at least according to official data.

The jurisprudence of Her Honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, may be only mediocre at best, but her candor deserves the highest praise. Every few years she'll pull back the judicial curtain and tell the rest of us what she thinks is really going on at the court. And shock anybody who can still be shocked at the court's motivations.

It should be clear by now that the Obama White House has been engaged in another coverup that cries out for the enactment of a special prosecutor. The sooner the better.

We're living in a time when freedom is again being assaulted. Not just by foreign threats, but by an increasingly tyrannical central government.

Part of the problem is that there is no harmony. It would be so much easier if the economy was generating 300,000 jobs a month, factories were being built, and the Fed didn't feel obligated to pump in $85.0 billion a month.

Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan's attorney general, spoke for many Republicans when he called President Obama's 2012 appointment of four federal officials without Senate approval "a breathtaking violation of the separation of powers." But according to a recent federal appeals court decision, abuses like Obama's have been a bipartisan practice in recent decades, with Republicans, including Meese's former boss, more sinning than sinned against.

Progressivism thrives best when truth is suppressed, but suppressed truth is still truth. You can try to sink it, shred it, cover it and destroy it, but truth eventually rises to the surface. Truth floats. Always.

What we're seeing today is a secular liberalism that wants to expand the prohibition of establishment to silence articulate religious voices and disenfranchise religiously motivated voters, and at the same time to narrow the scope of free exercise so that the new secular morality can reign over American society unimpeded.

Barack Obama says he is angry about the Internal Revenue Service singling out conservative and Tea Party groups for rough treatment, even though it may or may not have something to do with an anti-Muslim video.

As the drama continues to unfold, it will be very interesting to observe who in the Obama administration knew what —and when they knew it, while all along Obama lived life on the 13th tee.

There are at the moment a number of exaggerated, even breathless comparisons between President Obama's Benghazi/IRS/Associated Press controversies and President Nixon's Watergate scandal in 1973.

Guilty as charged. That was a Philadelphia jury’s verdict against abortionist Kermit Gosnell for multiple murders of babies in his Pennsylvania abortion facility. The jury also convicted Gosnell of hundreds of lesser criminal offenses. To avoid the death penalty, Gosnell agreed to serve the rest of his life in prison. This sordid chapter in the battle for the life on the unborn child is now over.

Time Magazine recently featured Sen. Rand Paul as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was not just on the list. Time placed Paul on its cover for the first, (though likely not for the last time). This may signal the emergence of the Libertarian Moment.

Wow, after five years of his loyal constituents supporting him and receiving nothing in return, it was nice to see President Obama address this year’s all black male Morehouse College graduates.

If Fogle had spent sufficient time immersing himself in the Moscow culture, he would have learned that every guy you sit next to at the local bar is either affiliated in some way with the security services or knows someone who is. Until you're able to confidently ascertain the difference -- which Fogle clearly couldn't -- then you shouldn't be out trying to recruit anyone to spy for America, particularly as brazenly as Fogle did.

For decades, African Americans have voted more reliably Democratic than any other ethnic or special interest group. President Obama himself received over 95% of the black vote in 2008 and 2012.

Who knew that I would be a victim of the oppressive attacks of the IRS on people of conservative values and Christian faith. But I have, and it is a personal stinging reminder of how terribly close we are to losing all of our freedoms. Like many readers of my column, I have been watching accelerated attacks against Constitutional government, free speech, free markets, freedom of religion - you name it, we have lost much over the last few years.

An all too familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting on May 4th to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that dealt in fossil fuels.

America has the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) and the UCP (ultimate clutch players). One is mixed martial artists, and the other is quarterbacks of the NFL. They all are athletic warriors who are extremely determined to win.

Here’s Klein’s argument boiled down to the bones: We didn’t intend to cheat; we’re just so stupid that it had the same effect as cheating.

One of the most disturbing things about the IRS targeting Obama's political enemies for persecution is that many liberals seem to be perfectly fine with illegitimately using the power of government to hurt their political enemies.

Count me as irritable on the subject, but President Obama's imperious habit of suggesting that American diplomats work for him is offensive to democratic sensibilities.

Given last week's revelation that the IRS targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, it's worth recalling President Obama's Ohio State University commencement address. The president decried "voices" warning "that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner."

How would you react if a pro-death penalty president travelled across the country with parents of murdered children -- on behalf of capital punishment?

No, this is not Watergate or Iran-Contra. Nor is it like the sex scandal that got Bill Clinton impeached.

Imagine that: A government tax collection agency asked a bunch of citizens about their conversations with God. I guess we can chalk this up to the IRS’s complete disregard for Constitutional limitations, but does it strike anyone else as mildly anti-American?

Simply put, Obama lied when he said "you can keep your existing plan", knowing full well the law was purposely written to make sure that would not happen over time. Eventually you will be stuck with a new Obamacare plan and higher premiums whether you like your existing plan or not.

Believe it or not, there are some people in Congress that can’t even wrap their mind around the power of the IRS. (And we wonder why there might be some abuse of power?) John Ransom talked with Bill Tatro about the recent White House scandals, and the coercive power of tax policy.

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder gave Washington a preview of how the last few months of the Obama administration are going to look, and they're going to be ugly.

But the regulatory burden goes way beyond some odd anecdotes. We’re talking about a huge cost to the economy, and it’s been getting worse for the past 12 years.

The Gang of Eight immigration bill can be summed up as amnesty now, border closing never.

Doubling wages means fewer workers, higher prices for customers, and less profit for shareholders. Essentially those are the goals of the puppet master behind the McDonald's worker walkout.

So sad, so affecting -- the cases of various newborns whose lives a Philadelphia jury found Dr. Kermit Gosnell to have taken through quick, deft application of scissors. The district attorney called Gosnell "a monster."

The acquisition leaves Yahoo! with another $4 billion cash-on-hand. Yahoo’s earnings were previously expected to grow 20% this year. Expect upward revisions to future earnings estimates.

During the Obama years, talk radio played a vital role in the formation of the Tea Party movement. They railed against a Democratic health care bill that eventually passed.

Last week, the Obama White House finally was exposed to Americans on both the left and right as the abusive and arrogant administration that it is. Throughout this presidency, we've seen examples of the constant abuse of power and living above the law. The executive orders on gun control, the assault on religious liberty through Obamacare and the refusal to enforce immigration laws to gain political favor are just a few among many. And last week, three more egregious offenses came to light that concern all freedom-loving Americans.

The familiar saying used to be, “I can afford it, but I don’t want it.” Conversely, now it’s “I want it, but I can’t afford it.”

The quantitative easing that has been going on under the direction of Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve seems to have been with us almost half a life time, but it hasn't. It arrived after the beginning of the financial crisis, and was supposed to be a panacea, but it hasn't demonstrated to be the “do-all” solution to our financial problems.

There will be an event on Capitol Hill this week that will tell us a lot about the future of comprehensive immigration reform.

That the Tea Party has been under attack is not exactly news to Tea Partiers, though we are grateful that the rest of the country has finally taken notice.

With three full-blown scandals currently surrounding the Obama administration, there are too many “-gates” to name just one. There is the cover-up of the fatal Benghazi terrorist attack, the IRS targeting conservatives, and the Justice Department spying on members of the press.

Protecting U.S. diplomats from terrorists on foreign soil is one thing. Protecting terror-sponsoring diplomats on U.S. soil quite another. Our State Department is currently under heavy fire for failing at the former.

As tax collector for the nation’s second-largest state, I know it’s a necessary function — from the fire station to the space station, nothing government does is possible without taxes.

Scandals are nothing new in Washington. Just about every president has faced an accusation of misconduct, whether moral or criminal. It should be no surprise that the Obama Administration would find itself in the midst of one, well actually 3 at present.

Why do Conservatives insist on getting in their own way? They couldn’t have asked for a better week, one White House scandal following another like so many tumbling dominos.

The health of not just our citizens but our national soul demands that we do a better job, that we work hard to foster and nourish life, both in the womb and outside of it.

Some establishment types are shaking their heads as they warn conservatives that we must not politicize the Administration’s Benghazi bungling, its Obamacare shakedowns, its AP records grab or its IRS abuses.

I don’t believe in the Trilateral and Bilderberg conspiracies. But I do believe that our world leadership suffers from a severe case of intellectual, political and corporate inbreeding that’s led them to dangerous defects in their vision for which there is no cure but cultural, financial and social death.

Chilling effect. That's the term lawyers and judges use to describe the result of government actions that deter people from exercising their right of free speech.

With the convictions in the case against abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell – three counts of murdering live babies and one count of involuntary manslaughter – abortion is back in the national discussion.

My University, UNC-Wilmington, needs to change its name to The University of No Competition Whatsoever. We could still use the UNCW logo but our full name would more accurately reflect our educational priorities.

American comedians are making a pile of cash with clean humor centered on guns, God and family.

The eurozone proponents ignore the costs of staying in the euro and overly trump up the benefits. The article perpetuates the myth that German taxpayers will suffer the consequences of a breakup, but suffer no costs if the eurozone stays intact.

And what better way could there be for several participants to interact with an alternative entertainment attraction in a relatively short period of time than for the main interface between participant and attraction to be a simulated bowl of soup?

It wasn’t that long ago that I shared a very encouraging story from England about civil disobedience against a revenue-hungry government.

How, exactly, does a free people overthrow an abusive bureaucracy that, as David Axelrod asserts, is too vast for even the president to be aware of, let alone control?

Over the years, even when I haven't voted for a given President, I've always come to trust that, though they were committed to different priorities and policies, they still had America's best interests at heart. I no longer think you do.

Having been back in the western world for about six hours, I am immersed in the growing triumvirate of scandals that are threatening to engulf President Barack Obama's second term.

These results are consistent with the Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll, which has always reported a higher level of support for the law than other polls, yet whose latest results show support for Obamacare slipping to just 35 percent of adults.

Under President Obama, “justice” is anything but blind. Neither is it deaf. In fact, based on recent revelations, it appears to be watching your every move and listening to your every word.

Controversies threaten President Obama's second-term agenda. As the IRS, Benghazi, and AP scandals engulf an administration long predicated on expanding government power, lawmakers in Washington are using the opportunity to push forward legislation along similarly misguided philosophical lines.

The IRS succeeded in shutting down the opposition and they were all high-fived and handsomely rewarded.

Young people are unlikely to respond to Republicans as long as the party resembles a cross between their curmudgeonly grandfather and the preacher from Footloose.

The Democratic Party, and especially the outgoing Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, must be wondering if their confident stride over the past four years didn’t just gallop them right past a forbidden threshold.