Among young women below age 30, new government figures show a clear majority of births—53 percent—now occurring outside of marriage. Since 1970, out-of-wedlock birthrates for blacks have tripled—to 73 percent—while the rate for whites went up ten-fold, to 29 percent.

Even the New York Times recognizes the disastrous impact of such numbers, since children of single mothers fail more frequently in school, while engaging more regularly in criminal, self-destructive behavior. Liberal analysts say financial hardships make non-marital births more likely, but out-of-wedlock births also make those financial hardships more likely.

Only 8 percent of college graduates give birth outside marriage—indicating that the same qualities of self-discipline and long-term planning that enable women to achieve educational success also help them avoid bringing babies into the world without a marriage to nourish them.

The BBC and the New York Times have both reported on yet another alarming trend in the Arab world: people dousing themselves with gasoline and setting themselves on fire in suicidal protest.  

Last year, more than 100 Tunisians ignited themselves. This year in Morocco, five university graduates went up in flames to denounce high unemployment. Similar incidents also occurred in Jordan and Bahrain. This horrific fad began in 2010 when a fruit vendor launched the Tunisian revolution by burning himself to death.

North Korea announced that the embalmed body of recently deceased dictator Kim Jong-il would go on permanent display next to the similarly preserved remains of his father and predecessor, Kim Il-sung.  

The government imported a team of Russian experts, in charge of preserving Lenin’s 90-year-old corpse, to supervise efforts to keep the flesh and skin of Kim Jong-il from natural decay. Many Communist regimes show the same gruesome fixation on embalming and displaying dead leaders—including Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao and many more. This contrasts with ancient Jewish law, which prohibits preserving and flaunting a body after death.

The Biblical worldview emphasizes immortality of the soul, so there’s no point maintaining what’s become an empty vessel. For Communist materialists, that corpse is all that’s left—hence, ghoulish obsessions with fleshly remains.

At a time of trillion-dollar budget deficits, why do we need a new “Video Game Czar” in the White House? That Czar—or, Czarina, more precisely–is Constance Steinkuehler,  a professor from University of Wisconsin whose appointment as “Senior Policy Analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology” constitutes, in the admiring words of USA Today, “one of the most unconventional White House hires in recent memory.” She’s supposed to use her presidential appointment to promote development of “big, save the world” video games, but since this particular industry seems to succeed admirably without federal supervision, it’s hard to understand why taxpayers must fund an expensive new office to take charge of game development by the private sector. Instead of trimming millions of unnecessary jobs from government payrolls, Barack Obama is determined to add more, alas.

Prominent conservatives led by Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin like to describe Barack Obama as a “Saul Alinsky radical,” thereby linking the president to a Chicago community organizer and leftwing theorist of the 1950s and ’60’s. White House defenders reject the label, insisting Obama was only ten when Alinsky died and that his later work as a community organizer focused on practical help for the poor, not sweeping social transformation.

Regardless of the president’s possible affinity for Alinsky’s philosophy, it’s dumb politics to obsess on a forgotten activist few Americans could pick from a police lineup. To discredit the president through possible Alinsky associations you’d first have to explain who Alinsky was. Instead of wasting time describing an agitator’s bad ideas from last generation, conservatives should concentrate on exposing President Obama’s bad policies from last year.

A prominent medical professor at the University of Connecticut stands accused of fraudulent research on the purported health benefits of drinking red wine. Dr. Dipak K. Das published more than 500 articles promoting his ideas but now a 60,000 page federal report finds 145 instances of falsification of data and outright fabrication.

To make matters worse, Dr. Das took $890,000 from the federal government to pursue this phony research—a prime example of the corrupting influence of wasteful federal spending. This sum doesn’t even include the cost of 60,000 pages to expose his lies. Why should the taxpayer, instead of some winemakers association, have ever financed dubious investigations on the glories of Merlot and Cabernet in the first place? Washington bureaucrats don’t need wine-promoting fraud in order to spend public money like drunken sailors.

In a video message to campaign workers, President Obama promised an economy that “works for everyone, not just a wealthy few.” He also warned that his opponents sought to move “toward less opportunity and less fairness.” Apparently, calls for “fairness” will be the hallmark of his re-election bid, as if someone else led the country during the last three years of dysfunction.

Actually, the claim that fairness and opportunity go together is deeply misleading: history shows that governmental activism to manage the economy and redistribute wealth reduces opportunity rather than increasing it. An opportunity society means that each family wins rewards according to its own ability and hard work, so the results won’t be equal—and may not look fair. But any other system guaranteeing similar benefits regardless of effort or productivity is, inevitably, even less just.

On the eve of Civil War, Abraham Lincoln concluded his First Inaugural Address with two sentences of incandescent eloquence: “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

These words remind us that Lincoln—whose birthday we celebrate February 12^th—became one of the greatest English prose writers in history. The fact that such mastery came from an impoverished frontier boy with only a year of schooling constitutes one of the many miracles that should inspire anyone willing to look with open eyes at our amazing past.

Ron Paul supporters praise their candidate for consistency but are willing to ignore his glaring inconsistencies on crucial decisions. He says he opposes foreign wars – and wants no military action without formal declarations of war. But 11 years ago he backed war on Afghanistan with no declaration of war. In 1988, when Reagan was still president, Paul resigned from the Republican Party and denounced its leadership as phony conservatives; he ran as a Libertarian nominee for president and got less than one percent of the vote.

He then returned to the GOP to run for Congress, but wouldn’t support the McCain-Palin ticket in 2008—and won’t commit to backing the Republican nominees this time. For all its faults, the GOP remains the only vehicle for conservative change, and Ron Paul’s relationship to that party has been consistently…erratic and unpredictable.  

A new survey from Pew Research Center showed two thirds of Americans believing that our nation is torn by “strong conflicts” between rich and poor – with a nineteen percent increase in those citing this clash since Obama became president.

More people now agree about the existence of such conflicts than similar splits between white and black, young and old, or immigrants and native born. But the survey doesn’t indicate that people experience rich-poor battles themselves—just that they believe they exist. Considering the administration’s nasty anti-business rhetoric, with repeated claims of the rich escaping their fair share of taxes, not to mention journalistic obsession with the Occupy Movement and its slurs against “the 1 percent,” it’s hardly surprising the public is increasingly aware of class warfare – even if reality shows that rich and poor actually prosper, or suffer, together.

Going through clippings from the tumultuous year 2011, I came across a July item in the New York Times with a profoundly revealing headline. “Billionaires’ Rise Aids India, and the Favor is Returned” the story proclaimed, describing the way India’s growing private sector built huge fortunes for corporate chiefs who, in turn, have played the key role in India’s spectacular  growth.

If the New York Times understands that success of billionaires aids India, why can’t they acknowledge that success of billionaires in the US similarly benefits this country? Big profits for business leaders don’t mean they’ve taken the money away from their neighbors; it means they’ve enlarged the total sum of wealth that enriches the whole society. Money is no more a finite resource than human ingenuity, creativity or hard work.

Three quarters of Americans think we’re headed in the wrong direction, but nearly half of us still favor Barack Obama for re-election.

This means that millions assume that he'll somehow do better in a second term than he did in his first—breaking one of the iron rules of American politics: the Second Term Curse.

Even the most admired chief executives—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Grant, Wilson, FDR, Ike and Reagan, not to mention Clinton and Bush— suffered more disappointments and scandals in second terms.

As “lame ducks” scheduled to leave the White House, second termers enjoy less clout; big agenda items, honeymoon embraces and consensus governance are generally played out during the first term.

Obama would face a less compliant Congress in his next four years than in his first two, so why should anyone expect enhanced success? Those who already lament the state of the nation should consider a potential second term with an old warning: “You ain't seen nothin’ yet!”

Committed conservatives who support Ron Paul's presidential bid often choose to dismiss his naive and radical attitudes toward foreign and defense policy, but in so doing they ignore the very Constitution that Dr. Paul claims to revere.

America's founding charter doesn't place the President of the United States in charge of the economy, or social policy. But it does make him Commander-in-chief of the military and gives him principal power to conduct our relations with other nations.

This means that those who back Paul's domestic policies but ignore his isolationist, moral-relativist approach toward America's position in the world are actually saying they care more about presidential roles not specified in the Constitution than they do about the chief responsibility the Founders themselves had in mind. Dr. Paul wants America to play a less robust leadership role in the world—apparently agreeing with Barack Obama, but disagreeing with great Republicans Lincoln and Reagan.