Opinion and commentary on news, politics, culture, and policy impact.
The presidential campaign more and more resembles Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. The public and pundits are constantly being surprised on where the course turns next. Few would have predicted the list of candidates left standing as the parties turn towards their conventions. The next president is going to have to sharpen America’s blunt sword. Fewer…
The 2016 edition of the World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders is out, and the news is not good. According to the group, “there has been a deep and disturbing decline in respect for media freedom at both the global and regional levels.” This trend, which started in 2013, shows no sign of…
The United States Commission on Civil Rights has issued a statement slamming what it described as “so-called ‘religious liberty’” laws in North Carolina, Mississippi, Kansas, and Tennessee that supposedly “target members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (‘LGBT’) community for discrimination.” A nine-page dissent released by two members of the eight-member commission defended both the commonsense…
The Constitution could not be clearer: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” However, it seems that someone forgot to tell federal regulators about that. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, tried this week to change some of that this…
What seemed like an encouraging headline a few weeks ago was really all smoke and mirrors—far from pulling out of Syria, Russia has been rolling in even more troops and equipment. Russian President Vladimir Putin has once again proven that he cannot be trusted. On March 14, Putin began ordering troops to return home from…
This week I will be offering an amendment to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to prevent scarce defense dollars from being squandered on President Barack Obama’s executive orders regarding climate change. These executive orders require the Department of Defense (DOD) to incorporate a host of climate change bureaucracies into its acquisition programs, logistics…
State Department spokesman John Kirby announced that the Obama administration plans to circumvent U.S. law in order to advance its climate agenda. This should come as no surprise, as the president has already circumvented the Constitution through not submitting what is clearly an international climate change treaty to the Senate. U.S. funding for the United Nations…
The political season has brought a fresh wave of free speech debates on America’s college campuses. Some students claim they need to be “protected” from even seeing the names of presidential candidates they don’t like. Fox News commentator Guy Benson, also the co-author of “End of Discussion,” sat down with The Daily Signal to discuss…
Last Friday Barack Obama made an extraordinary intervention into the British debate over whether or not to remain in the European Union. Just two months before voters across the United Kingdom go to the polls in an historic referendum on June 23, the U.S. president issued a stark warning to the British people on a…
Recently some have claimed that international trade is responsible for unemployment in the United States. It can be shown that over the last 40 years this has not been the case. Others have argued that imports destroy American jobs. Again, these claims are mistaken. According to Bryan Riley and Anthony Kim, senior policy analysts at The Heritage Foundation, “the…
The House Armed Services Committee will soon mark up their version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This bill regularly runs over a thousand pages long and sets budgets and policies for almost every aspect of our national defense. The committee markup routinely runs until 3 or 4 a.m. and includes hundreds of amendments…
Self-identified conservatives are at odds with each other. What American conservatism means today, who defines it, and who is or is not a “true” conservative, is the flashpoint of bitter controversy. So, too, is the ever-shifting definition of that broadly despised thing called “The Establishment.” But there is a North Star that should simultaneously guide…
Apparently, the strategy of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and other opponents of privacy and freedom, is to continually repeat a big lie in the hopes people will eventually come to believe it. That’s how they have attacked a new law in North Carolina known as the Bathroom Privacy and Safety Act (HB 2). The…
Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Tom Malinowski presided over the release of the U.S. Department of State’s 40th annual Human Rights Report. The report reviews the state of human rights in nearly all countries across the world. This year, Kerry placed special emphasis…
We have so many opportunities in the workforce, yet women are often still told that we’ve got to run ourselves ragged and forego balance in order to break through the glass ceiling. Why? Part of the reason work-life balance is difficult to achieve is because our society places so much weight on the financial success…
Abraham Lincoln once said, “No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.” Over the past several years, the number of Americans on food stamps has soared. In particular, since 2009, the number of “able-bodied-adults” without dependents receiving food stamps more than…
On Nov. 4, 2015, Faisal Mohammad was shot and killed for stabbing four individuals on the University of California-Merced campus. An FBI investigation later discovered pro-ISIS propaganda in Mohammad’s possession. This has been added as the 77th Islamist-inspired terror attacks or plots on U.S. domestic soil since Sept. 11, 2001, which brings the total number…
The federal government refused to hold its own officials accountable after the Environmental Protection Agency dumped millions of gallons of toxic water into the Animas River—a blunder that would likely result in a criminal conviction for a private party. Michigan’s attorney general, Bill Schuette, now deserves credit for doing what the federal government didn’t do: file criminal…
Now more than 10 years old, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) no longer can blame its continued program failures, employee misconduct, and lingering management challenges on “growing pains.” The Department of Homeland Security no longer can blame its continued program failures, employee misconduct and lingering management challenges on “growing pains.” Since its inception, DHS has…
For almost a year and a half the Bank of Japan has been purchasing assets at around 7 trillion Yen (roughly $64 billion) a month, mostly in the form of Japanese government bonds, in an attempt to boost inflation and the economy. The Bank of Japan now respectively owns assets equivalent to over 77 percent…