Ambrose: Jefferson championed vigilance, but Obama fears it
Thomas Jefferson said and others chimed in that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Phooey, says President Barack Obama. He recently told graduating college students in Columbus, Ohio, to essentially ignore such advice.
Ambrose: U.S. could stand to take a few lessons from Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher saved Great Britain not the way Winston Churchill did earlier, through wartime leadership, but domestically, through reform.
Ambrose: Terror in Boston shows importance of preparation
Homegrown or foreign-directed, it was terrorism -- a coordinated act meant to kill, maim, confuse and frighten at a major American event -- that we saw at the Boston Marathon on Monday.
Ambrose: A look at some winners and losers, saints and sinners
This is a review of recent winners and losers, of saints and sinners, starting with the wonderfully impressive Pope Francis, the Argentine newly in the Vatican, himself as much a work of art as the paintings there by Michelangelo, or no, much more a work of art. When he washed the feet of young prisoners on Maundy Thursday, as just one example, he radiated love you could feel halfway around the world.
Ambrose: Television news fails to inspire great deal of confidence
Last July, a Gallup poll said 21 percent of American adults had a "great deal" of confidence in TV news, which is odd even though it is a minority, seeing as how there is so little really, truly to have confidence in.
Ambrose: With government on autopilot, U.S. headed for a crash
In the movie "Flight," something major goes wrong with a passenger jet. It starts plunging downward, the pilot amazingly rolls the plane upside down to keep it just barely under control, and, at this point, if President Barack Obama were watching, he'd probably stand up to reassure the audience. "We don't have an immediate crisis," he would say, an encouraging smile on his face. "The plane is in a sustainable place."
Ambrose: Obama dodges blame for sequester; GOP not so lucky
'Spit in the ocean" -- it's a phrase that's well-worn, and for a reason, namely that it sums up so splendidly the idea of something that is itsy-bitsy relative to something very, very big.
Ambrose: Hypocrisy lets Obama avoid heavy criticism on drones
Ideology and personal tastes often can speak louder in politics than evidence or logic, and, yes, that's as true for one side as it is for another. But it has been especially pronounced among leftists in recent years, as many found little that George W. Bush did as president that they did not abhor, even as they can find little in Barack Obama they do not very nearly worship.
Ambrose: Super Bowl exemplifies some vital American virtues
The Super Bowl has come and gone. Reports tell us it was the third most widely witnessed event in American TV history, beaten only by two other Super Bowls. In this land of ours, the game has become as big a celebratory deal as just about anything from the Fourth of July to New Year's Eve. It features a physically tough sport. It is enmeshed in commercialism. Is all this OK?
Ambrose: JFK corrected his mistakes; will Obama do the same?
You bump into an article in The Atlantic magazine. It's about John F. Kennedy, an American hero writ large — except that he wasn't. It tells of how he put the world at risk for the sake of politics during the Cuban missile crisis, though finally coming to his senses, and you think about another charismatic American president, Barack Obama. Will he come to his senses, too?
Ambrose: Real solutions possible if Obama would just stay away
Republican House Speaker John Boehner, who started the fiscal cliff negotiations with a grand compromise offer, got as much as poked in the eye by President Barack Obama, and it didn't stop there.
Ambrose: Illegal immigration issue appears to be solving itself
Sometimes it seems the tipping point has come and disaster is on its merry way, and then -- what do you know? -- things start taking care of themselves. Maybe there was some helpful shoving, and it could be that more needs to be done. But you still have a kind of spontaneous solution, as is the case with immigration.
Ambrose: Durbin off by a lot more than a penny on Social Security
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said in a speech and in a TV interview that Social Security doesn't increase the debt by even one penny. He is wrong. It adds 2,100 trillion pennies to debt calculated as all future obligations. That's enough, along with the enormous amounts of money owed to other entitlements, to press down the American future to the point of its being squashed, but never mind. Durbin has politics to tend to.
Ambrose: Rice a pawn in effort to mislead public on Libya attack
A dozen women representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives said it was "sexist" to beat up on United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice for her misleading account of what happened in Libya on Sept. 11, and there's this to be said for their position: Rice wasn't the one most at fault for the deception.
Ambrose: Dream of Obama presidency has become nightmare
Maybe you didn't really trust Barack Obama's politics when he was elected president, but he was also bursting with positive characteristics, wasn't he? And weren't lots of people reassuring us he would fix the broken economy, abide by the highest principles of governance and move the country in right directions?
Ambrose: U.S. in midst of recovering from Obama's 'recovery'
First Lady Michelle Obama said the other day that America is in a "huge recovery" because of what her husband has done, and what I'd advise is that she get a pair of binoculars and look out a White House window.
Ambrose: Lessons on rescuing our schools
A report on American K-12 education as a security threat, a bully-boy teachers' strike and an emotionally powerful movie combine as a convincing lesson plan instructing us to rescue our schools soon — and that we can.
Ambrose: Conservatives are more compassionate than liberals
Mitt Romney has released his 2011 tax returns, demonstrating several things: how the left always overreaches, the bias of some news media and the truth of a book six years back that said it's not liberals who best illustrate compassion.
Ambrose: Obama's foreign policy full of contradictions, dangers
The day after the Libyan tragedy, President Barack Obama flew out to Las Vegas to do a political hootchy-kootchy and days earlier refused a future meeting with the prime minister of Israel, who is worried about something not so minor: how madmen edging toward nuclear weaponry in Iran just might immolate 7 million fellow citizens. And what prompted the disdain of numerous news outlets?
Ambrose: Rice takes stand against Obama's empty chair leadership
The Democrats are hysterical to the point of waging a war on the elderly, or at least on 82-year-old Clint Eastwood, who gave us a lasting image of President Barack Obama at the GOP convention. He is an empty chair, the filmmaker suggested, though just how empty was something we learned earlier in a speech by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Ambrose: Ryan's Medicare plan a stark contrast to Obamacare
The Democrats want to scare the elderly to death about Paul Ryan's Medicare proposals even though they won't affect anyone over 54, and here's what they're not telling anyone. Their own legislative mishaps include billions in cuts that start eating away at Medicare right around the corner and won't address the debt threat because of the coming costs of Obamacare.
Ambrose: Free speech proving costly to those who exercise it
In Russia, Vladimir Putin's government is prosecuting three women for a prayer to toss the president out of office. In the Netherlands and Denmark, officials have been putting people on trial for what they have said about Muslims. In Chicago, San Francisco and Boston, mayors are aiming to stop a restaurant chain from expanding its outlets because the owner does not believe in gay marriage.
Ambrose: Obama owes apology for more than smear campaign
His campaign's defamatory broadsides against Mitt Romney are "entirely appropriate," says President Barack Obama, a former community organizer whose work did so little good for the South Side of Chicago that it is now one of the more murderous neighborhoods in America. Play the game he's playing and you'd say he is to blame for the gang killings.
Ambrose: Health care law built upon foundation of major taxes
Is the crazily constructed, oppressively focused, unaffordable Affordable Care Act also the biggest tax in history?
Ambrose: Obama's autocratic mischief continues unchecked
Again and again, presidents overreach their authority. It's always a danger, and maybe there's a penalty such as public disapproval. Richard Nixon got caught in criminal conduct and was forced to resign.
Ambrose: Obama can't deny leaks enhance re-election effort
Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress say recent leaks of classified information could endanger national security, and some contend the White House itself did some of the leaking. The White House wasn't responsible, says the president. He adds that he is offended, which means The New York Times should be offended. If the president is right, the paper has been lying.
Ambrose: Playing politics with college loans only hurts students
Education Secretary Arne Duncan says student loans don't push up tuition, but of course, they do, much like housing prices were pushed up by banks giving loans to people who could not afford the mortgages. Does anyone in Washington, D.C., remember how that turned out?
Ambrose: Wisconsin recall vote could spur fight for fiscal sanity
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin may not have done every single thing right in his 16 months in office, but he did one thing right, powerfully right. He stood up to public employee unions turning many states and localities into places with little chance for good days ahead, and for that reason he is facing a recall election.
Ambrose: Dissident’s escape spotlights need for change in China
Kill millions here, kill millions there, and pretty soon you are talking about a brutal system that does not work. That was pretty much the way of things in China under the collectivism-worshipping philosophy of leader Mao Zedong, himself worshipped to this day, though his philosophy has been partly tossed out.
Ambrose: Obama sails toward fiscal disaster of Titanic proportions
President Barack Obama can’t seem to get anything right, or at least no more than half right, as when he said the other day that Google and Facebook “would not exist” without government spending on basic science and research. It is true that the Internet arose out of a military project, and it is also true that one of the few places Obama is willing to cut spending is the military. Go figure.
Ambrose: If health care law is upheld, all liberties are endangered
The federal government wants power, far more power than the Constitution grants, because, after all, officials don’t trust mere citizens to do the right things in their lives, and who better to instruct them than their betters in D.C.?
Ambrose: Governments must address pension predicament head-on
City and state officials have been as accomplished as Washington, D.C., squanderers in lavishing money they don’t have and never considering that the days of sunshine and plentiful revenues might end. They thus set us up for a mighty fall. My prime example for this thesis is highly publicized Stockton, Calif., which is getting ready to treat us to what could be one of the nation’s most memorable bankruptcies.
Ambrose: Flap over Limbaugh comments obscures true issue
Our priority-challenged president, who spent a few blinks of the eye talking about a potentially catastrophic national debt in his State of the Union speech, decided recently to comfort a female law student for an insult proffered by a radio-talk-show host thereby achieving what?
Ambrose: What’s wrong with free speech, honesty in elections?
Back around 1600, a Scottish physician made so bold as to write that the king of England and Anglican church officials were answerable to a higher power. His phraseology was not kind, and the Court of Star Chamber ordered his ears cut off.
Ambrose: Obama’s health care bill continues assault on faith
The latest embarrassment from President Barack Obama is more than an embarrassment. It’s an assault on faith that begins with a 2,500-page health care bill enacted with no one expected to read it except the bureaucrats paid to translate its obscurities into thousands more pages of regulations. After a prolonged look at a phrase that could have been interpreted multiple ways, the president and the masters of your life in the Department of Health and Human Services bypassed the sensible and decreed we are now in the age of mandated contraception coverage, one step closer to Utopian bliss.
Ambrose: Obama’s pipeline decision betrayal that hurts nation
In his weasel-worded decision to block a perfectly harmless pipeline that would have provided America with jobs, energy and hope, President Barack Obama betrayed his country, lied and even welshed on a deal with Congress. I am sorry to say so, but it’s true. Let’s look at some history to get there.
Ambrose: Mitt’s brilliance gets under Newt’s skin
Mitt Romney was a hugely successful, brilliant, insightful, bold, tough business leader of the kind who has lent mightily to American sparkle in good times, and for Newt Gingrich, that’s all the ammunition he needs to destroy the man.
Jay Ambrose: Many reasons to have faith in Tebow
Once, while working as an assistant city editor on a metropolitan newspaper, I made the discovery that while talent is a great blessing, it’s often character that counts most at the end of the day.
Ambrose: Michael Moore part of the 1 percent
Michael Moore, heavily weighted down with concern for fellow Americans — his nation harbors “possibly the dumbest people on the planet,” he once said — was tromping around in Denver recently. And no, even though I was just 25 or so miles west of him in my house, I did not feel the earth quake. I did catch him in the news being vicious with one of those he thought stupid.
Ambrose: Occupiers want own Reign of Terror
Some poor guy in New York was trying to get to work, and some Occupy Wall Street people were blocking his way, and one of them explained why. “This society is stopping a lot of people from going to work,” the person told a Los Angeles Times reporter. “It’s OK that we’re stopping people one day.”
Ambrose: Obama’s real concern his re-election
President Barack Obama, who has persistently been asking the rich for a tax sacrifice for the sake of their country, is hardly stopping there. He also wants thousands of America’s jobless to make sacrifices, but not for the national good.
Ambrose: Innovation vital as population soars
As of Halloween, or thereabouts, the world came to be inhabited by a total of roughly 7 billion people, which is fine except that some of them (radical, anti-technology, industrialism-hating environmentalists) want to keep others of them (mostly poor people in undeveloped countries) from having enough to eat. It doesn’t stop there because these sabotaging greenies don’t want the world to have enough energy, either, and if they get their way, their predictions will come true. Population growth will prove to be a population bomb. There will be poverty the likes of which we have never seen. There will be famine. Nature will not provide what we need from her and will see to it that population is reduced the hard way.
Ambrose: ‘Baptists and bootleggers’ policy fails
Across the nation, thousands are protesting Wall Street financial institutions and other corporations that are making more money than people make, as if corporate wage earners and shareholders aren’t people. The crowds are mostly expressing a “general frustration,” one reporter explains. Or massive confusion easily exploited, maybe? The protesters seem to like President Obama. He also rants against corporate greed, pretending to be a benevolent arbiter of justice, the great savior, a city upon a hill all by himself. But he is not by himself. He is forever serving financial interests in his crisis-confronting campaigns, making everything worse in the end.
Ambrose: Breaking law easier than you realize
Figuring on going somewhere? Stay home and remain seated, because the federal government may otherwise throw you in jail. If you think I am kidding when I explain that tens of thousands of criminal laws are out there waiting to grab you, listen to John Baker Jr. “Congress has made every American potentially indictable for a federal crime,” the law professor said to me as he explained the threat that began growing when Richard Nixon was in the White House. This president wanted a war on crime and got that and a lot more. As decades passed, liberals and conservatives joined forces in passing all kinds of criminalizing measures, often without knowing what the laws actually said.
Jay Ambrose: Obama big on ploys, short on leadership
If we were not in the middle of the worst recession since World War II and facing debt peril, President Barack Obama’s recent ploy about deficit reductions and taxes could be dismissed as one more wily politician assuming public gullibility. Disgraceful, of course, but not disastrous. But considering the possible consequences — prolonged and increased joblessness, dropping incomes, Greece-style crisis in America — the self-serving, re-election sleight-of-hand at the expense of others, namely all of us, puts Bernie Madoff to shame.
