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Are China’s threats to Taiwan a bluff?

Monday, four dozen Chinese military aircraft flew into Taiwan’s air defense zone, climaxing a weekend of provocations that saw nearly 150 sorties of China-based fighters and bombers. The U.S. State Department countered by issuing a stern statement warning Beijing about the adverse effect on regional “stability” of such “provocative military activity.” Yet even as the waves of Chinese military aircraft entered Taiwan’s air defense zone, President Joe Biden was reassuring Japan’s new Prime Minister Fumio Kishida that the U.S. would defend the Senkakus from any Chinese ...

The dirt on Dems’ reconciliation bill

Democrats are quarreling over the price tag of their Build Back Better bill, but the real problem is what’s in it. The bill coerces workers to join unions, imposes racial preferences on every facet of life and redistributes money from workers to takers. Fortunately, this bill is in limbo. Moderate Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin insist the bill has to be pared down to less than half its current price tag. The far left is screaming in outrage. But the bill can’t pass without every Senate Democrat supporting it. Not passing it would be the best outcome. This bill is as ...

A brief history of the law of both personal privacy and bodily integrity

As more governors issue so-called mandates requiring municipal and state employers, as well as private employers and public accommodations, to require their employees and patrons to be vaccinated against COVID-19, they are being challenged by arguments based on personal privacy and bodily integrity. The former argues that personal medical decisions are protected by the right to privacy, which is a natural right that supersedes governmental needs. The latter argues that since we each own our bodies, we can decide what goes into them. Both the personal privacy and the bodily integrity ...

2022 looking good for GOP

Going back to the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, the party of first-term presidents gained seats in House midterm congressional elections only twice. Karl Rove reminded readers a few months ago in his Wall Street Journal column that, since World War II, the average loss of House seats of the party of each first-term president in congressional midterms is 28. The largest loss was 63 in the first midterm elections in Barack Obama’s first term. This was after Democrats rammed through the Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote. Given that ...

Media soft-pedals root cause of murder

Sad to say, we keep killing each other. New FBI statistics show that, even though we practiced widespread isolation during the pandemic, the nation’s murder rate grew last year at the fastest rate ever — up 29.4%. There are fewer homicides now than during the peak years of the early ‘90s, but not since the federal government began keeping track in the ‘60s has the annual jump in homicides been as big as it was in 2020. The Washington Post’s news alert on the bureau’s announcement carried the headline: “U.S. killings soared nearly 30 percent in 2020, FBI data shows, with ...

Who is killing 10,000 Black Americans every year?

“Unfortunately, Jan. 6 was not an isolated event,” warned FBI Director Christopher Wray last winter: “The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now, and it’s not going away anytime soon.” Since he became director in 2017, said Wray, FBI domestic terrorism investigations had doubled in number to more than 2,000, and FBI investigations of white supremacists had tripled. Listening to Wray, one came away with the impression that right-wing terrorism was our foremost internal security issue, that the Jan. 6 riot was a ...