Now in its third year in office, the Obama Administration has never championed the cause of human rights. Its slow reaction in June 2009 to the stealing of the election in Iran and the birth of the 'Green Movement' there, and its delay in backing the...
It was simply impossible to support Carter for reelection in 1980 and easy for me to support Reagan. The Reagan campaign was happy to have Democratic support, and the Reagan administration was happy to have Democrats in it; they took the view that, a...
In Jordan, where the prime minister is always a commoner, the king has announced some new reforms that would tend to move the country toward a more democratic system: Notably, the prime minister would emerge from the victorious political party, not f...
The mishandling of the would-be airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab's visa is only the latest piece of evidence that the granting of visas should be taken away from the State Department. For the granting of visas - especially today, when terro...
Knowing how to keep someone motivated and how to keep a connection are skills humans have learned and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. A robot can't figure out whether you can do one more push-up, or how to motivate you to actually do it.
Whether it is an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system, an attempt to bring down an airplane over Detroit, an attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square... I think that gives us a sense of the breadth of the challenges that we face, and the ...
I grew up in the Justice Department. I served 12 years as a line lawyer in the public integrity section. This department under me will not have any kind of political interference. I will not allow political interference in the Justice Department. Tho...
I think that people, despite my law enforcement background, view me as taking these consistently progressive stands, and I think that, philosophically, there is a desire to get at that person. But I think the stands I have taken are totally consisten...
The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens - raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized a...
Take the things from America that speak to you, that excite you, that inspire you, and be the Americans we all want to know; then cook it up and sell it back to them for $28.99. Cue Funk Flex to drop bombs on this. All my peoples from the boat, let '...
Vice President Joe Biden believes that illegal immigrants are citizens. Obama believes that some Americans who join Islamist groups are citizens, while others are not. Who is an American? Whomever the executive branch deems an American. Who isn't? It...
We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.
Most Americans are more concerned about the economy and job creation. And they can't understand why the Obama administration or the Democrat majority in Congress wants to pass a bill like the cap-and-trade tax that will cost us jobs, that will hurt o...
I am one of the most successful economists, according to what markets tell us, though most of my professional colleagues, who are much keener to accept market outcomes than I am, would dismiss me as a crank or - the worst of all abuses among economis...
I've read quite a few readers' reviews of my book on Amazon, saying, 'Ah, he criticises the free market, he advocates central planning.' I don't do that for a minute! But this is our black and white, dichotomous way of thinking - which has really bee...
Contrary to what many people believe, the welfare state was originally a 'rightwing' invention. It was the arch-conservative Otton von Bismarck who first introduced it. Bismarck hated socialism, but he wasn't an ideologue. He basically figured out th...
A chief justice's authority is really quite limited, and the dynamic among all the justices is going to affect whether he can accomplish much or not. There is this convention of referring to the Taney Court, the Marshall Court, the Fuller Court, but ...
I think judicial temperament is a willingness to step back from your own committed views of the correct jurisprudential approach and evaluate those views in terms of your role as a judge. It's the difference between being a judge and being a law prof...
When I worked in the Department of Justice, in the office of the solicitor general, it was my job to argue cases for the United States before the Supreme court. I always found it very moving to stand before the justices and say, 'I speak for my count...
President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to upho...
The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, socia...