Cal Thomas stories, Page 4

If anyone ever was a good candidate for the death penalty,it is Nikolas Cruz. Four years ago, the then-20-year-old shot and killed 17 people, most of them students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Cruz pleaded guilty to all counts and last week came the sentencing phase....

DUBLIN — Americans are not the only ones suffering from high fuel and food prices, along with rapidly increasing costs for housing and rising mortgage rates. The Irish, too, are experiencing a similar economic squeeze, but unlike Americans who can reduce financial pressures and move to states with no state...

Watching BBC and Sky News coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, one is struck by the adjectives used by reporters, commentators and people interviewed outside Balmoral castle and Buckingham Palace: sense of duty, virtue, integrity, service. What astounds is that these and other character traits the late queen...

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been in office only seven months and already he is listed at No. 5 in a Washington Post story about possible 2024 GOP presidential candidates. In an interview, I asked him to respond to suggestions in some quarters that he might be well positioned to...

I hated college history. The textbooks were mostly about dead white men, Abigail Adams excepted. The lectures were boring. I didn’t see how any of it related to my young life and future plans. Historian David McCullough, who died this week at age 89, helped change my attitude toward history...

During recent election seasons there has been a debate over whether a voter must present an identification card to cast a ballot and if so, what type? Congressional Democrats are considering legislation that would provide secure identification cards, not to U.S. citizens for the purpose of voting, but to those...

In 1974, when the inflation rate was 11.04%, President Gerald Ford came up with a slogan: “Whip Inflation Now.” WIN buttons were manufactured by the millions and people were asked to wear them to demonstrate grassroots solidarity to combat the economic scourge. The campaign was later described by Martin Crutsinger...

Chief Justice John Roberts has confirmed the accuracy of a leaked document that revealed an initial majority vote to overturn Roe vs, Wade. In that memo, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the 1973 case overturning restrictive state abortion laws was “egregiously wrong from the start.” So where do the 64...

There’s an old joke about a fictitious poll taker who asked people what they thought about ignorance and apathy when it comes to politics and elections. One respondent said, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” I thought of that joke after seeing a recent YouGov poll. It shows a...

President Biden’s speech from Warsaw Saturday night reminded me of two previous presidents who delivered speeches confronting the autocracy that was then the Soviet Union and is now Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, a man Biden has rightly called a war criminal. On June 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy...

Oh, for the good old days of the Soviet Union. America’s foreign policy and goals were clear then: containment and opposition to communist expansion. Nuclear weapons were a deterrent, but neither side believed the other would use them. Russian President Vladimir Putin has changed the game by threatening to use...

While President Biden and local officials keep talking about causes for the rise in crime in our major cities, proposing “solutions” that have failed in the past, like former President Bill Clinton’s Midnight Basketball idea, the real reason for its escalation is deeper than what we see on the surface....

Former President Donald Trump has further — if that’s possible — undistinguished himself by again attacking his vice president, Mike Pence. In another of his ongoing email messages to supporters (which are usually accompanied by a donate button), Trump says he wanted Pence to overturn the results of the last...

Trust in government has been declining since the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. According to Pew Research, only 36% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents and 9% of Republicans and those leaning Republican now trust government. Who can blame them given the failure of government to perform on many levels? One...

The art of deconstructing an argument by refutation and holding a person accountable for previous statements that the person now contradicts was once an honored tradition. It has now mostly gone the way of other traditions in favor of sound bite statements formulated in political party meetings and used to...

For the third straight day last week, the Chicago Teachers Union canceled classes, choosing to return to virtual learning and citing dangers from the omicron variant as their excuse. To many, this is seen as nothing more than a teachers’ strike and power grab executed by a union that historically...

The conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell on five of six charges of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for sexual encounters with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is not and should not be the end of the story. While Maxwell has been held accountable for her actions, the men who engaged in these...

Peace on Earth and goodwill to men this time of year seems increasingly absent in diverse places. In America, the noble objective seems to have long ago left the U.S. Capitol, where too many members of Congress are as divided and angry at each other as ever. A new study...

President Biden has attempted to tamp down the frustration many feel over his inability to crush the pandemic, as he promised he would do when campaigning for the office he now holds. In a Tuesday afternoon address from the White House, the president promised to ramp up testing sites and...

As has been the case with so many other school shootings over several years, last week’s murder spree at Oxford High School in suburban Detroit might have been avoided if actions had been taken in the face of several obvious warning signs. Ethan Crumbley, 15, is charged with murdering four...

The death of composer Stephen Sondheim at 91 is more than the end of an era. It is the end of a chain of great Broadway musicals dating back to the 1920s when Jerome Kern’s “Showboat” first dazzled theater audiences. I met him only once. It was at Barbara Cook’s...

For some, this Thanksgiving — like last year — is a more difficult occasion than previous ones. Perhaps a loved one has died from covid-19, or you feel isolated from relatives and friends due to lockdowns, quarantines, travel restrictions, vaccinations (or not), masks and “distancing” and might think you have...

Before the right to keep and bear arms is stated in the Second Amendment, the Founders wrote why they believed it necessary for people to arm themselves as part of a “militia.” They said it is a “necessity to the security of a free state.” The Founders knew that liberty...

Remember those “shovel-ready jobs” promised by the Obama-Biden administration in 2011? When many failed to appear after passage of this spending boondoggle, President Obama joked, “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” That law, noted Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), cost $787 billion, of which $48 billion was supposed...

“Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.” — Thurgood Marshall Eric Adams, the incoming mayor of New York City, met last week with Hawk Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York,...