‘Alan Caruba’ Archives
President Stupid
By Alan Caruba Remember when everyone was calling George W. Bush stupid? I do. Since then, his published memoir of his years in the White House has been on the bestseller lists following two years of Barack Obama unrelenting blunders and lies. From the beginning of the Obama administration, there were all manner of evidence that a group of [...]
Bankrupting America
By Alan Caruba The very word “budget” suggests a financial plan that one expects to live within, based on how much money one earns. It suggests prudence, plus the intention to put aside some earnings as savings for future or unexpected needs. None of this applies to the Congress of the United States of America, nor White House [...]
Multicultural Suicide
By Alan Caruba In his famed poem, Mending Wall, the American poet, Robert Frost chided the rock wall that he and his neighbor would mend each spring, replacing fallen rocks. “He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, ‘Good fences make good [...]
A Prediction for Egypt
By Alan Caruba In ten years--or less--Egyptians will look back at the Mubarak regime as "the good old days." Only the military can save Egypt from becoming the next Iran. The Moral Liberal Featured Writer, Alan Caruba, writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder [...]
Disputing Darwin
By Alan Caruba Abraham Lincoln was born on the same day, February 12, as Charles Darwin in 1809. The place was Shrewsbury, England and he was the fifth child and second son of Robert Waring Darwin and Susanna Wedgwood. He would bequeath the family name to science as Darwinism or Darwinian. He wrote “On the Origin of Species by Means of [...]
Short Attention Spans
By Alan Caruba The American Revolution, from the day in 1773 when tea got dumped in Boston Bay to the day in 1781 when the British were defeated at Yorktown took eight years. If it had been on television, the ratings would have fallen off in about two weeks. My point is that, by the end of the second week of the turmoil in Egypt, it mattered [...]
Iran’s Gangster Government
By Alan Caruba Two hapless Americans, Shane Bauer and Joseph Fattal, have been held hostage in Iran for eighteen months. Hikers, they and Sarah Shourd, were taken prisoner in what is generally described as “an unmarked border area between Iraq and Iran.” As much as I sympathize with their problem, I keep asking myself how can three [...]
Islam and the Prospect of World War Three
By Alan Caruba “I against my brother, I and my brother against our cousin. I, my brother and our cousin against the neighbors. All of us against the foreigner.” – Bedouin proverb Almost from its beginning, Islam has been a religion divided by warring camps. The tragedy of Islam is that Muslims are far more likely to die at the hands [...]
Barack Obama, Shape-Shifter
By Alan Caruba With the advent of the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birthday on Sunday, it was perhaps predictable that Time Magazine would photoshop of picture of Obama and Reagan as if they were standing together. “Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan” was the cover line. Obama would have been twenty years old when Reagan took office and, of [...]
Why Islam is Different and Dangerous
By Alan Caruba Imagine that every day of your life begins with a morning call to prayer from minarets around the city or village in which you live. Imagine that you are required to pray five times throughout the day, every day. Imagine that the law of the land is based on Sharia, taken from the Koran. Imagine that you live in a nation where [...]
Nutty Professors and Nutty New Taxes
By Alan Caruba Alan S. Binder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. All of which might explain why the nation is broke and why “intellectuals” like Binder are responsible for some of the most stupid ideas ever imposed on citizens who lack their [...]
Can Spring Be Far Behind a Groundhog’s Behind?
By Alan Caruba When Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow on February 2nd, you can be sure that spring will arrive on March 20 this year. Truth is, even if he doesn’t see it, it will still occur on March 20. On some years, it occurs on March 21. Groundhog Day is a holiday celebrated in both the U.S. and Canada, thus ensuring the eternal bonds [...]
Obama has a Very Bad Day
By Alan Caruba “Jan 31, 3:10 PM (ET) - PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge in Florida says the Obama administration's health overhaul is unconstitutional, siding with 26 states that had sued to block it. U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson on Monday accepted without trial the states' argument that the new law violates people's rights by [...]
Waiting and Watching Egypt
By Alan Caruba Today we watch events unfold in far off places often in real time. What we lack, however, is context. Most Americans and, I suspect, others in Western nations are frequently at a loss when it comes to knowing anything about the culture and history, past and recent, of nations in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia. What we do know [...]
Losing Egypt
By Alan Caruba Those of us around at the time of the 1979 Iranian student revolution that deposed the shah are having strong feelings of déjà vu because that uprising was swiftly co-opted by Ayatollah Khomeini who hated the Great Satan, America, as much as he hated the Little Satan, Israel. The U.S. lost a major ally in the Middle East. The [...]
The Long Winter of 2010-2011
By Alan Caruba For New Yorkers and those in my part of New Jersey across the river, snow has fallen eight times since December 14, an average of once every five days, 56.1 inches in Central Park as of Jan 27th, and people are, shall we say, taking notice? Along with the snow come power outages, disrupted bus schedules, air travel delays, [...]
Demonizing Bisphenol-A: The BPA File, Part One
By Alan Caruba In July 2010 I wrote a commentary about Bisphenol-A, more commonly called BPA. It is a chemical that has been in wide, safe use for over 50 years, but has come under a horrendous and unrelenting attack by a variety of specious environmental and consumer groups. Out of curiosity mostly, I initiated a Google Alert earlier this [...]
The True State of the Economy
By Alan Caruba The mainstream media will fall all over itself to put a good face on the President’s State of the Union speech. Time was when Presidents simply sent a written message to the Congress (Article II, Section 3) to be read in chambers, but we must now suffer through an hour and a half of madcap Democrat applause and frozen [...]
My Advice to the POTUS About the SOTU
By Alan Caruba Some of you will have more important things to do on Tuesday evening than to listen to President Barack Hussein Obama’s second State of the Union, commonly referred to as the SOTU and, of course, he is the POTUS. Is there an acronym for B-O-R-I-N-G and P-R-E-D-I-C-T-A-B-L-E? Here’s some free advice for the POTUS. The [...]
Hating Infidels 24/7
By Alan Caruba The Holocaust of the last century is remembered for the mass murder of Europe’s Jewish population, an estimated six million who perished. In total, an estimated eleven to seventeen million Europeans, Jews and Christians, died in the Nazi concentration and death camps or were murdered outright in their homelands. Records were [...]
Strangulation by Regulation
By Alan Caruba On Tuesday, January 18, I had the opportunity to participate in a conference call initiated by the Office of Management and Budget to roll out President Obama’s executive order regarding the revision of the federal government’s massive regulatory morass. On the same day, the Wall Street Journal had published President [...]
Unrepentant Commies
By Alan Caruba I have known a few Communists in my time. The worst of them are the unrepentant ones, still aglow from the 1960s and 70s when the college campuses and streets were filled with protesters of every description. Others have unhappy memories of the FBI keeping track of them. The best of them had an epiphany at some point in their [...]
Africa, the Awful Continent
By Alan Caruba As long as I can remember, for seventy-plus years I have seen photos of sick and starving African children. Now that Africa is home to seventy percent of the world’s cases of AIDS that image applies as well to too many of its adult population. As far as I can tell, it is an awful continent. That is a vast generalization, [...]
Who the Hell is Reince Priebus?
By Alan Caruba Okay, we have had two years of the token black man as the chairman of the Republican National Committee and it’s goodbye Michael Steele. Thanks for whatever, but the party’s broke and still has to raise a ton of cash for the 2012 elections. Bring in the white guy, Reince Priebus. Reince Priebus? Who the hell is Reince [...]
The Great ‘Climate Change’ Taxpayer Rip-Off of 2011
By Alan Caruba Unless I am seriously mistaken or misinformed, the rate of unemployment in the U.S. remains high and the foreclosure rate on homes is approaching the level of the Depression years. Two major bond rating companies, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s just warned that, if the federal government doesn’t stop spending and [...]
A Needless, Nationwide Bed Bug Epidemic
By Alan Caruba There really is no mystery to solving the nationwide bed bug epidemic. In 1946 the solution was DDT. Today the solution could still be DDT if it hadn’t been banned by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s and, since then, any number of other beneficial pesticides. I know something about this because, as a public [...]
Chris Christie’s Jersey Attitude
By Alan Caruba It’s the curse of having sat through too many local town council meetings and too many speeches by politicians; it’s taking notes as they speak because you want to keep what’s said fresh in mind. Regular folks don’t do this, but anyone who has spent any time as a reporter will tell you it is a hard habit to break. So, [...]
It Really Is a Small World
By Alan Caruba There is a flood in Australia of biblical proportions though it must be said there is little news of it in the U.S. media. Much of Queensland is under water which would be comparable to saying that much of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and a large portion of New York is under water. Australia is very big. If that news was not [...]
Haiti: A Victim of Nature and the UN
By Alan Caruba January 13th will mark the one year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. What followed has become a classic example of everything that can go wrong when the “international community” steps in to run a sovereign nation. For as long as I can remember, Haiti has been a political, [...]
Exiting Afghanistan
By Alan Caruba Like others of my generation who lived through the Vietnam War, it was at the time the longest war that America ever fought. Now the longest war is the one in Afghanistan that began on October 7, 2001. The Vietnam War began for the U.S. in 1963 when 2,000 military “advisors” were sent to aid the South Vietnamese government [...]
