Obama losing rock-star status among young voters

In his campus speeches, Obama stumped for keeping low interest rates on student loans. But young people may be figuring out that colleges and universities are gobbling up the money government pours in, leaving them saddled with debt.

It's a side issue. The Harvard survey showed 58 percent of Millennials saying the economy was a top issue and only 41 percent approving Obama's handling of it. Like Romney, they seem to be saying, "It's the economy, and we're not stupid."

by Michael Barone (read more)

Conservative consumers: Stand your ground

Conservative consumers need to get informed, get active and stand their ground against free speech-squelching progressive activists who have demonized the American Legislative Exchange Council. This isn't just a battle over ALEC. It's a war against the left's shakedown artists taking aim at our freedoms of speech and association.

by Michelle Malkin (read more)

The Vatican and the sisters

On April 18, after years of study, the Holy See appointed Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle to oversee the LCWR’s activities, supervise the LCWR’s adherence to the Church’s liturgical norms, review its links to affiliated organizations like the political advocacy group “Network,” and guide a revision of the LCWR’s statutes. Sartain will be assisted by Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Ill. (appropriately enough, a veteran ice-hockey goalie used to taking hard shots), and Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo (whose theological analysis of the LCWR’s activities over the past decade shaped the decision to appoint Sartain as the Holy See’s delegate in charge of the LCWR).

That imagery — three men, acting on behalf of a male-dominated Curia, assuming leadership of an organization of women religious — proved irresistible to Vatican critics, eager to drive home the point that the Catholic Church doesn’t care about one half of the human race (as the proprietor of a once-great American newspaper once told his new Rome bureau chief as she was leaving the U.S). Others were eager to use the Vatican action to prop up crumbling public support for Obamacare: The good sisters of the LCWR supported Obamacare; the aging misogynists at the Vatican whacked the LCWR; see, Obamacare must be right, just, proper, and helpful toward salvation! The problem with the former criticism, of course, is that the Catholic Church is the greatest educator of women throughout the Third World and the most generous provider of women’s health care in Africa and Asia; there, the Church also works to defend women’s rights within marriage, while its teaching on the dignity of the human person challenges the traditional social and cultural taboos that disempower women. As for the notion that the Church’s Roman leadership put the clamps on the LCWR because “the Vatican” objects to Obamacare, well, that would be the first European-style welfare-state initiative to which “the Vatican” has objected in living memory.

by George Weigel (read more)

Why America is still the best hope

There are three big ideas -- or religions, if you will -- competing for humanity's allegiance: Leftism, Islamism, and Americanism. I argue that the American value system -- what I call "the American Trinity" -- is the best system ever devised for making a good society.

The problem is that most Americans cannot identify these values, and therefore cannot fight on their behalf. In the meantime, the alternatives, Leftism and Islamism, have been spreading like proverbial wildfire, largely because their adherents know exactly what they are fighting for.

by Dennis Prager

The French election’s lesson for conservatives

[French President] Sarkozy’s fate is ... an awful warning to conservatism throughout Europe and even in the U.S. Since the end of the Cold War, mainstream conservative parties have thought they could safely dispense with patriotic voters disturbed by the drift of power from nation-states to undemocratic transnational institutions. They ignored their complaints about the loss of democratic accountability and the diminution of national sovereignty as old-fashioned and irrelevant. They believed those voters, long a staple element in conservative coalitions, had nowhere else to go. Well, ... these voters have joined new coalitions with left-leaning voters motivated by economic insecurity under the auspices of insurgent parties of Left and Right. That has happened across Europe and, indeed, the advanced world. And where insurgent parties were not available, they have stayed at home — and the mainstream center-right parties have gradually become weaker, less connected with the voters, more reliant on public relations and opinion management, and increasingly rooted in a transnational political class.

by John O'Sullivan

Liberal nostalgiacs don't understand jobs of the future

The bad news for the Millennial generation that is entering its work years is that the economy of the future won't look like the economy we've grown accustomed to. ...

The good news is that information technology provides the iPod/Facebook generation with the means to find work and create careers that build on their own personal talents and interests.

by Michael Barone

The president’s incoherent economic ‘philosophy’

When you strip out all of the excessive and grandiose rhetoric, what the president is attempting to argue ... is that the keys to higher economic growth in the United States are higher marginal tax rates on the successful, no reforms to entitlement programs, and more government spending on selected "investments." To say that this is a pathetic plan for growth would be to give it too much credit.

by James Capretta

Mixing and matching

Behind ... busy work for bureaucrats and ideologues is the idea that there is something wrong if a community does not have an even or random distribution of various kinds of people. This arbitrary assumption is that the absence of evenness or randomness — whether in employment, housing or innumerable other situations — shows a "problem" that has to be "corrected."

by Thomas Sowell

Will we defuse our debt bomb?

The big question facing America now, and in the foreseeable future, is not who is going to win the next election but whether we are going to defuse a debt bomb that has put our very survival at risk.

by Tom Coburn

Should the US legalize hard drugs?

Would the public health problems resulting from legalization be a price worth paying for injuring the cartels and reducing the costs of enforcement? We probably are going to find out.

by George Will

Don’t do business with progressive appeasers

McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Intuit, Kraft, Arby’s and Walgreens have shown their true colors: appeasement yellow. It’s time for conservatives to stand their ground and stop showing these corporate cowards their money.

by Michelle Malkin

Still the least racist country in the world

In light of the tragic killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin -- and the manufactured hysteria surrounding it -- one thing needs to be stated as clearly and as often as possible: The United States is the least racist and least xenophobic country in the world.

by Dennis Prager

Why we need voter-ID laws now

There is something surreal about the voter-ID issue... [I]t is comically easy to commit voter fraud in person, and, unless someone confesses, it’s very difficult to ever detect.

by John Fund

The Democrats' election forgery racket

Primary petitions. Absentee ballots. Doctors’ orders. Fraudulent signatures are becoming the signature of desperate Democrats who play the electoral game by one set of rules: By Any Means Necessary.

by Michelle Malkin

The invincible dogma

At the heart of [a long-standing legal charade] is the prevailing dogma that statistical disparities in employment — or mortgage lending, or anything else — show discrimination.

by Thomas Sowell

Forward, march!

Republicans will need to run a campaign that explains. Explanation—as opposed to denunciation of others, or celebration of self—hasn’t much characterized the campaign of the likely Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, so far. But if Romney—assuming he’s the nominee—can’t lift his general election campaign above the level of the primary contest, he’s likely to lose.

by Bill Kristol

Assailing the Supreme Court

[A]s panic sets in, the left has taken to mau-mauing the Justices by saying that if they overturn the mandate they'll be acting like political partisans. The High Court's very "legitimacy" will be in question, as one editorial put it—a view repeated across the liberal commentariat. ...

Overturn any part of the law, the Justices are being told, and your reputations will be trashed. The invitations from Harvard and other precincts of the liberal establishment will dry up. And, by the way, you'll show you hate sick people—as if the Court's job is to determine health-care policy.

This is the left's echo of Newt Gingrich's threat earlier in the primary season to haul judges before Congress when it dislikes their rulings. Remember the political outrage over that one?

from The Wall Street Journal