The Londoner

Wayne LaPierre and the NRA : so defensive it was downright offensive The leading gun rights lobbyist gave a performance so tone-deaf that only he missed why 'put more guns in Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice-president, called reporters 'irresponsible, duplicitous and dangerously dishonest'. Photograph: Christian Gooden/AP Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association , came to the podium Friday with the pursed lips and furrowed brow of a banker anxious over accounting errors . Throughout the press conference, he seemed to be reaching for an emotional range that would reflect the horror and sorrow so many felt in the wake of the Sandy Hook killings . But the most effective expression he could muster was that of someone trying to remember his lines. I would like to believe that LaPierre was as anguished and confused by the events of last week as the rest of us, but the man clearly suffers from constip

America’s Baby Boom And Baby Bust Cities At this most familial time of the year, as recent events make us hold our children even closer, we might want to consider what kinds of environments are most conducive to having offspring. Alarm bells are beginning to ring in policy circles over the decline of the U.S. birth rate to a record low . If unaddressed, this could pose a vital threat the nation’s economic and demographic vitality over the next few decades. In contrast to last week, when we examined the nearly uniform aging of America’s biggest cities over the last decade , the decline in the country’s youth population has been in relative terms. In 2000, roughly 21.4% of Americans were under 15; in 2010, that percentage had dropped to 19.8%. However, unlike in parts of Europe and East Asia , the number of American children did not decline – there were over a million more in 2010, a 1.7% increase. Yet since children are by def

What’s Behind the Russian Adoption Ban ? The Magnitsky Act , passed recently by the United States Senate , may have been of little interest to Americans , but its impact and aftermath in Russia has been tempestuous. The act, put very briefly, bars Russians who are implicated in human-rights abuses from entering the United States, and freezes their American bank accounts. Its adoption was accompanied by furious and threatening statements from Russian officials. This week, in a retaliatory move, the Duma, Russia’s lower house, voted almost unanimously for further constraints on non-government organizations that have even the faintest connection to America. Another amendment in the same package introduced a flat ban on the adoption of Russian children by parents in the United States. Read more here. HOME

Well, the Mayans were sort of right. The world didn’t implode when their calendar stopped on Dec. 21. But the National Rifle Association did call for putting guns in every American school in a press conference that had a sort of civilization-hits-a-dead-end feel to it. And we learned that negotiations on averting a major economic crisis had come to a screeching halt because Speaker John Boehner lost the support of the far-right contingent of his already-pretty-damned-conservative caucus. We have seen the future, and everything involves negotiating with loony people. Wayne LaPierre , the C.E.O. of the N.R.A., has major sway in Congress when it comes to gun issues. So the press conference, in which he read a rambling, unyielding statement in a quavering voice, while refusing to take any questions, could not have inspired confidence that the national trauma over the shooting at a Connecticut elementary school was going to be resolved anytime

The infanticidal maniac of Sandy Hook was merely conscripting grade-school extras for a hollow, hyper-narcissistic act of public suicide .   A man kneels in front of a makeshift memorial during a moment of silence at 9:30 a.m., Friday, Dec. 21, in Newtown, Conn . The chiming of bells reverberated throughout Newtown, commemorating one week since the crackle of gunfire in a schoolhouse killed 20 children and six adults in a massacre that has shaken the community and the nation. The 16th-century Coventry Carol, a mother's lament for her lost son, is the only song of the season about the other children of Christmas – the first-born of Bethlehem, slaughtered on Herod's orders after the Magi brought him the not-so-glad tidings that an infant of that city would grow up to be King of the Jews. As Matthew tells it, even in a story of miraculous birth, in t

Can The Last Taxpayer Leaving France Please Turn Out The Lights? The fiscal frenzy that has seized French socialists is not only grinding France ’s economy to a halt; it is also attacking the very foundations of French society by destroying entrepreneurship and responsibility. Taxes are raining down on French citizens , and the promised shelters often disappear before they have even been introduced.   The French government’ s 2013 finance bill has announced confiscatory tax rates on incomes and capital gains, and payroll taxes will be increased as well. But the socialists are shooting themselves in the foot, as such tax rates will destroy wealth and drive out entrepreneurs, capital, businesses, and young people . Thus, tax revenues will ultimately not rise but fall. The message could not be clearer: The number of requests by French citizens to leave France are suddenly up

Why the next four years might be more of the same Rather than come to some agreement with the administration, House Republicans have switched to a unilateral plan to deal with the fiscal cliff: Bush-era tax rates would remain for all income under $1 million. The White House has now announced that Obama would veto any such measure, and the House GOP’s “plan B” isn’t going anywhere. But it signifies something larger about what to expect in Obama’s second term: That none of the incentives have changed for Republicans, meaning they still have no reason to cooperate with the President. In other words: The next four years may be largely the same as the last four. The GOP’s current behavior is out of sync with the public’s priorities, as expressed in the election, where solid majorities reelected President Obama and sent more Democrats to the Senate. But that likely won’t matter to Republicans, because the odds are good that in the end they won’t incur public discontent for

Invincible Ignorance By Thomas Sowell Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates? The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available. If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive. Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many. When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, bu

His Birmingham Moment? It took a traumatic turn of events in Alabama to show John F. Kennedy that he had to confront the issue of civil rights. The Newtown massacre may be a precipitating event for Barack Obama. B arack Obama’s pitch-perfect public statements on the Sandy Hook shootings summed up the grief and shock that even the most distant observer—and certainly every parent—must feel about last Friday’s unspeakable events. But I think I detected an even more personal elegiac note: regret that he himself has not done more to grapple with the issue of guns. “Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?” the president asked in Newtown, Connecticut, on Sunday. “I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer is no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to ch

Untouchable Why Hillary Clinton is the Teflon secretary. Washington can be a cruel and unforgiving place. Want a friend? Harry Truman once said. Get a dog. Or maybe he didn't say it . But it's a good point: In this town, nobody gets a free pass from the press, the pundits, and the pols. Nobody, that is, until Hillary Clinton. At the end of her tenure as secretary of state, she alone has emerged virtually unscathed -- the lone superstar of the president's first term. A recent poll has her numbers well above the president's and exceeded only by -- you guessed it -- her husband Bill. And those high favorability ratings have remained pretty consistent since 2008. There's no denying that Clinton has done a very good job as the nation's top diplomat. But to read the media adulation, you'd think she was about to be admitted into the secretary of state

Mexico's Maya face Dec. 21 with ancestral calm Meanwhile, advertisers capitalize on the doomsday theme Two Maya priests hold a water blessing ceremony at the Noc Ac cenote — a natural deep deposit of water — in the Mexican town of the same name on Saturday. The ceremony was part of a Maya cultural festival to celebrate the end of a cycle in the Maya Long Count calendar, and the beginning of a new era. UH-MAY, Mexico  — Amid a worldwide frenzy of advertisers and new-agers preparing for a Maya apocalypse, one group is approaching Dec. 21 with calm and equanimity — the people whose ancestors supposedly made the prediction in the first place. Mexico's 800

Birth Control In United States Lost amid the shock and horror of Friday's news was a remarkable op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who should no longer be called a "rising star" of the GOP. He commands attention by virtue of being smart, good at his job, and not a white guy. So it's significant that he chose to use his platform to break ranks with many social conservatives in his party by calling for over-the-counter sales of birth control pills. Of course, Jindal did so by couching his argument in a hyper-partisan defensive posture, lashing out at "Democrats [who] demagogue the contraceptives issue and pretend, during debates about health-care insurance, that Republicans are somehow against birth control." Jindal recognizes that the vast majority of Americans support the use of contraception, and that the issue of access to contraception is a loser for Republicans. So he proposes to take the