The Londoner

Deficit solution must preserve the American dream For families still struggling to get by, the holiday season is a time for hope that the coming year will bring new opportunities. While our economic recovery has seen significant progress, there is still much more to be done to get Americans back to work and expand our middle class. However, a serious impediment to doing so exists in the form of the fiscal cliff. That combination of automatic tax increases and arbitrary spending cuts, if allowed to hit on January 1, would significantly undermine Congress’s ability to invest in moving our recovery forward, creating new opportunities, and working toward sustained job growth. If we don’t prioritize spending or bring in sufficient revenues, programs that expand our economy and protect the most vulnerable are at risk. Indiscriminate cuts to those kinds of programs would damage the economy even furthe

A massacre that has turned the world upside down. Sunday I learned about the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school while we were setting up at Fox News to tape Cavuto on Business . The news was so horrible that we all felt as if we had lost our legs and could no longer stand. It was such horrible news that it simply turned the world upside down. It still is that kind of news, and it’s incredibly depressing about the nature of humanity. And my wife and I pray all day for the souls of those dear children and for the peace, if there ever will be peace, of their families… and for the souls of the adults and the peace of those who knew and loved them. As usual, the smartest comment about the whole subject came from John R. Coyne, Jr. “There is evil in the world. It’s beyond mental illness, beyond gun control. It is evil.” The killer got his weapons from his mother, who apparently had bought them legally and registered them. That tells us something about what anti-gun laws

What If Nothing or Nobody is to Blame for Adam Lanza? Guns, Video Games, Autism or Authorities Eight-year old Shayne Frate, a third grade student at Sandy Hook Elementary School, hangs from her mother Valerie's back, wrapped in a Red Cross blanket to protect her from the cold, rainy weather, as she waits in line to attend an interfaith vigil in Newtown, Conn. What if there is nobody or nothing to blame for Adam Lanza's heinous acts? Other than Lanza, of course. What if school security and the school psychiatrist kept an eye on Lanza since his freshman year? The Wall Street Journal has a compelling narrative about the red flags addressed. What if he had a form of autism that has little or no link to violent behavior? Lanza may have had Asperger's syndrome but, even so, that is not a cause. What if it's too simple to lay the massacre at the feet of the gun lobby? Reader Larry Kelly tweets

The appointment of Tim Scott to replace Jim DeMint as South Carolina’s new senator is both history-making and good news for conservatives. Senator DeMint, who is leaving Congress to run the Heritage Foundation, is certainly pleased. At a Heritage dinner last week he made little secret of the fact that he wanted Scott to replace him. “He’s a good and decent man with firm convictions,” he told me. This is the second time that Scott has made history. He becomes the first black senator from the Old Confederacy since Reconstruction. In 2010, he became the first black Republican elected to the House from the South since the 1890s. His House race that year was drenched in symbolism. Scott ran in the GOP primary for the seat around Charleston against Paul Thurmond, an attorney and the son of one-time segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond. After having dispatched Thurmond easily, Scott won the general election. He took office in time to attend ceremonie

The Bracing Political Reality of Gun Control If there is any good that came of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it is that the informal stricture against “politicizing tragedy” enforced by the gun lobby and its allies, and generally complied with by the news media, crumpled, in something akin to a mass act of civil disobedience. The injunction against politicizing tragedy was itself political; now the rest of us are politicizing it back. The trouble is that most gun-control advocates are politicizing it the wrong way, in a way that’s deeply naive, and likely to crash quickly on the shoals of disillusionment. Michael Bloomberg emblemized the naivete when he spoke for vast swaths of America — and especially center-left America —  yesterday : It's time for the president, I think, to stand up and lead and tell this country what we should do — not go to Congress and s

IT hasn’t been a good year for evangelicals. I should know. I’m one of them. In 2012 we witnessed a collapse in American evangelicalism. The old religious right largely failed to affect the Republican primaries, much less the presidential election. Last month, Americans voted in favor of same-sex marriage in four states, while Florida voters rejected an amendment to restrict abortion. Much has been said about conservative Christians and their need to retool politically. But that is a smaller story, riding on the back of a larger reality: Evangelicalism as we knew it in the 20th century is disintegrating. In 2011 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life polled church leaders from around the world. Evangelical ministers from the United States reported a greater loss of influence than church leaders from any other country — with some 82 percent indicating that their movement was losing ground. I grew up hearing tales of my grandfathe

America: Too many guns, too little will to change Newtown, Connecticut, joins a rollcall of towns whose names become synonymous with violent death. The President has a fight on his hands Share +More This column, readers should be warned from the outset, is an exercise in futility. Not a single argument in it is new. It, and the myriad similar ones which have appeared these last 24 hours, might have been published a year ago, five years ago, even 20 years ago. In fact, they were – but in the interim, nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed. And that is the real tragedy and disgrace of Friday's mass shooting in Connecticut. The simple truth is that for all the ink spilt and outrage voiced, such incidents have become more, not less frequent since I first arrived in the US in 1991. That October, I was writing my first rampage story, about an unemployed merchant seaman named George Hennard who drove his pick-up

(WASHINGTON) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who skipped an overseas trip this past week because of a stomach virus, sustained a concussion after fainting, the State Department said Saturday. The 65-year-old Clinton, who’s expected to leave her job soon after serving as America’s top diplomat during President Barack Obama’s first term, is recovering at home and being monitored by doctors, according to a statement by aide Philippe Reines. No further details were immediately available. The statement said Clinton was dehydrated because of the virus and that she fainted and sustained a concussion. She will continue to work from home in the week ahead and looks forward to being back in the office “soon,” the statement said. Congressional aides do not expect her to testify as scheduled at congressional hearings on Thursday into the Sept. 11 attack against a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.

In the wake of the devastating shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut , which left 20 children and a reported seven adults dead, guns have become a focus in a state that’s usually far from the glare of the broader gun control debate. When one thinks of Connecticut—a firmly liberal state—it’s a safe bet that firearms aren’t the first things that come to mind. While other states have bigger gun-toting reputations (remember when Texas governor Rick Perry shot a coyote while jogging?), the Nutmeg State’s relationship with guns is more subdued—though no less profound. As one of early America’s industrial centers, Connecticut was a hotbed of weapons manufacturing—so much so that it was referred to in the 19th century as the “Arsenal of America.” In 1851, Samuel Colt, inventor of the revolver, built a factory on a parcel of land on the banks of the Connecticut River near Hartford. The legendary saying attached to Colt was “Abe Lincoln may have freed a

What the cliff means, and why America’s deficit woes are so intractable WHEN the dust from November 6th’s election settled, the re-elected Barack Obama and the re-elected Republican leaders of Congress had less than two months to avert the “fiscal cliff”, a collection of tax increases and spending cuts scheduled for the beginning of the new year. They proceeded to fritter most of it away by disparaging each other’s offers. When John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, met reporters on December 7th, he moaned, “This isn’t a progress report, because there is no progress to report.” Now, with less than three weeks to go, the pace has at last picked up. Mr Boehner and Mr Obama (pictured above) have talked twice in the past week, and representatives of both have exchanged offers. Publicly they say they are still far apart, but that is to be expected: serious negotiations seldom take place in front of cameras.

Jonathan Rauch’s (Mostly) Failed Agenda for Hurting Workers – and What Would Work College of the Ozarks’ “Hard Work U” Program I see lots of attention being paid to this article by Jonathan Rauch on the economic crisis of America’s working class. He’s looking at the right problem, but he’s looking at it all wrong. As a result, he misunderstands both the cause and the needed remedy. Rauch is right that the bottom half of workers have a long-term problem: the economy still produces lots of wealth for the top half, but not so much for the bottom. Unfortunately, Rauch mostly thinks of this in terms of moving wealth from the top half to the bottom – not, to be sure, through government transfer programs, but through wages. Unfortunately for Rauch, transferring wealth from one social class to another is not the purpose of wages. The purpose of wages is to compensate workers for their work. The value of wages therefore reflects the value of their work (excep

News that Michigan became the nation's 24th right-to-work state on Tuesday produced surprise in liberal and conservative circles alike. But this tectonic shift is no surprise to us. It's the result of nearly a quarter-century of advocacy that shows how the politically improbable can become politically inevitable. Unions ruled the legislature here for decades before free-market activists, the Mackinac Center's first president Lawrence Reed chief among them, began challenging their hold over the powers that be. Eventually, the tide began to turn, and in 1995 the Detroit Free Press, the state's largest newspaper, agreed to publish an op-ed by Mr. Reed asking, "Should workers be compelled to join a labor union to hold their jobs?" Over time, brave workers like UAW member Terry Bowman, president of Union Conservatives, stood up and demanded a choice. The West Michigan Policy Forum and Michigan Chamber of Commerce added their voices and influence to

Stopping Gun Violence Starts With Obama Amid one shooting after another, the only way to guarantee a gun-control debate is if Obama starts one. This morning, children – young children – were killed in their elementary school by a gunman in quiet, suburban Connecticut. Three days ago, holiday shoppers were killed in a mall in suburban Portland. Two weeks ago, an NFL linebacker murdered his girlfriend and then killed himself at his team’s stadium. Each of these tragedies has spurred calls for a national conversation on America’s culture of guns and violence. It’s a conversation that inevitably never takes place, and it’s one that only President Obama can make happen. The White House on Friday said it was too soon to talk about gun policy. “There is, I’m sure, will be, rather, discussion of the usual Washington policy debates,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney. “But I don’t think that day is today.” Yet Washington, and Obama, ha

The Times is  reporting today  that, if John Boehner and the White House can’t reach a deal on averting the fiscal cliff, the House GOP is considering passing a bill that would extend the middle-class Bush income tax cuts while enacting low tax rates (possibly even lower than the current rates) for unearned income like dividends, capital gains, and inheritances, and canceling the automatic defense cuts set to begin next year. Without knowing much more about it, this strikes me as a very savvy move for the GOP. The party’s big problem, as  Jonathan Chait has written , is that it has created a whole apparatus for preventing its members for voting for tax increases, whereas in this case the looming tax increases require no votes—simple inaction will result in massive tax hikes beginning on January 1. Chait refers to this as a Maginot Line—a seemingly formidable structure that opponents simply sidestep en route to wiping them out. What the GOP proposa