Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson If I were to ask you to name a national monument, you would probably pick the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty. President Obama has a different idea. He designated vast acreages in Utah and Nevada as national monuments. The 1906 Antiquities Act gives the president the authority to create national monuments from federal lands. In recent decades, only a few presidents have used this law. Perhaps the most notable was when President Clinton designated the Grand…

Kerby Anderson Economist Thomas Sowell filed his last column a little over a week ago. At the age of 86, he certainly has earned his retirement. We will miss his insight, but benefit from the books and columns he has written over the years. One of his last few columns had the engaging title “Football and Fallacies.” As is so often the case, he takes on one of the fallacies of the liberal left. He talks about the reaction from…

Penna Dexter It’s widely expected that, not long after Inauguration Day, confirmation proceedings will begin to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. What is less-discussed, but highly consequential, is that once Donald Trump is sworn in as the new president, he will have 103 judicial vacancies to fill. It’s a pretty big number. To put it in perspective, President Obama had 54 open seats to fill upon entering the White House. (This despite the fact that President Obama…

Kerby Anderson In my Viewpoint commentary last week, I mentioned an article that profoundly influenced John Stossel. The title of the article was Rinkonomics: A window on Spontaneous Order by Daniel Klein. He used the idea of a skating rink to illustrate some important economic principles. If we’d never seen a roller rink or skating rink, we would assume that you would need lots of organization. Imagine a 100 people skating around. It would seem that you would need smart…

Kerby Anderson Now that Congress is in session and most state legislatures are in session, it would be a good time for some soul searching. At least that is what Representative Marcy Kaptur is saying. She is a Democrat with a district in Toledo, Ohio. She says “the Democratic Party has some soul searching to do. On the economic front it fell short.” In order to get the attention of her Democratic House colleagues, she sent them a packet of…

Kerby Anderson Graeme Wood gives us a chilling picture of what Islamic jihadists are really like. His new book, The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State, is the result of years of interviewing ISIS members. It is amazing that he was allowed to interview them and that they didn’t consider killing him or holding him for ransom. Those who he interviewed were called “The Strangers.” When he asked them why they called themselves that, they said it…

Kerby Anderson Freedom of association has been the issue in so many of the religious liberty cases over the last few years. Should a baker, florist, or photographer be required to perform their artistic services for an event that is contrary to their moral stance? In most of these cases, government officials say that a person’s moral objections to same sex marriage cannot be a justification. If someone disagrees with what a homosexual or lesbian couple believes and wants to…

Kerby Anderson As 2016 came to a conclusion, I wanted to cover some of the important stories of the year. One of the top stories, of course, was terrorism and the terrorist attacks both in this country and abroad. The problem is that there are so many any more that is hard to keep track of all of them. In a recent column, Cal Thomas expressed the same frustration. You have the recent terrorist attacks in Turkey and Germany, but…

Kerby Anderson As this year is winding down, it is time to start a new year. As we begin a new year, I wanted to pass on some advice. In previous Viewpoints, I have talked about the value of using this time of year to change something in your life. There is nothing magical about using January 1 as a start date, but why not use it to improve yourself? First, I would recommend you pick just one thing to…

Penna Dexter Author and radio host Eric Metaxes told an important story in his column that appeared in the Wall Street Journal Christmas weekend. He wrote of a Christmas Eve, 48 years ago, when three astronauts spent Christmas Eve inside the Apollo 8 capsule orbiting the moon. The astronauts did something that should not be surprising, but seems extraordinary to us today. They took turns reading from the first ten verses of the Book of Genesis. Their voices were broadcast…

Kerby Anderson This Christmas season we probably ate too much candy. Walter Williams in a recent column reminds us why so much candy is now produced in other countries. It is another example of why many American companies decide to leave the United States. Chicago, he reminds us, used to be America’s candy capital. It isn’t anymore. Brach’s used to employ about 2,300 Americans. Most of their jobs now can be found in Mexico. Ferrara Candy Company also moved much…