Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, let me suggest that you take some time to read his letter from a Birmingham Jail. If you are young, I think it will give you a better idea of what the civil rights movement in the 1960s was all about. If you are older, it will remind you of some forgotten events and chapters in American history. I realize that it will take some time to read his letter. When I…

Penna Dexter As the president-elect chooses his cabinet we’re reminded of the size and complexity of our federal government. One wonders, can this really be changed? Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, is one observer who is hopeful. In the December issue of Hillsdale’s publication Imprimis, he writes “our government has swollen beyond recognition.” The founders enshrined a separation of powers in the Constitution so that each branch could work to keep the others in check. We have come to…

Kerby Anderson The millennial generation may reject God but they feel entitled to go to heaven. That is the conclusion of Nick Pitts in a column he wrote last year. He was on my program last week to talk about various aspects of the millennial generation. This conclusion was one of the most interesting. Quoting from some of the research by Professor Jean Twenge, Nick Pitts shows that Americans are much less spiritual than they were in the past. Americans…

Kerby Anderson At a university where Mike Adams is a professor, the Faculty Senate Steering Committee passed a resolution condemning faculty members for public comments on the demographic characteristics of students. They did so because of a free speech controversy that involved professor Mike Adams. In a recent column, Mike Adams used the resolution to raise a larger issue that I think universities need to seriously consider. If this university wants to stop publicly referring to the demographic makeup of…

Kerby Anderson Fake news is still in the news. In fact, PolitiFact designated “Fake News” as the “2016 Lie of the Year.” Some of the examples they cited are: “Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop” and “Thousands of people at a Donald Trump rally chanted: We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back.” None of these or other stories are true. Robert Knight in a recent column laments the…

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…