Opinion

The “war on Christmas” has become an annual yuletide fiction as reliable as tales of the Grinch , the nutcracker or even of Santa Claus himself. Fox News and its ilk complain about this alleged attack on Christianity each year. Make no mistake, though. There definitely is a war on Christmas, but it is not homosexual leftists like myself who are waging it: it is capitalism.

Andrew Thomas, 26, made a deadly decision to get behind the wheel after he’d been drinking on Thanksgiving night. With his 23-year-old wife, Darien Ehorn in the passenger’s seat, Thomas left the Canteena Bar and was immediately pursued by Paradise police officer Patrick Feaster.

In 1989, President Ronald Reagan’s farewell address referenced a refugee crisis which lasted throughout his presidency and beyond: the “boat people” of Indochina. In the wake of America’s involvement in Vietnam, perhaps as many as 2-million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians began to flee repressive regimes beginning in 1975. It took twenty years for that refugee crisis to end.

I was planning to write a festive poem to Congress as they approach their merry holiday recess but couldn’t come up with a rhyme for “dysfunctional.”

Gun violence has been a problem for a long time, but the recent shootings in Paris and San Bernardino have focused new attention on the issue.

Our children need us. They don’t need fear; they don’t need classes on how to get a gun away from a shooter. They need grownups

Reading the coverage of Donald Trump’s latest philippic calling for the prohibition of Muslims traveling to the United States, I noted that some reporters and commentators mentioned Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, his imagining of a United States taken over by a fascist dictator.

In the wake of the recent murders in Paris at least two GOP presidential candidates—Donald Trump and Marco Rubio—have said that American mosques should be shut down because they pose a security risk.  The assumption is that mosques serve as breeding grounds for ISIS, the Jihadist extremists who claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks and who have targeted the United States.

The economic hoarding by those at the top has been termed “income inequality”, but that’s neither a strong nor accurate enough phrasing. I have never heard poor people complain about “income inequality”; poor people complain about being screwed out of housing , or about working more hours for less pay or about having to choose between medicine and food .

When is it okay for public officials and the news media to withhold information from the public? Although “never” might seem like the right response, perhaps the correct answer is “When it saves lives.”

Even before the facts of the San Bernardino mass shooting are in, a familiar argument is dividing Americans along political, religious and racial lines: was this terrorism? The right-wing news site Breitbart.com wasted little time describing Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik as the “ jihadis next door ”, even before initial reports emerged that the couple may have visited radical Islamist websites and had unspecified forms of contact with people being investigated for links to extremist groups. Other outlets preferred to focus on the fact that Farook worked for the county public health department whose holiday party was targeted without immediately assuming his religion or political beliefs had anything to do with it.

The high costs of running the Islamic State’s “caliphate” and fighting a ground war are largely met from selling oil, supplemented with donations and money extorted from Christians and hostages. Preventing the jihadists from profiting from oilfields under its control should be a priority for the military coalition – indeed, Britain’s first strikes in Syria were against oilfields.

Like Brandon Ellingson, James Bava died at the hands of the Missouri Highway Patrol –but in Bava’s case, those hands were his own. Trooper Bava perished on August 28 when he crashed his patrol vehicle while giving pursuit to a speeding motorcyclist, later identified as twenty-year-old Serghei Pavel Comerzan.