Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at Obama cuts off supply of military-style gear to local police
I know there are a lot of people, including some on the right (and some who pretend to be right-wingers . . . looking at you, libertarians) who are uncomfortable with the idea of the "militarization of local police." Count me not among them. I am uncomfortable with the misuse of military-style equipment by police. But if rioters are going to form violent mobs, loot cities, burn private businesses to the ground and attack innocent people, I want the police to have all the gear and firepower than can get to put those riots down.
- Monday, May 18, 2015
Not news: Hillary Clinton is corrupt, to the point where she shamelessly shakes down corporations for cash in advance of their lobbying her for all kinds of favors in the event she is ever in a position to grant them.
Even as U.S. Special Forces had just taken out a major ISIS commander in Syria, the people of Ramadi have now become the latest witnesses to what happens when the United States fights a battle in a half-hearted manner. We lose, and when the enemy is a sadistic group of monsters like ISIS, our allies pay a horrifically high price.
Reports overnight are that Ramadi, a crucial city in the Anbar province and a strategic part of the gateway to Baghdad, 
I know a lot of you are absolutely convinced that Tom Brady cheated his way to the Super Bowl by flagrantly directing the illegal deflation of footballs that were used in the AFC Championship Game against the Colts, and that the Patriots' 45-7 win in that game was tainted by Brady's better grip on the balls as a result of the tampering.
As someone who believes Hillary Clinton is the most woefully ill-suited person ever to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, I certainly welcome any challenge to her candidacy. In fact, I doubt many of you agree with me but to this day I think we've been less bad off under Barack Obama than we would have been under Hillary - and that's setting the bar pretty low.
So let me see if I have this straight. ABC News hires a guy whose primary experience is as a mouthpiece for the Clintons, and assigns him to report news objectively and without bias. Some time later we discover, to our horror, that he is contributing money (and more than he first admitted) to the slush-fund-disguised-as-a-charity that these very same Clintons use to line their pockets while shaking down foreign governments, making speeches for upwards of half-a-million dollars, and demanding the "toppling" of the damnable "1 percent."
I present to you, Saida Grundy, an assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University - and apparently quite the piece of work insofar as she wants more open discussion about what a gigantic problem white males are on college campuses. But I also rise in defense of Assistant Prof. Grundy, because I believe she should suffer no consequence and pay no price for saying what she said.
Once the news came out yesterday that the derailed Amtrak train was traveling more than twice the speed limit around the curve where the crash occurred, it was only natural to speculate that something might have been wrong with the engineer. Whether that was something self-inflicted or something entirely beyond his control, that would have to wait for more facts to come out. What the engineer is now saying through his lawyer does not exactly qualify as a fact, but it certainly fuels the theory that 
The stories that come out of North Korea - speaking here of the executions of those who in some small way displease Bowl Cut Jr. - are horrifying to the extent they can be believed. But I'm not gonna lie . . . sometimes they're downright hilarious. Maybe you just suspect that the "spies" who come up with this stuff are just punking the rest of us, which is why you can allow yourself to be amused by the creativity of the stories. The one about Kim having his ex-girlfriend executed in a stadium, which (we think) turned out not to be true, sounded like something Rogen and Franco could have come up with on their own.
Do you know what a fact is? That's easy. Of course you do. Fact is an objective truth not subject to interpretation or dispute. Water is liquid if it's above 32 degrees Fahrenheit. That's a fact. Thursday comes after Wednesday. That's a fact. The address of the White House is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
People who deal in actual facts can recognize that an assertion is either fact-based or its not. It's really not that complicated. That's for normal people who understand what a fact is. But there are other kinds of people, those who don't know what a fact is because they are apparently not intelligent enough to understand such a straightforward concept. Ironically, and tragically, many of these people have found work doing something that calls itself - but patently is not - "fact checking."
At first, the numbers seem alarming, and there is an alarming element to it. Since the last time such a poll was taken in 2008, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians has dropped from 78 percent to 70 percent. Yes, 70 percent is still an overwhelming majority, but an 8 percent drop in just seven years is pretty big.
So how does one account for those one-time devoted followers of Jesus Christ suddenly abandoning the Kingdom of God? One doesn't, because that's not what's really happened here.
A lot of people know that Denzel Washington is a Christian, and he's never been particularly shy about it. And Dillard University is at least nominally a Christian college, so it's not as if Denzel brought this message to Harvard. Now that would have been controversial (Harvard's origins as a Christian seminary notwithstanding). But what I love about this address is not just that a celebrity associated with secular art delivered it. It's the unusually excellent substance of what he said, crammed into 11 minutes at that:
I am not passing judgment on the evidence Marilyn Mosby will present in the her cases against the six Baltimore cops connected to the death of Freddie Gray - because I haven't seen the evidence. Maybe it's rock solid, and if that's the case then convictions will be warranted in spite of the way she's acting.
Is Ben Carson brilliant? Absolutely. Anyone who can perform brain surgery on children is brilliant. Ted Williams was brilliant too. He knew more about hitting than anyone alive. And I'd argue that Tony Banks is brilliant as well, because of his use of chord changes, unusual time signatures and complex song structures.
But just because your mind operates at a very high level, and you are able to pair it with a particular skill set to do a difficult thing that most people couldn't ever conceive of doing, that doesn't mean you can do every difficult thing that requires brilliance. So does the brilliant mind and impeccable skill of a neurosurgeon, not to mention a clear inclination toward conservative policy ideas, make Ben Carson presidential material?
Al Sharpton won't be heading to Mississippi, and for that I'm sure all of Mississippi can take some comfort. Geraldo Rivera won't be showing up either, nor can we expect burning drug stores and video of one brave mother whooping her son for acting like a moron.
But two innocent police officers who were just trying to make a routine traffic stop are dead. The murders occurred on Sunday, and four suspects have already been arrested. Now the usual media pattern for stories like this is tell you the race of everyone involved, but that assumes they cover the story at all of course. I think it's a racist load of crap to do that, but I will tell you that the racial makeup of the principles here pretty much guarantees the media won't touch this story with a 10-foot pole, as it holds out no potential for causing a race riot - just the thing they love.
