Cal Thomas

Every election cycle we must endure challenges and allegations about fraud (conservatives) and discrimination (liberals) when it comes to voter ID laws. This year is no different. A federal court ruled that the Texas Voter ID law passed in 2011, requiring voters to present official photo identification, discriminated again poor, minority and disabled voters and ordered a judge to approve new…

Growing up, I watched a lot of Westerns. In addition to the cowboy hero, the town sheriff was almost always a model of integrity. He stood for law and order against bank robbers, cattle rustlers and horse thieves all trying to disrupt the peace. A contemporary and real-life version of those fictional characters is Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.

During a guest appearance on Tuesday's edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe program, Cokie Roberts -- a political commentator for National Public Radio and ABC News -- hammered people who still support Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as “morally tainted” and an example of “textbook racism.” Roberts said of the approximately 40 percent of American voters who polls say still support Trump…

While we shouldn't live in the past, we can certainly learn from it. We are not the first humans to walk the Earth and yet too many, especially the young, suffer from the conceit that history is just a boring subject in school. PBS is rerunning episodes on its award-winning series "American Experience" on modern presidents and the challenges they faced. Each episode retraces what presidents…

You've probably heard the very old riddle: When is a door not a door? When it's ajar. An updated version might go like this: When is a ransom not a ransom? When the Obama administration says it isn't. President Obama and his State Department want us to believe that $400 million in foreign cash that was flown into Iran under cover of darkness on an unmarked cargo plane was merely money "owed" to…

Thanks to WikiLeaks, which has released nearly 20,000 emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee — with promises of more to come — we have proof the party that styles itself as inclusive, diverse and tolerant isn’t. Among the delectable tidbits on which Republicans are feasting are these: one male DNC staffer wrote another male staffer saying “I love you” and added “no homo.” Another…

In 1926, speaking about the Declaration of Independence on its 150th anniversary, President Calvin Coolidge noted the unique philosophy behind the creation of the United States: "We cannot continue to enjoy the result, if we neglect and abandon the cause."

In just the last few days, two African-American men were shot and killed by non-African-American police officers in Minnesota and Louisiana and five non-African-American police officers were shot and killed in Dallas by an African-American man who declared he "wanted to kill white people, especially white officers." The gap in our racially divided country has never been wider.

FBI Director James Comey has given Hillary Clinton something better than a get out of jail free card. He's protected her from indictment by recommending to the Department of Justice that she not be prosecuted for her and her staff's "extremely careless" handling of emails on private servers that included documents classified as "top secret," "secret" and "confidential."  

Have you heard that Hillary Clinton is the "first woman" ever to be nominated for president by a major political party? Of course you have. The media have repeated the line so often it is broken news. Hillary Clinton's nomination and the euphoria in the press (one NPR female reporter said she has seen women weeping over the possibility of Hillary becoming president) eclipses any discussion about…

Maybe it was those college courses on the history of Europe that soured me on the idea of a united continent. How could a conglomeration of nation states noted for invading each other, pillaging and warring against each other form a union? How could a continent with different languages, cultures and money become a united states of Europe modeled after the USA?

Credit President Obama for finally using the words he has desperately tried to avoid during his presidency. He correctly called the mass shooting in an Orlando gay nightclub Sunday morning, which killed 49 and injured 53, "an act of terror." It was, writes The New York Times, the "deadliest attack on a gay target in the nation’s history."

My musical tastes do not include rap and hip-hop, but when Snoop Dogg comments on the "Roots" remake, saying he is tired of movies about slavery and would prefer a series "about the success that black folks are having," he is singing my song.

Historically, when our nation has transitioned from one way of life to another, there has usually been some optimism about what was to come. That was true at the time of the American Revolution and it was true as we moved from an agrarian society toward the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th through mid-19th centuries.