Cal Thomas

The battle over whether parents, or public schools and elites should decide what goes into the minds and souls of students has entered a second stage The Washington Times reports LGBTQ activist groups are complaining about parents who object to children as young as five being taught gender issues and reading books that contain profanities and anti-police messages.

During the 1994 congressional campaign, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Dick Armey (R-TX) drew up what they called a Contract with America. It was printed on a card which was small enough to fit in a wallet or purse and it detailed what Republicans would do should voters give the GOP a House majority for the first time in 40 years. The left and the media derided the contract, but it was deemed…

It’s an old Washington political trick. When you’re in trouble, change the subject. When President Biden’s poll numbers are low and falling, when the economy has produced the worst inflation in four decades and gas prices in some states have reached record highs, when he claims we should expect food shortages and produces gaffes instead of gas and then refuses to walk them back, even after…

President Biden’s speech from Warsaw Saturday night, reminded me of two previous presidents who delivered speeches confronting the autocracy that was then the Soviet Union and is now Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, a man Biden has rightly called a war criminal. On June 26, 1963, Kennedy spoke before the Berlin Wall which the Soviets had erected to stem the flow of Berliners out of the communist…

When one sits down to make a deal with the devil, it is the devil who usually wins. That’s because he is “crafty,” as the book of Genesis describes him. The United States and Iran appear on the cusp of a deal that President Biden and his diplomats claim will prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon in the short term. In exchange for a deal that won’t be worth the paper it is written on,…

There has been much in the news lately about censorship. The major media have been reporting on Vladimir Putin’s efforts to keep the Russian people from hearing the truth about his war against Ukraine and what President Biden has called war crimes. Dictionary.com offers this definition of a censor: “an official who examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television…

In his State of the Union address, President Biden claimed he would, be “the only president to ever cut the deficit by more than $1 trillion in a single year.” While this is technically true, he ignores the fact that the reduction in the deficit will be due to the decreased expenditures associated with COVID-19 relief.

Oh, for the good old days of the Soviet Union. America’s foreign policy and goals were clear then: containment and opposition to communist expansion. Nuclear weapons were a deterrent, but neither side believed the other would use them. Russian President Vladimir Putin has changed the game by threatening to use nukes should the U.S. directly confront his forces now raping Ukraine and committing…

When a president’s poll numbers are tanking, as the most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll shows they are for President Biden — 37 percent approval — he needed to do something spectacular, even radical, to keep him from sinking further. Unfortunately for Biden and his party, he did nothing that is likely to stem his free fall. Washington Post columnist Henry Olson said…

As often happens among the political class in Washington, we met on television debating each other. I liked him immediately, despite our political and even religious differences. Bob Beckel and I became friends and eventually more than friends. Twenty years ago, after debating a long-forgotten subject on Fox News Channel, we came back to the green room where I noticed a streak of sadness in…

It is usually Republicans who blast the media for what they consider biased or unfair coverage of their policies, but increasingly we are hearing Democrats engaging in the same behavior, apparently frustrated their agenda is not being embraced by some of their fellow Democrats and the public. Last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has yet to stem rising crime as he promised to do,…

“Dirty tricks” was a term used to describe the behavior of operatives within the Nixon administration to smear the reputations of opponents and undermine the appeal of certain politicians. Fifty years ago, these dirty tricks included a false allegation that Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA.) had fathered an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old girl and the break-in at Democratic National…

While President Biden and local officials keep talking about causes for the rise in crime in our major cities, proposing “solutions” that have failed in the past, like former President Bill Clinton’s Midnight Basketball idea, the real reason for its escalation is deeper than what we see on the surface. The president’s proposals delivered in New York City last week are more window dressing. As…

Trust in government has been declining since the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. According to Pew Research, only 36 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents and 9 percent of Republicans and those leaning Republican now trust government. Who can blame them given the failure of government to perform on many levels? One might think that trust by Democrats would be lower…