Hugh Hewitt

California’s May 19 rebellion set to reject tax hikes

California voters head to the polls next week with predictions of doom echoing in their ears if they decline to endorse the massive tax hikes prescribed for them by big Democratic majorities in the statehouse, the governor and a handful of now politically ruined Republican legislators. “Shrill” doesn’t begin to describe the campaign designed to stampede the Golden State electorate. The latest ad has a weary, soot-covered firefighter urging a yes vote on the tax hike. The message is clear: Vote no and your homes will burn down. Not even this sort of fearmongering is moving the needle toward “yes” on the massive tax surge on next week’s ballot as poll...

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Obama's Choice - and Republicans' choice as well

When Winston Churchill became British prime minister in 1940 (on the very day Hitler invaded France, Belgium and Holland) there were severe pressures on him to exclude from his Cabinet the "guilty men" of Munich. He wisely resisted the hue and cry and formed a successful coalition of all parties, including many who had been quite wrong about Munich, Hitler, and much else. In his memoirs Churchill explained: "'If the present," I said a few weeks later, 'tries to sit in judgment on the past, it will lose the future." My friend George Kimball sent me a reminder of this bit of Churchill greatness this week, along with this thought: "The essential wisdom of...

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Trillions for pork, but nothing for the Raptors?

Has the world really changed that much since 1990? When the Air Force first announced its planned procurement of the F-22 Raptors, the intended acquisition was for 750. The Soviet Union was the enemy then, and soon thereafter the Soviet Union fell apart. In 1990, the Air Force adjusted its expected acquisition to a total of 648. The world continued to become safer — at least in the eyes of President Clinton — and the 1994 projection dropped to 442 planes. Three years later, the total was cut to 339. By 2003, the number was 277. Last week, with two active battlefields still requiring the complete air superiority Americans have come to assume as a condition of nature,...

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Voting to kill and injure kids: A congressional CYA endangers children

Thousands of children 12 and younger ride motorcycles, ATVs and snowmobiles, which is why a lot of effort and time has gone into designing vehicles made for smaller folks. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal noted a study by the Motorcycle Industry Council that concluded "90% of the youth fatalities and injuries on motorcycles occur when kids ride adult vehicles." On Thursday of last week, the Senate of the United States voted 58 to 39 to reject an amendment to the budget bill designed to keep kids on bikes designed for them and thus off adult vehicles. The reason the amendment was offered by South Carolina's Jim DeMint is because the 2008 "Consumer Products Safety...

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A longer view, please

“Traditionally, the Chinese think in terms of millennia,” Richard Nixon wrote in his 1980 best-seller, The Real War, “the Russians in terms of centuries, the Europeans in terms of generations, and we Americans in terms of decades.” Impatience was strategic deficiency in the mind of the former president. “We must learn to take a longer view,” Nixon concluded. In the nearly three decades since Nixon urged national patience as a virtue, our haste to get things done has grown more, not less, frenzied. Political impatience has reached its highest level yet in the new presidency of Barack Obama. In his Saturday radio address, the president again demanded...

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