“Viva Mexico!  Viva Mexico!”  As he spoke those words, murderer and rapist Humberto Leal felt the gush of pentobarbital run into his arm. Like the late, lamented Mexican hero José Ernesto Medellín, whom Texas executed in 2008, Leal and his legal backers, including the Mexican government, argued that his guilty verdict was null.  The Vienna...

In June, Brigadier General Loretta Reynolds, USMC, became the first woman to take command of the Corps’s legendary recruit depot, Parris Island.  “Lori” is a feminist’s dream.  In March 2010, she became the first Woman Marine to hold command in a combat zone, when she served in Afghanistan as commander of Headquarters Group, First Marine...

As of June 1, residents of the Land of Lincoln are free to enter into civil unions, which allow same-sex couples to enjoy the benefits, protections, and responsibilities under Illinois law that are granted to spouses.  According to the richly appointed homosexual-rights movement that lavished funds and exerted pressure upon the politicians who passed the...

Ronald McDonald had better look into renting Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout.  Several national newspapers recently published a letter, signed by over 1,000 health professionals and two-dozen institutions such as the Chicago Hispanic Health Coalition and the Inpatient Diabetes Program at Boston University, imploring McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner to “stop marketing junk food to children.” ...

A recent headline read “Dividing forces are mounting in Europe.”  A more charitable version might have said “Sovereignty Returning to European Countries” or “Self-Preservation on the Rise.” “Until just a few weeks ago the European world seemed to be in order,” reports Handelsblatt.  “The freedom of travel [between E.U. countries] guaranteed by the Schengen Agreement...

Ever since Hugo Black succeeded in incorporating his anti-religious prejudices and Thomas Jefferson’s “Wall of Separation” into Supreme Court jurisprudence, Americans have known how a story like this is supposed to end: A parent who comes into a community objects to expressions of that community’s religious traditions in its schools.  There is no indication that...

How often have you heard “Don’t make a federal case of it”?  What in the world could that mean?  Everything’s federal these days—not least female modesty, or whatever passes for that once-prized commodity. Here’s Wendy Murphy, sharing her delight that the White House has—finally!—come around to combating sexual violence on college campuses.  Miss Murphy, I...

How many terrorists share a surname with a 19th-century American plutocrat famed for starting one of the country’s first investment banks and founding a technical university in the City of Brotherly Love?  How many terrorists hail from the Bluegrass State?  And finally, how many terrorists have yet to reach their seventh birthday?  If you answered...

Zack Shahin, an American, was arrested in Dubai in 2008 and held in isolation for months on end.  Shahin still remains in jail on what appear to be spurious charges, with no trial date in sight.  All this is happening in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which purport to be the forward-looking showcase of Arab...

Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs, announced on May 1, gives (theoretically, at least) Washington the opportunity to make an exit from Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it most certainly underscored the surreal nature of Washington’s relationship with its “ally” in the region.  Bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in...

If only Roger Barnett had known the courts would lynch him for defending himself.  Or maybe he did know and still decided to stand his ground.  Either way, the owner of the Cross Rail Ranch in Douglas, Arizona, on the U.S. border with Mexico, may soon be $87,000 poorer. The left-wing Ninth U.S. Circuit Court...

Unrest in Syria has discomforted rather than shaken the regime of Bashar Al-Assad.  It is an even bet that he will survive, which is preferable to any likely alternative.  There are several reasons he will not end up like Ben Ali or Mubarak. Bashar is popular with a large segment of the population, especially among...

Verbal sparring between Premier Vladimir Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev over Western intervention in Libya has raised questions about a split in the Russian “tandem,” and Putin’s criticisms of the intervention may reflect Russian fears of possible U.S. interference in the political struggle in Moscow.  On March 21, Putin compared the Western coalition air strikes,...

Americans who follow the immigration issue are quite aware of the Mexican government’s constant meddling in U.S. immigration policy.  Amnesty for all Mexican illegal aliens in the United States is high on Mexico’s agenda. Now Mexico’s neighbors are beginning, tentatively at least, to do a little meddling in Mexico. Each year hundreds of thousands (between...

U.S. military veterans know firsthand that putting women close to the front lines is not only idiotic but perverse.  Yet that’s been U.S. policy for more than 30 years.  Previously, women served in support roles far behind the front lines.  The only exceptions were some registered nurses, following the tradition of their noble forerunner, Florence...

Neoconservative ideologues have joined liberal internationalists and left-wing global utopians in celebrating the collapse of the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and the ensuing political uprising in other Arab countries.  Their glee suggests that the Middle East is about to go through the kind of political and economic reforms that have been sweeping the...

When the 30-year-old blind British jazz pianist George Shearing came to America for good early in 1949, he ran into fellow transplanted Brit Leonard Feather, a prominent critic, producer, promoter, and songwriter, who suggested that the pianist enlarge his trio to quintet size by adding vibes and drums.  Feather’s idea was that piano-bass-drums trios were...

Two days before Christmas, Edward Schumacher-Matos, a scribe for the Washington Post, worked himself into a lather because he believes the GOP is doomed at the ballot box unless it accommodates “Latino” concerns, mainly on immigration. Schumacher-Matos is wrong.  The GOP can retain control of American politics as long as it gets most of the...

President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union Address was almost entirely focused on domestic issues.  This was appropriate, considering the magnitude of social, economic, and moral problems America is facing, and the attendant impossibility of pursuing grand global themes for as long as those problems remain unresolved.  His proposals for resolving them are surprisingly...

A January 24 bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport left 35 dead and scores injured, as the Russian capital’s transportation system was targeted by terrorists for the second time in less than a year.  The most likely culprits are Muslim terrorists from the North Caucasus who had struck Moscow’s metro system in March 2010.  In the...

While Europe’s monetary crisis spreads, Americans watch in astonishment as the German government bails out its feckless co-unionists.  Greece’s financial predicaments boiled over last summer with baton-wielding riot police pummeling Greek civil servants who objected to their government’s modest proposal to raise the official retirement age from 61 to 63 by 2015.  In response, Germany...

The Council of Europe published a report on December 15 that identifies Kosovo’s “prime minister” Hashim Thaçi as the boss of a “mafia-like” Albanian group specializing in smuggling weapons, drugs, people, and human organs all over Europe. The report reveals that Thaçi’s closest aides were taking Serbs across the border into Albania after the 1999...

December was a tense month for Russia’s ruling “tandem.”  President Dmitri Medvedev and Premier Vladimir Putin were confronted with violent protests after “Kavkaztsy” (natives of the volatile North Caucasus) killed Yegor Svidirov, a leading member of one of Russia’s unruly and often violent soccer fan clubs, in a Moscow brawl on December 6. On December...

Many Americans today are baffled by the Third Amendment to the Constitution, the one in which the quartering of troops in private homes is prohibited in times of peace, except by the consent of the owner.  Quartering troops in time of war was allowed, but only as regulated by law. Some of the amendments in...

Saginaw, Michigan, in popular culture, is identified with the late county singer Lefty Frizzell, who sang in his 1964 hit song of fishing on the nearby bay that feeds into Lake Huron.  But the mid-Michigan city, 100 miles north of Detroit, is best understood as a 20th-century manufacturing behemoth whose physical assets and intangible knowledge...

California’s November 2010 election results were seen by national pundits as a “firewall” that stemmed the tide of Republican victories sweeping across the country.  Actually, this was a Republican disaster long in the making. The main cause of the GOP’s defeat was the large increase in the immigrant population in the last 30 years.  Voting...

On November 2, Oklahomans amended their constitution to prohibit their state courts from “look[ing] to the precepts of other nations or cultures” when adjudicating a case.  The amendment specifically prohibits consideration of “international law or Sharia Law.”  State Question 755, as the amendment is known, garnered the support of 70 percent of the citizenry. A...

Time was, when someone used the term American, or Canadian, Briton, or German, you knew what he meant.  The man or woman in question was white and had a name such as Smith, Jones, or Muller.  Or the American might be black, most likely a descendant of slaves.  Perhaps he was an Indian, meaning an...

Federal judges in California have been busy.  In August, Judge Vaughn Walker held that it is irrational to limit marriage to one man and one woman.  Following in Judge Walker’s footsteps, Judge Virginia A. Phillips struck down the congressional prohibition against homosexuals in the military as violating the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause...

The upset defeat of long-time congressman and former governor Mike Castle by Christine O’Donnell in the Delaware Republican senatorial primary on September 14 revealed more about the frustrations of conservative voters with the GOP establishment than about the strengths of a long-shot Tea Party candidate.  If ever there existed a Republican state leadership that fit...

You have to wonder when they’re going to start digging up Confederate graves and tearing down the statues of R.E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.  Until then, it seems, the campaign against the Confederacy and the Old South will not be complete. In September, the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss, banned the sale of any...

We are saddened to announce the death of our courageous longtime contributor, columnist, and friend Joseph Sobran, of whose passing we learned as this issue was going to press.  We invite readers to see Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s column in the next issue of Chronicles (December), which will provide a more fitting tribute to Joe.  May...

The Tea Party movement is known to be a haven for those who are disaffected with both political parties and the party line, and who want their voices to be heard.  The mainstream media has made great efforts to silence those voices, painting the Tea Partiers as cranks, bigots, and racists. There is a “democratic...

A recent article in USA Today (“Mexico’s Violence Not Widespread,” August 4) could serve as a case study in why Mexican journalists consider their North American counterparts “hopeless” when it comes to accurate reporting on their country. The article pretends to correct the public misperception that Mexico on a whole is a dangerous and violent...

Call it the luck of the Serbs. If deposed Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich had been charged with trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat in the months after September 11, he would have been shipped off to Guantanamo and never heard from again. But since the economy collapsed in December 2007, Americans have been in...

A consistent trait of ideologues is the failure to see the consequences of their ideologies.  Thus it is with antiwar movement’s defense of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, the alleged author of the notorious 90,000-page dump of classified military documents on WikiLeaks. Libertarians love WikiLeaks because it discloses government secrets—in this case, about the wars in...

The notion of the “French intellectual” makes a decent man reach for a gun.  Almost as odious as its Manhattan equivalent, it evokes images of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida and Bernard-Henri Lévy.  Evil degenerates, enemies of God and man. Gen. Pierre-Marie Gallois, who died on August 23 in Paris at the...

President Barack H. Obama, if current trends continue, will become the first Democrat to preside over a net national loss in domestic manufacturing jobs since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started reporting monthly employment data in 1939.  Seven percent of manufacturing jobs nationwide (873,000) have disappeared since Obama took office.  By contrast, manufacturing employment expanded...

On July 10, in Richmond, Virginia, the intellectual historian Thomas Molnar went to his reward, leaving behind an array of gorgeous ruins.  By these I mean not his works, which were masterfully crafted and will endure.  No, the ruins that Molnar used to guard are the temples, forts, and libraries of our previous civilization, the...

Miss Julia Gillard (one takes particular pleasure in applying the honorific “Miss” to so stentorian and charmless a femocrat), the prime minister of Australia, faces an interesting challenge in her bid for reelection on August 21.  Goodness knows, the Labor Party that she now leads—and which has been in office since 2007—should win at a...

Flamboyant William Stewart Simkins, during his professorial heyday at the University of Texas a century ago and more, was known for his long, white mane and his charisma as a teacher of law.  He wrote standard textbooks on equity, contracts, and estates.  But, dadgum, he took pride all his life (1842-1929) in helping, as an...

The Obama administration declared the mid-June announcement that BP was establishing an escrow fund worth $20 billion to pay compensation claims to Gulf Coast residents and businesses to be a resounding victory for the White House, but what it actually showed was Obama’s hands-off, indifferent management style, in which nothing is ever clearly or properly...

Every Easter and Christmas at least one of America’s three newsweeklies—Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report—includes articles trashing Christian dogmas.  For Easter 2010, Newsweek featured a piece by religion editor Lisa Miller blurbing her new book, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife. Concerning the resurrection of men, she wrote, “It’s a supernatural...

In itself, the Israeli military’s raid on the “Free Gaza” aid flotilla was proof, as the astute thinker Forrest Gump put it, that “Stupid is as stupid does.”  The flotilla was sponsored by a mishmash of Western lefty peaceniks and Turkish-backed Islamist groups that were trying, to use historian Daniel Boorstin’s term, to produce a...

Most English schoolboys learn this quip: Belgium is a country invented by the British to annoy the French. Which is just about true.  And if you don’t understand why and how Belgium was invented, you won’t understand the significance of the elections in Belgium earlier this summer. In 1795 the revolutionary French occupied what were...

Arnold Schwarzenegger marched into the Orange County Register’s lobby wearing cowboy boots and confidence.  He was mobbed in the lobby by women who wanted him and men who wanted to be him.  He cheerfully signed autographs.  He then came up to our offices to meet the editorial board. The celluloid dream became a physical reality...

In early May, four people lost their lives when rioters set fire to a bank in downtown Athens, then prevented rescue workers from reaching the facility.  Those deaths serve as a warning by leftists and anarchists that anyone who dares to work during a declared strike will lose his life.  At the time of this...

You know someone is old enough to remember, let’s say, the Kennedy assassination when he shudders as some lout on TV giggles out a laugh-line that substitutes ass for the body part known in quainter times as the derrière or the behind.  Without a beg-your-pardon, ma’am. It’s a wonderful new age, to be sure—one marked...

The Socialist Greek government is crafting and carrying out policies that appear to have come straight from the Soviet playbook in efforts to repress the conservative opposition, which came out of last October’s elections heavily wounded.  Those who oppose Greece’s immigration law, which grants citizenship to practically everyone (Al Qaeda has found a new gateway...