ArcaMax

When Vice President Calvin Coolidge ascended to the presidency on the death of Warren Harding in 1923, a wag remarked that Silent Cal's career had exhibited unmistakable signs of celestial intervention.

Governor Coolidge vaulted to national attention during the Boston police strike of 1919, where, in a stinging letter to Sam Gompers of the AFL,...Read more

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."

This was the nightmare of Ben Franklin.

Yet, with passage this spring of a $4 trillion bailout of an economy facing historic losses because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Nancy Pelosi's House having voted out another $3 trillion, we may have ...Read more

There is a real possibility that, this coming week, Joe Biden will be selecting the 47th president of the United States.

For the woman Biden picks -- he has promised to exclude from consideration all men, black, brown, white or Asian -- has a better chance of succeeding to the presidency than any vice presidential nominee in U.S. history, other...Read more

With the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse under nightly siege from violent radicals, and Portland's police hard-pressed to protect it, President Trump sent in federal agents to secure the building.

The reaction from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi:

"The use of stormtroopers under the guise of law and order is a tactic that is not ...Read more

How great a burden can even an unrivaled superpower carry before it buckles and breaks? We may be about to find out.

Rome was the superpower of its time, ruling for centuries almost the entirety of what was then called the civilized world.

Great Britain was a superpower of its day, but she bled, bankrupted and broke herself in the Thirty Years...Read more

Is her racial diversity America's greatest strength?

So we are told. Yet, even before America becomes a majority-minority nation, 25 years from now, recent changes in the composition of the country are going to impact both parties in 2020.

According to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, between 2010 and 2020, while America's ...Read more

Is the U.S., preoccupied with a pandemic and a depression that medical crisis created, prepared for a collision with China over Beijing's claims to the rocks, reefs and resources of the South China Sea?

For that is what Mike Pompeo appeared to threaten this week.

"The world will not allow Beijing to treat the South China Sea as its maritime ...Read more

On July 22, 1988, after the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, the party nominee, Gov. Michael Dukakis, enjoyed a 17-point lead over Vice President George W. Bush.

Five weeks later, on Labor Day, Dukakis was down eight points, the same margin by which he would lose the election. He had lost 25 points in one month.

What had happened? ...Read more

Before our Black Lives Matter moment, one had not thought of the NBC networks as shot through with "systemic racism."

Yet, what other explanation is there for this week's draconian personnel decision of NBCUniversal chairman Cesar Conde.

According to Conde, the white share of NBC's workforce, now 74% and divided evenly between men and women, ...Read more

The Seattle Commune is no more.

Declared three weeks ago by radical leftists as CHAZ, the City Hall Autonomous Zone, rechristened CHOP, the City Hall Occupation Protest, the six-block enclave inside Seattle ceased to exist July 1. The cops shut it down.

As Marx said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce.

If the Paris Commune...Read more

Now that statues of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant and Theodore Roosevelt have been desecrated, vandalized, toppled and smashed, it appears Woodrow Wilson's time has come.

The cultural revolution has come to the Ivy League.

Though Wilson attended Princeton as an undergraduate, taught there and served from 1902 to ...Read more

Some polls now have Joe Biden running ahead of Donald Trump by 10 points and sweeping the battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. This vindicates the strategy Biden's advisers have adopted:

Confine Joe to his basement, no press conferences. Trot him out to recite carefully scripted messages for the cameras. Then lead him ...Read more

The left's war on America's past crossed several new frontiers last week.

Portland's statue of George Washington, the Father of his Country and the first president of the United States, the greatest man of his age, was toppled and desecrated.

While the statue stood, an American flag was draped over its head and set ablaze. After it was pulled ...Read more

Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met for seven hours at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii with the chief architect of China's foreign policy, Yang Jiechi.

The two had much to talk about.

As The Washington Post reports, the "bitterly contentious relationship" between our two countries has "reached the lowest point in almost half a ...Read more

"Can we all just get along?"

That was the plea of Rodney King after a Simi Valley jury failed to convict any of the four cops who beat him into submission after a 100-mile-an-hour chase on an LA freeway.

King's plea came after the 1992 LA riots, the worst since the New York City draft riots in 1863 when Lincoln had to send in federal troops.

...Read more

On Gen. George Washington's orders, the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, was read aloud to his army. On hearing it, the troops marched to Bowling Green, decapitated and pulled down the statue of George III, and sent the remnants to be melted down into musket balls.

It was a revolutionary act, a symbolic statement. These once...Read more

Newly painted in huge yellow letters on 16th Street, just north of the White House, is the slogan: "Defund the Police."

That new message sits beside the "Black Lives Matter" slogan, also in huge letters, painted there at the direction of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

She renamed that section of 16th Street "Black Lives Matter Plaza."

Still, the ...Read more

In his statement to The Atlantic magazine, former Defense Secretary General James Mattis says of the events of the last 10 days that have shaken the nation as it has not been shaken since 1968:

"We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers."

Is "a small number of lawbreakers" an apt description of wilding mobs who have showered ...Read more

On the fifth night of rioting, looting and arson in Minneapolis, the criminal elements were driven from the streets.

By whom? By the same cops who had been the constant objects of media derision and mob hatred.

Without the thin blue line, far larger sectors of dozens of America's cities would be in ruins, burned to the ground by the mobs that ...Read more

In his half-century in national politics, Joe Biden has committed more than his fair share of gaffes. Wednesday, he confused Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941, with D-Day, June 6, 1944.

The more serious recent gaffe, a beaut, came at the close of a recent contentious interview with black activist Charlamagne tha God.

A miffed Biden signed off, ...Read more