Author: John C. Seiler (John C. Seiler)

Michael Wessel is a Democrat and a trade negotiator who was a big backer of the NAFTA and GATT deals two decades ago. But listen to him on the supersecret Trans-Pacific Partnership; he’s one of the few people actually to have read it. Noting that President Obama has attacked those who criticized TPP for not...

In the Daily Beast, Senior Congressional Correspondent Tim Mak is Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs over Marco Rubio’s speech Wednesday before the Council on Foreign Relations: “The student has now become the teacher. “Sen. Marco Rubio, once viewed as a protege of presidential competitor Jeb Bush, schooled the former Florida governor Wednesday evening in the first...

The U.S. Constitution is clear: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises… To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations….” But here are the headlines from the DrudgeReport: Extreme secrecy erodes support for Obama’s trade pact… Lawmakers forced to surrender notes… Forbidden from discussing details with public… USA runs more...

Item 1: According to U.S. News, a survey found less than 8 percent of America’s “major” universities required English majors to take a Shakespeare course. He’s a DWM (Dead White Male) and all. Given how P.C. those courses are, that’s a blessing. It also allows me to use a line of Moe Howard from one...

When she announced her fourth candidacy for president, I signed up for Hillary’s mailing list. (In case you forgot, she won two terms as co-president with Bill, in 1992 and 1996, before losing her co-president race in 2008.) “Friend – ,” she writes. Hill and I are on such close terms. “I was raised with...

Back in the innocent days of 1967-70, I attended Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in the Wayne-Westland Community School District in Michigan. District motto: “Absolutely, entirely, completely dedicated to mediocrity.” Like most junior high schools, grades 7-9, it mysteriously has been transformed into a middle school, grades 6-8. In 1967-68, Franklin had a simple dress...

Only government thinks it can move the sun across the sky. Like me, you may be suffering from “jet lag” today because of the “lost” hour yesterday when most of the country – excepting only the sensible states of Arizona and Hawaii – switched to Daylight Savings Time. (Excuse me, now it’s spelled “Hawai’i.” We...

Cue Wagner’s “Rienzi Overture,” YouTube here. My, how cowardly our modern “leaders” are. They’re only good at repressing and robbing the struggling middle-class. This is from the Daily Beast: “ROME — Last weekend in Italy, as the threat of ISIS in Libya hit home with a new video addressed to ‘the nation signed with the...

Chronicles readers might assume President Obama and his administration favor open borders. Not true. From an actual news story in the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Kerry repeated demands that Russia-backed separatists pull back their troops and heavy weapons and that Moscow seal its side of the border.” It’s part of the dissolution of what used...

Every year I vow I’m not going to watch the next one, but inevitably end up watching it anyway. The commercials pushed in yesterday’s game were so gross, so vile, even so blasphemous it should have been called the Sleazy Bowl. I won’t describe the ads, which I avoided the best I could by switching...

Something died in America 42 years ago today. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 1973 edict, Roe v. Wade, forcing all 50 states to almost completely legalize abortion on demand – even those states that already had legalized it. About 57 million babies have been killed since. But something more died: Maybe...

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau; Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again. —William Blake Some thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris: 1. Maybe gun control isn’t such a great idea. The killers somehow got AK-47s and possibly...

This Christmas I’ve been trying to find some glimpses of good cheer in a country that for decades, as Tom Piatak, wrote earlier this month, is far more Pottersville than Bedford Falls, even under national Republicans. Maybe especially under national Republicans. But something we still have, if we can keep it, is freedom of religion...

I’m hoping Jeb Bush will run for president – because his guaranteed demise would be what I hope would be a fitting end to the Bush Dynasty. Earlier this month he said: “I kind of know how a Republican can win, whether it’s me or somebody else—and it has to be much more uplifting, much...

Discussions on this week’s Senate report on the CIA and torture centered on two things: whether it’s moral. (It isn’t. Before 9/11, all Americans agreed on that.) And whether it worked to protect our country. The report said torture didn’t do any good. But former Vice President Dick Cheney charged the report was “full of...

A month ago was a day before the Nov. 4 election. In this space I predicted, “GOP sellout strikes on Wednesday.” It wasn’t hard being Nostradamus. Here’s the latest. Quoting Mitt Romney, I said the GOP would give President Obama unconstitutional authority to negotiate a new trade deal, with Congress only having an “up or...

It’s been almost 10 years since the death of Sam Francis. But his best-known saying, “anarcho-tyranny,” contains more descriptive power than ever. His phrase described when government, which is supposed to protect ordinary citizens, instead leaves them to anarchy; while the law-abiding are subject to monstrous centralized controls over every aspect of their lives. That...

Today President Obama accelerated his Anschluss of illegal aliens into the country whose Constitution he has sworn to uphold, but which he has shredded at every chance. Assuming America even survives, he perpetually will be held in obloquy by the people he has so harmed. But his brazen edict finally drew the lines clearly. Republicans,...

Not only does the U.S. government spy on everything we watch on websites, say on the phone or write in emails or messages. At least 40 agencies use Undercover Big Brother agents to infiltrate everything we do. The Washington Post, itself long the company newspaper of the D.C. autocracy, reported: “The federal government has significantly...

In Woody Allen’s farce “Bananas,” he’s being air-dropped into a Central American banana republic to foment a revolution. On the plane are two CIA agents who say this time they’re backing both sides of the revolution to make sure America is on the winning side. As usual in modern America, reality has overtaken farce. From...

To turn an American phrase already well worn out: If doing something over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, all 30 million Republican voters Tuesday should be put in asylums. Assuming Republicans win back the Senate and make gains in the House, we already know how this one is...

What with zombies, Ebola and politicians infecting the Land of the Free, it’s surprising we’ve survived. So it’s time for: Chronicles’ Halloween 2014 Most Horrible Americans List. Put on your masks of these ghouls and scare your neighbors – if you dare! 1. Jeb Bush. He actually believes his fellow Americans – those not born...

Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman got upset on a recent plane flight when he saw Ron Paul on NewsMax TV on the jet’s telescreen. Krugman wondered, “Who knew there was such a thing? Is it there to serve people who find Fox News too liberal?” Actually, Newsmax, like Fox News, is neoconservative – that is,...

I can’t think of a political speech in recent decades that more rattles around the back of the conscious of the American mind than Pat Buchanan’s “Culture Wars” speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. It even overshadows Reagan’s last major speech at the same convention before he slipped into the night of...

In Chronicles two years ago I defended the American Legislative Exchange Council against assaults by George Soros-funded groups seeking to shut down debate. ALEC works with local and state legislators to craft “model legislation,” such as for gun rights and voting integrity, that outrage the Left. Now tech oligarchs so rich they make Soros look...

I’m starting something new here: Chronicles’ by the Numbers Dept. ™ 1. Branches of government An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found only 36 percent of Americans correctly can identify the “three branches of government” in the United States. And 35 percent could not name a single branch. But I’m sure Chronicles readers know the...

I hope I’m not mangling the French in my title, “Vive l’Écosse Libre!” It’s a gloss on de Gaulle’s shout at Montreal City Hall on July 24, 1967, “Vive le Québec libre!” Canadians sure would have been better off if Quebec had separated in 1967. Then the odious socialist and politically correct Pierre Trudeau never...

Waist deep in the Big Sandy And the big fool says to push on. Waist deep in the Big Sandy? And the big fool says to push on. Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a Tall man’ll be over his head, we’re Waist deep in the Big Sandy! And the big fool says to push...

American public schools are prisons. They even look like prisons. See the nearby picture of Century High School in Santa Ana. Even hoity-toity schools in Newport Beach look like that, although the facades are ritzier. And consider this Sept. 3 report from my old newspaper, the Orange County Register: “SANTA ANA – Santa Ana Unified...

Last week I blogged about a Tennessee high-school classroom banning students saying, “Bless you!” Now the repression has spread to college. According to CBS Atlanta: “BRUNSWICK, Ga.  – One professor at the College of Coastal Georgia has banned students from saying ‘bless you’ in his class. “Campus Reform reports that Dr. Leon Gardner, assistant professor of chemistry at...

A couple of times in my writings for Chronicles I’ve mentioned “functionally atheist government schools.” That’s what they’ve been since the early 1960s, when several U.S. Supreme Court edicts effectively banned any mention of religion, or anything approaching religion, from public schools. I remember sitting in my 6th grade class at Elliott Elementary School in...

As Independence Day 2014 approaches, I’m still wondering when one of the Republican presidential candidates is going to seize the immigration issue and march to victory in the White House. That’s assuming there will even be an independent United States in 2015. Or if the country exists, that it will be anything but a totalitarian...

Back in 2006 my neighbor’s son was killed in Iraq by an IED – Improvised Explosive Device. I attended the funeral at the family’s Protestant church in Costa Mesa. He and his identical twin brother had joined the military shortly after 9/11 to defend America. The surviving brother also was fighting in Iraq. The military...

Despite my disagreements with him, I’m saddened at documentarian Michael Moore’s civil divorce. Raised a Catholic, his marriage likely is sacramental, which means he still would be married whatever decision is made by the courts of the civil government he loves so much and seeks to expand ad infinitum. Yet I also have some schadefreude...

“The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up.” — Hannah Arendt “Power is where power goes.” — Lyndon B. Johnson Right now the immigration issue is lying in the street for whatever Republican presidential candidate, if any, is willing to pick it up...

Check out the following chart of Real Median Household Income, which declined 9 percent nationally from 1999 to 2012.  Find your state’s decline and meet me below.                         Notice the place at the top of list, which had no decline in Real Median Household...

“Nado alert! Nado alert!” people were screaming about 1 am outside my room at Michaels Barracks in Hoechst, West Germany, a couple of days after I was posted there on Sept. 12, 1979. My roommate said it likely was just a drill, sending us out in our jeeps and trucks into the Fulda Gap to...

With little fanfare, in the past week the United States officially became a military dictatorship. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of a suit brought against the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that allowed indefinite detention of U.S. citizens. That means the military now can, at any time, “disappear” you, even if...

As I was still reeling from Tax Day, the Heritage Foundation just emailed me a copy of a letter sent to the IRS by former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld. Heritage also linked to a tweet by Rummy that also attached the letter. He seems to have written it all himself. In the 1960s, Rummy represented a...