Author: Tom Piatak (Tom Piatak)

  This morning, Mitt Romney chose the backdrop of the USS Wisconsin, one of four members of the mighty Iowa class and a magnificent symbol of American power, to introduce Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate.  If Ryan becomes vice president, he will be the first member of the House of Representatives elected vice president...

This month the Census Bureau reported that the inflation adjusted median income for male workers was $32,127 in 2010, less than the $32,844 such workers earned in 1968.  There are, of course, many reasons for this prolonged wage stagnation, but chief among them are mass immigration, which began with the Immigration Act of 1965, and free trade, which...

  Yesterday brought the news of Andy Griffith’s death at 86.  Unfortunately, the type of television exemplified by The Andy Griffiith Show died long before its star did.  Long gone are the days when the networks aired prime time series that parents could safely allow their children to watch, much less a prime time in which such...

  Putting together the Court’s two most notable recent decisions, the Arizona immigration decision and the Obamacare decision, leads to this unsettling conclusion:  there is virtually nothing the states can do on their own, and there is virtually nothing the federal government cannot do.  If that is what the Founders intended, I’m a unicorn. We also now have...

I hate to disagree with Rick Oliver, but I think he is too optimistic about John Roberts.  What Roberts’ decision today tells us is that he is unlikely to ever cast a decisive vote against the consensus of the Washington elite.  This means that the Roberts court will never overturn Roe v. Wade, because such a...

  Barack Obama’s recent concern over sending American jobs overseas is as phony as his broken promise, made during the Ohio Democratic primary in 2008, to renegotiate NAFTA, but there is little doubt that his attack on Mitt Romney’s record of outsourcing American jobs during Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital is politically potent.   The elites who favor free trade...

  I recently had the chance to visit the village of Annascaul on the stunningly beautiful Dingle Peninsula in Ireland.  The attraction in Annascaul was the South Pole Inn, opened by Annascaul native Tom Crean after his retirement from the Royal Navy.  Crean was, by all accounts, a modest man reluctant to draw attention to himself, but...

  President Obama’s announcement of a de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants by administrative fiat offered a chance for Mitt Romney to appeal to the majority of Americans who consistently tell pollsters that they want to see immigration reduced.  Instead,  Romney told a gathering of Hispanic politicians that he will increase immigration, by raising the caps for...

  It turns out that Barack Obama had managed to insult Poland before he ever talked about a “Polish death camp.”  The Polish Government had asked that Lech Walesa be allowed to receive the posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom being bestowed on Jan Karski.  The Obama White House said no, claiming that Walesa was “too political.” ...

  One of the sillier stories told to garner support for Barack Obama in 2008 was that he would help bring Americans together by peacefully ending the culture war, a culture war most Americans found tiresome.   There was never any reason to believe that Obama would unite Americans, since Obama has always been far to the left...

  American presidents seem to have a habit of insulting Poland.  Gerald Ford probably lost the 1976 election when he maintained in a presidential debate that Poland was not dominated by the Soviets and never would be under a Ford Administration.  (The Poles, who were in fact dominated by the Soviets, weren’t able to register...

  The story of the Mexican Left’s murderous persecution of the Church is not well known, even though it inspired one of the great novels of the 20th century, The Power and the Glory.  The story of the Cristero uprising intended to end that persecution is even less well known.  But that uprising has now inspired a...

  Just three days after Georgetown University had Kathleen Sebelius on campus to address an awards ceremony during commencement week, another prominent Catholic university found a better way of dealing with Sebelius:  the University of Notre Dame filed suit against Sebelius in federal court, asking the court to enjoin and then vacate the Obama Administration’s mandate requiring...

  Today brings news that Georgetown alumnus and author of The Exorcist William Peter Blatty intends to pursue a canon law lawsuit against his alma mater that may possibly result in Georgetown’s not being able to call itself a Catholic university any longer.  Not coincidentally, today also marked the appearance at Georgetown of Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius,...

  It used to be that plutocrats felt they were part of the society in which they lived, or at least felt the need to act as if they were part of that society. Thus, when they decided to give away some of their enormous fortunes, their gifts generally reflected a desire to improve the...

  Unless you live in a cave, you know that New York’s legislature recently passed a bill recognizing homosexual marriage, a bill that was quickly and enthusiastically signed into law by the latest loathsome member of the Cuomo clan to govern the Empire State.  The mainstream conservative movement’s reaction to this event was only slightly...

History contains many tragedies, and one of these is the early death of Mozart. For those of us who enjoy Mozart’s choral music, it is particularly poignant to reflect on the fact that, before his death, he had been appointed assistant Kapellmeister at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. Thus, had he lived longer, Mozart would...

  Farsighted conservatives have warned for decades that globalization was leading to wage stagnation in the United States. This was, for example, a major theme in Pat Buchanan’s The Great Betrayal, published in 1997. The less farsighted are beginning to catch up. Recently, David Frum published a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on his website, which was then picked up...

  It pains me to disagree with a writer I like and admire, but Srdja Trifkovic’s piece on Cardinal Stepinac makes no attempt to explain, much less understand, why Catholics respect and admire this brave Croatian martyr. Trifkovic takes umbrage at Pope Benedict’s treating Stepinac as a “saintly figure” and of saying this about him: “Precisely because...

  Forbes has a list out this morning of America’s five richest counties. Unsurprisingly, four of the five are in the Washington, D.C., area. Washington’s prosperity is completely detached from the fortunes of the rest of the country, since Washington continues to suck in tax dollars even when other parts of America suffer or even decline economically....

  There are few movies I am still thinking about several days after seeing them. One such movie is Of Gods and Men, the superb French movie about the martyrdom of seven French Cistercians from the small monastery of Notre Dame de l’Atlas in Algeria in 1996, in the midst of the Algerian civil war. This...

  When I turned on my computer this morning, I got reminders from both Yahoo and Google that today was…Earth Day.   I didn’t actually expect the lords of Silicon Valley to acknowledge the real significance of today. Still, it is striking that the secular world contrives to ignore a day that inspired music such...

  Lucy just pulled the football away from Charlie Brown again. In the budget compromise that averted a government shutdown, it was the Republicans not the Democrats who blinked on the funding of Planned Parenthood, and it was the pro-lifers who look to the GOP and not the abortion supporters who look to the Democrats...

  This morning brought the surprising news that, according to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Donald Trump is running second among GOP presidential hopefuls, at 17%, behind Mitt Romney’s 21%. I am far from a fan of the obnoxious, egomaniacal Trump, but his rise in the polls could be good news: The issue Trump has...

As our country plunges into yet another foolish war in the Moslem world and teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, it is easy to be focused on the negative. But today’s news also brought a small reminder of hope. The synod of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, meeting in Lvov, just elected 40-year old Sviatoslav Shevchuk,...

  Recently, the European Union published a calendar for school children that noted Moslem and Jewish holidays but made no mention of any Christian holiday, including Christmas. The same principle operates here, in the countless public school “winter concerts” that highlight music for Kwanzaa and Hanukkah but feature no Christmas carols. If the Eurocrats wish to achieve...

  Last week, President Obama named William Daley as White House Chief of Staff and Gene Sperling as the chief White House economic adviser. Last fall, he named Austan Goolsbee as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. These appointments are significant in part because all three men share a strong commitment to free...

  I would like to wish all Chronicles readers a Very Merry and Blessed Christmas. And, as a Christmas present, here is a link to a piece I wrote two Christmases ago for Takimag, about some of the things I like about Christmas, including Polish Christmas carols. Since the piece is two years old, most of the videos...

  Sixty-six years ago, a small plane took off from southern England for Paris. It never made it. On board was a 40 year old Army Air Force major, who before the war had been the most popular musician in America. His music is still listened to and enjoyed today, even though popular music has...

  Last night, on the recommendation of friends, my wife and I went to see Secretariat. We both thoroughly enjoyed this wholesome, well-made movie, that manages to be suspenseful even though most moviegoers already know that Secretariat won the Triple Crown in 1973. I should have realized that any movie I enjoyed would make someone else...

  On October 2, 2010, the Wall Street Journal ran an article detailing the results of the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. The article was entitled “Americans Sour on Trade,” but what Americans are really souring on is free trade: 53% of Americans now say that free trade agreements have hurt the United States, with less than...