A guest on Neil Cavuto's Fox News TV program this week, claiming that every illegal immigrant will eventually impose a $2.2 million burden on US taxpayers, said that it is "immoral to make American taxpayers shoulder this burden." 

True or not, it is important to understand that the immorality here is not putting illegal immigrants on the welfare rolls or transferring to them costly services at the expense of American citizens.

The immorality lies in the welfare state itself, in the government's policy of coercive wealth redistribution.

In fact, if there were any moral justification to such wealth redistribution, having the wealth go to illegal immigrants could be considered far more morally defensible than having it go to American citizens or legal immigrants. 

What was the motive behind 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui's killing of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech? Why was he consumed with hate, resentment, and bitterness?

Cho was an English Department major and senior. As a frequent lecturer on college campuses, I have discovered that the English Departments are often the weirdest and/or the most leftwing.

A look at the websites of Virginia Tech's English Department and of its professors reveals their mindset. We don't yet know which courses Cho took, but it could have been any of these.

Did Cho get evil egotistical notions from Professor Shoshana Milgram Knapp's senior seminar called "The Self-Justifying Criminal in Literature?" Indeed, that could serve as his own self-portrait.

Did Cho take a course from Professor Paul Heilker, author of another peculiar piece called "Textual Androgyny, the Rhetoric of the Essay, and the Politics of Identity in Composition (or The Struggle to Be a Girly-Man in a World of Gladiator Pumpitude)?"

Or maybe Cho preferred the undiluted Marxism espoused by English instructor Allen Brizee, who wrote: "Everyday, the capitalist system exploits millions of people. ... Our role in the capitalist system makes us guilty of oppression!"

A nosy, hectoring, busy-body, anti-smoking, anti-trans fat, social engineering, lifestyle blue-nosing, freedom-crushing, nanny-state enthusiast announced this week he's ready to spend a billion dollars of his vast wealth to run for president of our country.

Currently Michael Bloomberg is Mayor of New York.

The leading Democrat contender is Hillary Milhous Clinton, an anti-military radical feminist Euro-Socialist-cum-Trotskyite who is masquerading as a pro-military, pro-free-market, religious centrist.

But should Sen. Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. surprisingly get the Democratic nomination, then we would substitute for the secret leftist/publicly centrist Hillary Milhous a completely inexperienced African-American possibly former Moslem, partially Indonesian-raised, Harvard-trained ersatz Kennedyesque candidate.

This is turning into a freak show.  And I haven't even started with the Republicans.

It was a fitting image of the 14 wimps and a sob sister arriving back in the United Kingdom yesterday: skulking away with pink goody bags in hand.

The color was no accident - although yellow would've been more appropriate.

The released hostages weren't allowed to make any more statements. Apparently, the Blair government feared they'd repeat their lavish praise of their Iranian captors.

Look, we're all glad they're home safe, if not necessarily sound. But why on earth is Britain, the land of the legendary stiff upper lip, celebrating cowards who clambered over one another to shame their country?

Last week my former boss, Newt Gingrich, threw a much-needed conceptual bomb into the jejune public dialogue of presidential aspirants. Amid the platitudes, banalities and evasions that constitute pre-presidential debate these days, Newt argued (in a speech last weekend) that bilingual education only encourages students to be linguistically "living in a ghetto."

Predictably, the PC riot squad screeched into the media to suppress such clarity of language. Peter Zamora, co-chairman of the Hispanic Education Coalition, intoned: "The tone of his comments were [sic] very hateful."

Someone needs to tell Mr. Zamora that it is hateful of ideological "civil-rights" activists to try to intimidate any politician who would dare to liberate kids from the linguistic ghetto that serves to preserve their political power.

[After reading Professor Stott, I could not encourage you more to view  The Great Global Warming Swindle, a brilliant UK documentary not shown on US television but available on the Internet.  It's long but absolutely worth watching. ---JW]

Global warming represents the latest doom-laden "crisis," one demanding sacrifice to Gaia for our wicked fossil-fuel-driven ways.  But neither history nor science bolsters such an apocalyptic faith.

Our so-called "crisis" is neither a product of current observations nor of projections.

But does it matter if global warming is a "crisis" or not? Aren't we threatened by a serious temperature rise? Shouldn't we act anyway, because we are stewards of the environment?

Herein lies the moral danger behind global warming hysteria. Each day, 20,000 people in the world die of waterborne diseases. Half a billion people go hungry. A child is orphaned by AIDS every seven seconds. This does not have to happen. We allow it while fretting about "saving the planet."

What is wrong with us that we downplay this human misery before our eyes and focus on events that will probably not happen even a hundred years hence?

As an early and continuing strong supporter of President Bush's war effort, I nonetheless regularly have criticized his administration's inept communications and war-fighting strategies -- particularly in the years from 2004 to 2006.

Along with many others, I was both exasperated and puzzled by the gap between the magnitude of the president's bold enterprise and the stingy assignment of material resources (men and material), and diplomatic energy with which he provisioned it.

Even so, for all their mismanagement of a still vital and noble struggle, the Bush team has better served our cause than has the Democrat Party served its interests in its near-unanimous opposition to the war recently.

Theirs has been the most blatantly unprincipled war opposition short of treason in living memory -- and the Democrat Party is likely to pay a fearsome price at the polls for a generation.