Cal Thomas stories

Better buy your “Forever” stamps now, because the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has announced another price increase. On July 13, the cost of a first-class stamp is scheduled to rise from 73 cents to 78 cents. The plan is to raise prices four more times by 2027. Meanwhile, it appears...

President Trump is using an 18th-century law, the Alien Enemies Act, to justify the deportation of hundreds of people he says are members of a vicious Venezuelan gang. That law was last used during World War II by the Roosevelt administration to justify the internment of Japanese Americans. The government...

The cliche has been that the ball is now in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s court. Not any longer. Putin has responded to U.S. appeals for a ceasefire in the war with Ukraine with a strong backhand, rejecting a ceasefire in his unprovoked invasion. Now the ball is in President Trump’s...

While President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy were duking it out in the Oval Office in a rhetorical version of the Ultimate Fighting Club that Trump loves, six Ukrainian Christian ministers from different denominations were coincidentally (or prophetically?) down the street telling guests at...

Democrats are raising an alarm about what they call a “constitutional crisis.” If there is one, they should know because they are to blame for it. That’s because their party, since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, have been violating the boundaries and restrictions on government set forth in our founding...

In his 1951 farewell address to Congress and the American public (known as the “old soldiers never die, they just fade away” speech), Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur said something the Trump administration should recall as it seeks to end the war between Russia and Ukraine: “… once war is forced...

President Trump has ordered the Treasury Department to stop minting pennies to save money. It costs almost four cents to make one and as the president seeks to reduce federal spending, the penny is a good, if largely symbolic, target. The nickel is even more expensive. It costs nearly 14...

When President Trump threatened to slap tariffs on Colombia if President Gustavo Petro did not accept criminal migrants deported from the U.S., he did not get the initial response he expected. Instead of immediately caving to Trump, Petro countered with plans for his own tariffs on U.S. goods coming into...

According to the Frank Sinatra song, “Love is lovelier, the second time around.” We’ll see how that works out in the second coming of Donald. J. Trump, now president of the United States for a second time, following a four-year “intermission.” The two terms will be a contrast in policy,...

Who remembers Donald Trump’s first inaugural address? Probably not very many, unless they have Googled it, as I did. That’s likely because after the speech Trump became fixated on the size of the crowd, which he repeatedly claimed was larger than official estimates. As I reread it, I was surprised...

President-elect Trump and nominees for his upcoming administration often speak about cutting spending in order to reduce the debt. Some of the targets are familiar, but one that is never mentioned is the amount of money that could be saved by releasing, or not incarcerating in the first place, nonviolent...

Political and other prognosticators are busy as usual predicting the future. Never mind calculating how wrong they have been in the past, our desire to know what’s coming sometimes overcomes sound thinking, ignorance of history and an understanding of human nature. Recall the number of times climate alarmists predicted we...

When Washington politicians speak of a Christmas tree this time of year, they are not referring to an actual tree. It means they’ve loaded up a bill with another kind of “green,” the kind that’s decorated with money. The “bipartisan” bill passed just before midnight last Friday, minutes before a...

The soon-to-expire Biden administration is behaving as if an invading foreign power is about to take over and the house must be burned down to keep the “invaders” from succeeding. In the past few weeks, the cynicism meter has ticked up several notches because of the decisions made by the...

Media reports say President Biden is about to issue a slew of blanket preemptive pardons for people associated with his administration to thwart any “revenge” the incoming Trump administration might take against them. While the Founders intended presidential power to be nearly unlimited (there is an exception for a president...

New York Times columnist David Brooks, who is about as close to a conservative as that liberal newspaper publishes, wrote something last week that gets to the heart of why Democrats, especially, but also some Republicans, fear a second Trump administration. After extolling what he believes to be the personal...

Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo has joined Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in opposition to fluoride in the water supply. Ladapo cites controversial studies that claim the additive poses a risk to developing brains. I shall resist the temptation to draw a link between such studies and our politicians. The...

Fifty years ago when Ron Paul (father of Sen. Rand Paul) was running for Congress from Texas, a billboard featured an obese Uncle Sam with the caption “let’s put big government on a diet.” Since then, the federal government has grown even more obese. To seriously address the problem, President-elect...

If any constitutional amendment can be hated, it would be the 16th Amendment. Passed by Congress in 1909 and ratified by the states in 1913, it allowed Congress to “levy income taxes without apportioning them among the states based on population.” At first the collection of revenue came from the...

In the end, Kamala Harris was the wrong candidate with the wrong message at the wrong time. President-elect Donald Trump won the greatest comeback in American political history — bigger than Richard Nixon’s 1968 victory — by surviving two assassination attempts, a media that was shamelessly in the tank for...

What can a columnist do when his deadline is Election Day and he doesn’t know who has won the presidency and other offices (and we likely might not know for days, or more, if the polls are right about a virtual tie)? Answer: He speculates about 2028. Whether Donald Trump...

MIAMI — As in most presidential election years, ballot measures are usually overlooked or downplayed by the national media. One is in Florida where a proposal to legalize cannabis to be administered by the state is on the ballot. Marijuana has been made legal in 24 states, three U.S. territories...

In 1995 when Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children and injuring hundreds more, President Bill Clinton blamed “promoters of paranoia,” which conservative talk radio hosts took as a slur against them. At the time I wrote that while there were many...

As the disastrous (for Biden) Trump-Biden debate June 27 did not include any of my recommended questions, I offer ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis some questions they might consider asking Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris in tonight’s face-off. For Harris: Some Republicans, including your opponent, have...

CNN has won the “privilege” of conducting the first interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Gov. Tim Walz on Thursday night, beating the promised “end of the month” deadline she had set. The Harris team had reportedly been “shopping” networks to assess what they believe would be...