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President Obama talked this week about poverty, a subject he should know a lot about, since he's done such a good job of expanding it. Instead, he offered only fact-challenged and badly misguided ideas.

Is Jesus a Bernie Sanders fan? Could be, if you believe Howard Dean. On today's Morning Joe, Dean claimed that "if you look at the red-letter version of the Bible, Jesus was probably to the left of the Democratic party." Dean's declaration came in the context of a discussion of yesterday's forum on poverty in which President Obama and AEI President Arthur Brooks participated. Question: is Dean confusing the establishment of faceless government bureaucracies that can entrap people in dependency with the kind of personal caring for the downtrodden that Christ commanded? View the video here.

Who is Barack Obama to lecture anyone, let alone Fox News, about "malicious" stereotypes concerning poverty? According to our "Uniter in Chief", I'm the racist equivalent of White Privilege who needlessly clings to guns and religion because I'm an ignorant Right Wing Extremist instead of an educated patriot who knows the constitutional charter of individual liberty - Checks & Balances - is the single greatest deterrence to executive unilateralism and government tyranny. Stereotypes, Mr. President? Unlike you I'm armed with cutthroat common sense and unflinching perspective: that's the catharsis of the "unreported truth" in liberal vernacular. If I may, Mr....

Pope Francis has warned “the powerful of the Earth” they will answer to God if they fail to protect the environment to ensure the world can feed its population. “The planet has enough food for all, but it seems that there is a lack of willingness to share it with everyone,” Francis said at a mass to mark the opening of the general assembly of the Catholic charitable organisation Caritas. “We must do what we can so that everyone has something to eat, but we must also remind the powerful of the Earth that God will call them to judgment...

Crying poor mouth by the Obamas has about as much validity as the rich-by-billions Clintons trying to get away with crying poor mouth The picture of Barack Obama when he was still Barry Soetoro on his tricycle, age 4, circa 1965, tells the true-life story about Obama and his claim of knowing what it’s like to be poor. Obama was never poor. He lived a charmed and privileged life, including the photographed chapter where he was the spoiled and spiffy little darling of his well-heeled maternal grandparents. Ditto for the woman he was later to make his wife. Crying poor...

President Obama suggested that people of faith should focus more on helping the poor, instead of focusing on divisive issues such as gay marriage and abortion. President Obama suggested that people of faith should focus more on helping the poor, instead of focusing on divisive issues such as gay marriage and abortion.

For going on seven years we have learned three things about President Obama: 1) He loves the poor so much he continues to create more of them. 2) He loves the poor so much he does everything in his power to keep them poor. 3) He doesn’t see the opposition as loyal, but as bad players — his enemy. This is especially true of Fox News, which Obama ripped as anti-poor bigots during a Wednesday afternoon summit on poverty.

The Congressional Black Caucus said that poverty and civil unrest are tied. Who did they blame? Read this: "The Republican budget was partly to blame. It’s very unkind to domestic nondiscretionary spending and will just wreak havoc in low-income communities." This tired excuse has got to go! Blacks -- and all Americans -- need to hear a new message. They need to hear about a black man who grew up with a single-mother in the ghetto of Detroit and escaped. They need to hear how, as a young and angry man, he read the Bible, changed his life, and eventually...

In the summer of 1996 I got off a long flight at Baltimore to begin a PhD at Johns Hopkins University. My roommates-to-be were two Indian students who had rented a car to pick me up were somewhat unfamiliar with the roads. So, having taken a wrong turn off the highway, we found ourselves in West Baltimore, not far from Mondawmin Mall where two weeks ago rioting began in the wake of the custodial death of Freddie Gray. Out of the backseat I saw shabbily dressed people sitting on plastic chairs or on the stoops of their rowhouses. These houses...

A new report released by the Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) says that only 16 percent of 15- to 17-year-old teens in Baltimore have been raised in an intact, married family. The report, released Wednesday and compiled in light of the recent Baltimore riots, cites Census Bureau statistics showing that, in terms of family units, Baltimore is “one of the five least intact counties of America,” along with Cuyahoga, Ohio; the Bronx, N.Y.; the District of Columbia; and Shelby County, Tenn. The report cites studies indicating that children who grow up in intact, married families are...

All children, regardless of their circumstances, deserve safe, nourishing and delicious school meals.One of the best ways to help district nutrition programs as they transition to healthier food is to buy school lunch for your children. When I talk with parents about school food, many are so disappointed in the options their schools provide that they’ve simply opted out. They pack their children’s lunches every day, giving up on their school’s nutrition program as a lost cause. I understand and support parents who insist their children eat healthfully and responsibly. My dream is a nation in which all food –...

Reflecting upon Ferguson and Baltimore—along with Detroit and other cities—reveals what they all have in common: most of their African-American residents are captives on what some might call the new plantations—urban islands of poverty surrounded by the fetid waters of political disinterest. The new plantations aren’t so new, created as they were by The Great Society, when Lyndon Johnson wrapped himself in the mantle of the brave new world, and despite presumably noble instincts, laid the foundations for a social slavery he would never have imagined. It’s debatable, of course, but when one peruses the photographic journals compiled by Pittsburgh’s...

Regardless of how Dr. Ben Carson chooses to try to convince Republican voters that he should be their candidate for president, Carson's personal story is particularly worthy of the attention of all Americans during these troubled times. His story defies much of the conventional wisdom we get from both the left and the right to "explain" the grave social problems in our poor minority communities and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to success facing poor black children. From the left, we hear that black life in America would have no hope but for government programs to ease the burdens of an...

Neighborhoods matter. That’s the upshot of two fascinating new studies from Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues. In the 1990s, the federal government launched an experiment, called the Moving to Opportunity project. It created a lottery for housing vouchers that would allow the winners to move out of high-poverty neighborhoods into low-poverty ones. The project’s initial findings were a disappointment for people — like me — who argue that culture matters quite a lot. It did find that neighborhood poverty was a big factor in determining economic mobility, but researchers saw little evidence that getting poor people out of...

Last year the United States celebrated the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty begun by LBJ in 1964. Over that time the country has spent approximately $40 trillion on welfare and redistribution programs of one sort or another – and that number doesn’t include expenditures for Social Security or Medicare. The program started out slow, but has steadily picked up steam so that today the United States spends over a trillion dollars on welfare programs every year. To put that $1 trillion in perspective, that is more than the GDP of every country on the planet except for the...

Bubba threw a pity party on the Today Show. For those of you who didn't catch the MSM newser news, probably just about everyone these days, here is a link to the video. You might want to have a box of tissues handy ... cause this short clip is a real tear jerker!

...After seeing CNN's story Friday on Charles Gladden -- a man who works in the Senate cafeteria but lives on the streets -- Nathan Morris, the co-founder of musical group Boyz II Men, started an online call to arms to help. Using a crowd-funding site "Go Fund Me," Morris urged people to make a donation to help Gladden find housing.... ...Gladden, 63, makes about $11 an hour, and takes home about $360 a week. But he said he gives a lot of it to his children and grandchildren, who have their own financial troubles. "I take care of them," he...

A survey targeting local low-income families has found that 40 percent of respondents felt they have very little or no job security, according to results being released this week. That kind of instability makes it challenging to commit to car loans, apartment leases and tuition payments – steps often necessary to improving a family’s economic standing. Of those participating in the survey, more than 1 in 2 has received free groceries or meals and about 1 in 4 has needed help with housing, utilities or health care. The 502 responses reflect the experiences of those who continue to struggle in...

For a sense of the neighborhood in which Freddie Gray grew up, and which has been set partly ablaze over the last several days — the plot of West Baltimore known as Sandtown-Winchester — one need only read the relevant portion of the Baltimore City Health Department’s 2011 Neighborhood Health Profiles. According to the department (which included in its analysis the adjacent neighborhood of Harlem Park), the 10,000-person neighborhood, which is almost entirely black (97 percent), had a median household income of $22,277 as of 2011– 40 percent below Baltimore City’s average. One in five residents age 16 or older...

Baltimore is in a state of unrest and the mainstream media is condemning protestors as vigilantes. In other words, when it comes to black rage and pain, it’s business as usual. Martin Luther King, Jr. said “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Since the beginning of time, riots and have revolution have gone hand in hand. From the Boston Tea Party to Nat Turner to the L.A riots, there has never been revolution without them. To dismiss the riots as just the actions of “thieves” trying to get free stuff is to ignore history. While Whoopi Goldberg and...