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The death of the journalist Nat Hentoff, who slipped away Saturday at 91, takes one of America’s greatest tribunes of the Constitution at one of its hours of maximum peril. Hentoff rose to fame as a jazz critic of for the Village Voice. We tend to think it was no coincidence that his love of jazz, which toppled musical conventions, throbbed in the same heart that led him to challenge so many political conventions, particularly, though not exclusively, the political correctness of the Left. How we will need newspapermen like Hentoff in the years ahead...

The columnist has championed a woman rejected from law school for being white. He has defended a police chaplain fired for saying "fag," and been shouted down by pro-choice feminists at a pro-life rally. He's quoted approvingly a charter school founder saying that only when racial categorization is stopped can there be "true equal protection of the laws." And he quit the ACLU in protest of their position against revealing the results of HIV tests on newborns. By the way, he's a life-long leftist who has written for the Village Voice since the 1960s. He's Nat Hentoff. And with virtually...

We learned of Nat Hentoff’s death last night from his son, who was the first to tweet this sad news to the rest of the country. You his full obituary in the New York Times, but I would suggest combing the Internet to read his words for yourself. Even though he was a product of a pre-Internet age, Hentoff deftly utilized the tools of the late 20th and 21st century to spread his message of individual liberty and the rule of law. A perfect example being this Web video from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, an organization committed...

Nat Hentoff, an eclectic columnist, critic, novelist and agitator dedicated to music, free expression and defying the party line, died Saturday at age 91. His son, Tom Hentoff, said his father died from natural causes at his Manhattan apartment. Schooled in the classics and the stories he heard from Duke Ellington and other jazz greats, Nat Hentoff enjoyed a diverse and iconoclastic career, basking in “the freedom to be infuriating on a myriad of subjects.”

The last of a breed

WASHINGTON — Worse than Richard Nixon. An unprecedented abuse of powers. The most un-American president in the nation’s history. Nat Hentoff does not think much of President Obama. And now, the famous journalist says it is time to begin looking into impeachment. Hentoff sees the biggest problem as Obama’s penchant to rule by executive order when he can’t convince Congress to do things his way. The issue jumped back into the headlines last week when, just before his first Cabinet meeting of 2014, Obama said, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone … and I can use that...

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner in economics and an influential New York Times columnist, also has a blog, "The Conscience of a Liberal." On ABC's "This Week" (Nov. 14), during a discussion on balancing the federal budget against alarming deficits, he proclaimed the way to solve this problem is through deeply cost-effective health-care rationing. "Some years down the pike," he said, "we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes." That would mean the U.S. Debt Reduction Commission "should have endorsed the panel that was part of the (Obama)...

This is a story that should be a warning to Americans, regardless of political party, because it dramatically illustrates what pre-eminent civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate documents in his book, "Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" by means of the ever-increasing broad and vague federal laws that allow prosecutors to pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, even for the most seemingly innocuous behavior. Consider what happened to an unemployed American, Bruce Shore, because of e-mails he sent to the Web site of U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky. As reported by Arthur Delaney on...

"I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had."—Nat Hentoff Nat Hentoff has had a life well spent, one chock full of controversy fueled by his passion for the protection of civil liberties and human rights. Hentoff is known as a civil libertarian, free speech activist, anti-death penalty advocate, pro-lifer and not uncommon critic of the ideological left.At 84, Nat Hentoff is an American classic who has never shied away from an issue. For example, he defended a woman rejected from law school because she was Caucasian;...

There has been a sudden disclosure that, in the influential Senate Finance Committee's health care bill, there is a dangerous provision that could deny crucial health treatments for Medicare patients. This is the much-publicized and debated Baucus bill, named for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus. In its news section, the Wall Street Journal reported (Sept. 17) that this bill "breaks a logjam and is likely to form the core of a bill in the full Senate." During the continuous, extensive coverage of this proposed legislation, there has been only very limited mention — and none I've seen in the...

Startlingly - and wholly involuntarily - President Obama is teaching us that, as Thomas Jefferson often said, "the people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberty." The growing resistance to the president's goal of state-controlled health care is moving more of us to act on our constitutional power to protect our quintessential individual liberty - to decide for ourselves how long we are going to stay on this Earth. The reverberating town-hall meetings are a legacy of the 1765 meeting in Boston where Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty organized against King George III and, not having access...

Why is the press remaining mostly silent about the so-called "hate crimes law" that passed in the House on April 29? The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act passed in a 249-175 vote (17 Republicans joined with 231 Democrats). These Democrats should have been tested on their knowledge of the First Amendment, equal protection of the laws (14th Amendment), and the prohibition of double jeopardy (no American can be prosecuted twice for the same crime or offense). If they had been, they would have known that this proposal, now headed for a Senate vote, violates all these constitutional provisions....

I've borrowed Woody Guthrie's 1942 song to report that this is my last column for the Voice. I'm not retiring; I've never forgotten my exchange on that decision with Duke Ellington. In those years, he and the band played over 200 one-nighters a year, with jumps from, say, Toronto to Dallas. On one of his rare nights off, Duke looked very beat, and I presumptuously said: "You don't have to keep going through this. With the standards you've written, you could retire on your ASCAP income." Duke looked at me as if I'd lost all my marbles. "Retire!" he crescendoed....

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Leading pro-life Democrat Nat Hentoff wrote a national editorial on Tuesday saying he had considered supporting Barack Obama for president. That was until he investigated Obama's record on abortion and found that the Illinois lawmaker essentially supported infanticide. "I was once strongly inclined to vote for Barack Obama for president (assuming he won his party's nomination)," Hentoff said in the column. "But then I learned Obama's voting record on abortion." Complete story at: http://www.lifenews.com/nat3903.html

As a solo pro-lifer over the years — among my wife, my friends and journalists I work with — I have been strengthened by knowing and learning from the late Henry Hyde on how to report on the degree to which this country can and is combating the culture of death — from abortion to assisted suicide and the "futility doctrine" in a growing number of hospitals that certain lives are not worth living any more. From 1975 to 2007, former U.S. Rep. Hyde, a force for life, was not only instrumental in limiting the number of abortions, he also...

Discussing your criteria for your nominations to the Supreme Court, all of you said you would not consider anyone who did not pledge to uphold Roe v. Wade. This "litmus test" means that all other possibilities, no matter how distinguished their records on constitutional issues, would be ignored. I ask all the Democratic candidates: Do you have any other "litmus tests" for the high court? On nominees' views on homosexual marriage? Federal taxpayers' funds for "good works" by religious organizations? How high should the "wall" between church and state be? At the Planned Parenthood meeting, Mr. Obama proposed an "updated...

The unassuming international champion of universal health care, Michael Moore, was asked (New York Sun, June 29) whether, while filming "Sicko," he inquired about the condition of Cuban journalist Normando Gonzalez, a political prisoner since 2003. He has contracted severe chronic illnesses while in a Castro gulag. Moore answered that he asked only about Cuba's health care system while he was there. Among other suffering prisoners in Cuban cells who would have added further dimension to "Sicko" are independent librarians, put away for more than 20-year sentences for the crime of giving Cubans access to books and other publications forbidden...

For years, I have been covering the Castro regime’s imprisonment — often for very long sentences — of what Amnesty International accurately calls “prisoners of conscience.” Among them are independent journalists, labor organizers, women’s rights supporters, authors and independent librarians. The latter are brave Cubans and women’s-rights supporters who make available books that their neighbors and other Cubans are not allowed to read in the state-controlled library system. Whatever direction a post-Fidel government takes, this punishment of free thought will continue. From kangaroo-court records I have seen, when independent librarians are sent to the gulags, certain confiscated books — and...

Overlooked in the wake of the midterm elections and the Supreme Court oral arguments on partial-birth abortion is a South Dakota abortion case in the federal courts that casts a sharp shaft of light on the national abortion debate. The case is not connected to partial-birth abortion or to a South Dakota ban on nearly all abortions in that state which was thumpingly defeated by the voters on Nov. 7. This case is about a South Dakota law that gets to the very core of the abortion controversy: When do we become human beings? The law would require that doctors...

Among the celebrities journeying to Connecticut to support Ned Lamont's campaign to unseat Sen. Joseph Lieberman (now running as an independent, having lost the Democratic primary to Lamont) is Michael Schiavo, known around the world as the husband who finally succeeded in having the feeding tube removed from his late wife, Terri Schiavo. Schiavo pointedly reminded Connecticut voters that Sen. Lieberman has supported the president and Congressional Republicans in passing emergency legislation involving federal courts in an attempt to save Terri Schiavo's life while he, Michael Schiavo, was respecting her wishes — which she could no longer communicate — to...