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Political Commentary

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June 5, 2015

Are We In for Another High-Crime Era After the Response to Ferguson and Baltimore? by Michael Barone

Are we seeing a reversal of the 20-year decline in violent crime in America? A new nationwide crime wave?

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June 4, 2015

The College Board's Sabotage of American History by Michelle Malkin

A stellar group of American historians and academics released a milestone open letter yesterday in protest of deleterious changes to the advanced placement U.S. history (APUSH) exam. The signatories are bold intellectual bulwarks against increasing progressive attacks in the classroom on America's unique ideals and institutions.

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June 4, 2015

The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is the Other Party By Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven Webster Emory University

Which candidate will emerge from the crowded Republican presidential field next year? Can anyone stop or at least slow down Hillary Clinton’s seemingly inevitable march to the Democratic nomination? Will Democrats be able to match the GOP in Super PAC spending? And will there be new revelations about Clinton’s e-mails or the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising practices?

These are some of the questions that are dominating discussion of the 2016 presidential election in the media and among Washington political insiders. What you need to know is that the answers to these questions, interesting as they might be, will have almost no bearing on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

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June 3, 2015

Socialist "Justice" By John Stossel

Protestors demand "social justice." I hate their chant. If I oppose their cause, then I'm for social "injustice"? Nonsense.  

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June 3, 2015

Paying the Price By Thomas Sowell

Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets, but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves, in order to curry favor with local voters.

Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double what they were in May last year, and higher than in any May in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the number of arrests is down by more than 50 percent.

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June 2, 2015

Why Must Americans Clean Up a Foreign Sport? by Froma Harrop

The competent Loretta Lynch can no doubt handle the job of cleansing professional soccer of widespread corruption. But why is that the U.S. attorney general's job? One must ask.

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June 2, 2015

Is it Time for Civil Disobedience of Kludgeocratic Bureaucracy? By Michael Barone

Is there any way to reverse the trend to ever more intrusive, bossy government? Things have gotten to such a pass, argues Charles Murray, that only civil disobedience might -- might -- work. But the chances are good enough, he says, that he's written a book about it: "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission."  

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May 29, 2015

Colleges and Universities Have Grown Bloated and Dysfunctional by Michael Barone

American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I've written before of their shameful practices -- the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society.

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May 29, 2015

Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge? By Michelle Malkin

How many times have you heard President Obama and his minions pat themselves on the back for their noble "investments" in "roads and bridges"? Without government infrastructure spending, we're incessantly reminded, we wouldn't be able to conduct our daily business.

"Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive," Vice President Joe Biden infamously asserted. "Private enterprise," he sneered, lags behind.

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May 28, 2015

House 2016: Gridlock Ahead for a Possible Clinton Administration By Kyle Kondik

If Hillary Clinton wins the White House, there's a decent chance that she will achieve a historic first, but not the one everybody talks about.

Clinton could become the first Democratic president in the party's nearly two century-long history* to never control the House of Representatives while she's in office.

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May 27, 2015

How the World Has Changed Since World War I By Michael Barone

Over the past year, I've been reading books inspired by the centenary of World War I, a war with horrific casualties painful to contemplate. What helps in comprehending the scale of the slaughter is a book by one of Bill Gates' favorite authors, the Canadian academic Vaclav Smil, "Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact."

Smil leads the reader through the invention and development of electricity, oil production and distribution, the automobile, steelmaking, the telephone, the airplane and the production of synthetic ammonia -- to his mind the most important because without it agriculture couldn't feed the world's 6 billion people.

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May 27, 2015

Don't Go! by John Stossel

It's graduation time! Have we learned much? No.

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May 26, 2015

Why Do So Many Eggs Come From Iowa? by Froma Harrop

An outbreak of bird flu has forced American farmers to kill millions of egg-laying chickens, 32 million in Iowa alone -- hence the rise in egg prices.

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May 22, 2015

Can Hillary Clinton Reverse the Six-Year Decline in Democratic Turnout? by Michael Barone

Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 by running as a different kind of Democrat from previous nominees. Hillary Clinton, Anne Gearan of The Washington Post reports, is hoping to win the presidency in 2016 by running as the same kind of Democrat as the current incumbent.

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May 21, 2015

Senate 2016: Sorting Out the Democrats' Best Targets By Kyle Kondik

Former Sen. Russ Feingold’s (D) long-expected decision to challenge Sen. Ron Johnson (R) in a 2016 rematch crystallized for us that Johnson is the most vulnerable incumbent senator in the country. But it also helped put the other top Senate races into context.

First of all, let’s re-set the scene. Map 1 shows Senate Class 3, which will be contested in November 2016. The 34 seats up next year are lopsidedly controlled by Republicans: They are defending 24 seats, while the Democrats are only defending 10.

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May 20, 2015

Dr. Capitalism By John Stossel

For years, my scientist brother Tom was the nonpolitical Stossel.    

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May 19, 2015

Death Penalty for Tsarnaev Hurts Boston By Froma Harrop

Why was 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sentenced to die in a state so generally opposed to capital punishment? A recent Boston Globe poll found that only 19 percent of Massachusetts residents wanted the Boston Marathon bomber put to death. The state hasn't seen an execution since 1947.

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May 19, 2015

The Two-Point-Something Campaign by Michael Barone

This spring it seems as if there have been two-point-something Republican presidential candidacy announcements per week. And, since she made her own announcement April 12, Hillary Clinton has answered an average of about two-point-something questions from the press each week.

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May 15, 2015

British Pollsters Failed in the Increasingly Difficult Struggle to Get it Right by Michael Barone

The world may have a polling problem. That's the headline on a blogpost by Nate Silver, the wunderkind founder of FiveThirthyEight. It was posted on 9:54 ET the night of May 7, as the counting in the British election was continuing in the small hours of May 8 UK Time.

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May 14, 2015

The Left Is So Wrong on Trade By Froma Harrop

The left's success in denying President Obama fast-track authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership is ugly to behold. The case put forth by a showboating Sen. Elizabeth Warren -- that Obama cannot be trusted to make a deal in the interests of American workers -- is almost worse than wrong. It is irrelevant.

The Senate Democrats who turned on Obama are playing a 78 rpm record in the age of digital downloads.