The two major parties have done their job in terms of setting the parameters for the 2012 presidential nominating process. Now, it is time for the states to fill in the blanks. And what they do in that regard over the next few months could go a long way in determining who wins next year's Republican presidential nomination.
With gas prices soaring as summer vacations near, many optimistic Republicans and nervous Democrats are left wondering about what impact those prices will have on President Obama's reelection chances. High gas prices, they point out, sank Jimmy Carter in 1980 and added to the baggage George W. Bush passed on to Republican nominee John McCain in 2008.
I found this quote, buried in a news story about rising prices in China:
"I hear that many Chinese exporters are rejecting orders from Walmart and other Western retailers," said Dong Tao, an economist for Credit Suisse in Hong Kong. "I've been covering the Chinese economy for a long time, and I've never heard that before."
Behold the damage Donald Trump hath wrought. Every credible fact check has established that Barack Obama was born in this country. Yet on Wednesday, a reality TV show ringmaster forced the president of the United States to prove it.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's abrupt withdrawal from the race for the Republican presidential nomination -- after hiring a topnotch New Hampshire campaign manager and planning to fly around the country next week -- has naturally inspired a lot of punditry on the Republican presidential race.
Many years ago, the late and great U.S. District Court Judge Constance Baker Motley of the Southern District of New York was assigned to hear a case alleging sex discrimination by one of New York's top law firms. The plaintiffs were no doubt as pleased by the assignment as the defendants were displeased: Judge Motley had served as one of Thurgood Marshall's top deputies at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, before Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court and Motley to the federal district court. She was widely known as a strong supporter of women's rights.
When oil prices blew sky high in 2008, ExxonMobil paid $36.5 billion in income taxes, $34.5 billion in sales taxes, and $45 billion in other taxes, for a total of $116.2 billion in taxes paid and collected in 2008. That’s according to Mark Perry at the Carpe Diem blog.
It wasn't that long ago when Democratic members of Congress were warning about conservative colleagues trying to insert their religion into politics by trying to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. For issues concerning family planning, the left generally agrees that it is wrong to impose religion on politics.
Last weekend, David Ignatius in his Washington Post column made a vital contribution to the debt and deficit debate: "Take the deficit pain now. It's a truth of economics and life that if you have bad news coming, take the hit early and get it behind you. You can't start building until the debris is out of the way."
The defined benefit is dying. Barack Obama is struggling to keep it alive, but it's apparent that it's something that even as bounteously rich a society as ours can't afford.
The first tip-off that Greg Mortenson's memoir "Three Cups of Tea" has some credibility issues comes in the book's introduction. Co-author David Oliver Relin writes that as Mortenson is flying over Pakistan, the helicopter pilot marvels to Mortenson, "I've been flying in northern Pakistan for 40 years. How is it you know the terrain better than me?"
Everything we really need to know about the character of Donald Trump was revealed when the wannabe president frivolously accused Barack Obama's late grandparents of committing fraud with his birth announcement. Trump told CNN that they had placed the Aug. 13, 1961, announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser because they wanted to get "welfare" and other benefits. But this casual falsehood revealed only the tiniest hint of the truth about Trump that Americans will discover if he actually runs for the White House.
With 18 months to go until November 2012, there is exactly one use for a current projection of the 2012 Electoral College results. This is merely a baseline from which we can judge more reliable projections made closer to the election. Where did we start--before we knew the identity of the Republican nominee for president, the state of the economy in fall 2012 and many other critical facts?
The classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller "North by Northwest" contains a few of Hollywood's most memorable--and ludicrous--sequences, including a famous scene in which our hero, played by Cary Grant, finds himself being shot at by a crop duster at a bus stop near a cornfield.
About 10 years ago, a new radiation treatment for prostate cancer came on line. A single course of "intensity-modulated radiation therapy" cost Medicare about $42,000. The older radiation therapy cost $10,000. Hospitals bought the new machines and stopped using the traditional method. This tacked another $1.5 billion per year to Medicare spending on prostate cancer alone.
Last year, when President Obama wanted to convince Americans that his policies were paying off and creating jobs, he visited a solar-panel plant in Fremont, Calif. "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra," quoth the president.
Did Barack Obama take Tax 1 in law school? I did, and I remember the first day of classes, when mild mannered Professor Boris Bittker asked a simple question, "What is income?"
I must admit that it took me at least a minute to figure out the Drudge Report headline: "Paw In."
If future historians look back on the ruins of the American economy after a U.S. bond crisis struck in the second decade of the 21st century, many causes will be noted. Obviously, it will be seen that for decades before the catastrophe, the U.S. was spending vastly more than it could afford on government health and retirement programs.
You know the war on drugs has gone too far when politicians keep ratcheting up restrictions on cold and allergy medications in order to prevent kitchen drug labs from buying pills and converting them into methamphetamine.
