Let's start with the assumption that America is not a Third World country. In poor countries, many people never see doctors. Only the elite go to college. Rattletrap trains take two hours to go 70 miles.
Barack Obama is a politician who likes to follow through on long-term strategies and avoid making course corrections. That's how he believes he won in 2008, and since then he's shown that he's not much into details.
President Obama well may have begun another undeclared war -- this time on states that try to enforce their own death penalty laws -- on the dubious grounds that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved drugs intended to kill convicted killers.
It's that time of year again, the time of year when high school seniors who have done everything right their whole lives discover that it wasn't good enough to get them into the colleges they dreamed of attending. Ditto for college seniors applying to graduate school.
Having hesitated to fully enter the fiscal fray, President Obama has at last delivered a plausible, principled response to the budgetary flim-flams of the far right. But one speech, even a very good speech, won't fulfill his obligation in this fateful argument.
Between 1932 and 1994, Democrats controlled the U.S. House of Representatives for 58 of 62 years. Since then, however, party control has changed three times, with Republicans controlling the House from 1995 through 2006, Democrats from 2007 through 2010, and Republicans since then.
If Barack Obama’s political standing is helped by a slowly recovering economy, talk among Democrats will quickly turn to taking back the House. However, control of the House of Representatives after the 2012 elections will still belong to the Republicans.
For years, America’s left-leaning mainstream media outlets have belittled and rebuked members of the new media — questioning their credibility, impugning their integrity and assigning all manner of self-serving motivations to their contributions to the marketplace of ideas.
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank attracted some attention when he promised not to mention Sarah Palin for a month. He kept his promise. The republic and the Post survived.
Mitt Romney is too much like Barack Obama. I don't see how he'd win the 2012 GOP nod because he's got too much in common with the guy he wants to replace.
We thought tax reform meant lowering rates and broadening the base by eliminating or cutting back on various deductions, credits and loopholes. That's what the Bowles-Simpson commission proposed. That's what Paul Ryan and David Camp are working on. And that's the pro-growth model.
The great American engine of democracy is beginning to build up a head of steam, and it remains the finest device created by man to organize collective human action.
A friend from out of town asked me what everyone in Los Angeles was saying about the budget crisis and the almost shutdown of the government. Did I know it would be settled? Were people as glued to their televisions as she was?
If you think that academia is not the exclusive playground of the academic left, consider the fate of UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom.
America's tailspin toward the cultural abyss has gained speed with an ad featuring single-mother celebrity Bristol Palin. Bloggers unfriendly to her mother, conservative entrepreneur Sarah Palin, have bashed a charity for paying Bristol $262,500 to warn against teen pregnancy while doling a pitiful $35,000 to social organizations that actually deal with its problems.
Over the years, the daily tracking of the Rasmussen Consumer Index has shown that a single factor generally tends to drive consumer confidence. In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, national security was the primary factor moving consumer confidence. At other times, it has been things like job creation or gas prices.
One of the things that fascinate me about American politics is how the voices of the voters as registered in elections and polls are transformed into changes in public policy. It's a rough-and-ready process, with plenty of trial and error. But for all its imperfections, the political market seems to work.
President Obama has dedicated his time in office to soaking up applause and shifting blame. Last year, when Democrats owned the White House, the House and the Senate, Congress didn't even bother passing a budget. Obama didn't seem to mind. But when Republicans put together a stopgap measure to fund the military and prevent a government shutdown, Obama promised to veto it. Obama called the measure "a distraction from the real work that would bring us closer to a reasonable compromise for funding the remainder of fiscal year 2011."
Washington shutdown fears are sinking the U.S. dollar, according to some news reports. Surely there's something to this, as investor confusion rises and confidence falls, and as Washington seems to be gridlocked over a few billion dollars.
What the meteoric career of Paul Ryan demonstrates is how easily impressed we are whenever a politician purports to restore solvency by punishing the poor and the elderly (while coddling the rich).
