With American politicians still refusing to substantively address the looming consequences of their fiscal irresponsibility, it only makes sense that voters are feeling frustrated and powerless.
Of all the discussion about Paul Ryan's big-bang budget plan, the element I like best was caught in this Wall Street Journal op-ed title: "The GOP Path to Prosperity." In other words, it's a growth budget. It has plenty of spending cuts, but it also has significant pro-growth tax reform.
"My worst experience was the financial crisis of September 2008," responded House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan yesterday to a reporter's question about Democrats' attacks on the budget he unveiled earlier in the day.
While the president's top advisers are currently most worried about the public judgment in November 2012 on his Libyan war actions, they might be better advised to worry about his actions in Iraq.
As he announces his bid for re-election, President Barack Obama is facing some tough poll numbers. According to the Rasmussen Reports daily tracking poll, the president's approval index, as of April 4, was a not so stellar -14, which means that 14 percent more of us strongly disapprove of him than strongly approve.
SINGER ISLAND, Fla. -- The Florida sun flashes off the row of oiled bodies, their owners largely unmindful of the politics being played on this strip of sand. The ocean waves are eating the beach. Residents of the luxury condo towers behind us fear losing the currently ideal sand-surf balance. They pressed Palm Beach County to stop the erosion by building a 1.2-mile series of breakwaters parallel to the shore. The county commissioners have just said "no."
The New York Times reported last month that General Electric earned $14.2 billion in international profits, including, $5.1 billion in the United States. Yet GE did not pay a dime in federal income taxes last year.
Are whites on the verge of becoming a minority of the American population? That's what some analysts of the 2010 Census results claim. Many go on, sometimes with relish, to say that this spells electoral doom for the Republican Party.
"No blood for oil" was a popular slogan chanted by the left in opposition to President George W. Bush's push to send U.S. forces into Iraq. Now that President Obama authorized Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya, I have been waiting to hear chants of "no blood for oil." I am happy to report, I don't hear them.
Did the big March jobs report put President Obama back on the road to re-election? If so, he can thank the GOP, whose tax cuts saved him from himself.
J Street, the pro-peace, pro-Israel lobbying group, is circulating a petition calling on President Obama to go to Israel in the very near future. In my view, they are absolutely right. Such a trip is absolutely essential for two reasons.
Scarcely any news story induces sleep as swiftly and surely as congressional budget negotiations -- a topic that features politicians bickering loudly over huge dollar amounts that lack meaning for most people, while their public posturing reflects little of what is actually going on in the back channels.
California Gov. Jerry Brown won the blame game and lost the budget.
As the world keeps a watchful eye over the badly-damaged Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan, a radioactive threat much closer to home is being deliberately downplayed by our government.
When it comes to congressional redistricting, the nation’s most populous state is in a class by itself. About a decade ago, the Democratic state legislature passed what would prove to be one of the most perfect “status quo” congressional district maps imaginable. It was designed to create a large cadre of safe seats for both parties, and it did just that.
Has the wind gone out of the sails of the smaller government movement? Is the tea party movement going through a hangover?
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- You'd think that a state knocked cold by the real-estate meltdown would invest in a future not based on housing bubbles. And that if the feds dangled a bag of money to help it address a serious economic drag -- a gridlocked highway system that turns off tourists, retirees and business travelers -- you'd think the state would grab it.
If you buy into the energy speech President Obama delivered on Wednesday, it sure sounds like we're headed for drill, drill, drill. It would be a total reversal of policy. I guess $100-plus oil and near $4 gas at the pump -- along with a consumer economic-political revolt -- will do that to you.
"We have only just begun," Geraldine Ferraro wrote in inscribing a photograph to me after the 1984 campaign. I keep it above my desk, to remind myself that Rome wasn't built in a day, that it takes courage and perseverance when you're trying to change the world.
In 1427, a ship captain sailing for his Portuguese Prince, Henry the Navigator, discovered the Azores Islands. If the question of the significance of this event had been posed, at the time, to Sultan Murad Khan (the leader of the Ottoman Empire), or to Itzcoatl and Nezahualcoyotl (the co-leaders of the Aztecs) or to Rao Kanha (one of the princes of Jodhpur in India), it is unlikely that any of them would have responded that it is an early indication of a historic explosion of cultural energy in Europe that will lead to European exploration and conquest of most of the known world, and to a renaissance of European thought that will give rise to scientific, industrial and scholarly dominance of the planet by European culture for at least half a millennium.
