"Mad Men" just won its third Emmy for "outstanding drama." If there were a gold statue for "best nostalgic portrayal," the AMC series would have walked off with that one, too. The allure and success of "Mad Men" is its stylish evocation of a lost era that many older Americans miss and younger ones envy.
The latest CBS poll found that 59 percent of Americans view Arizona's SB1070, the immigration bill that allows Arizona to prosecute immigration violations, as "just right," while another 14 percent think the bill doesn't go far enough. So why does President Obama continue to hammer Arizona's law? And why did the State Department include a reference to the Arizona law in a report for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights on America's human rights record?
It's a bit too early for House Republican leader John Boehner to measure the drapes and pick out new wallpaper.
House Minority Leader John Boehner has a brilliant idea.
At the Crystal Ball we receive many requests for information about the history of congressional elections, and there are many ways to look at this topic. In the two simple bar graphs below, we present one way to conceptualize a key part of the contests for Congress. How many incumbents lose for the House and the Senate?
The circus around the mosque should start to lose audience. New York officials have the authority to decide whether an Islamic center may be built near the tragic site of the attacks on the Twin Towers.
Every 10 years, it's time for reapportionment and redistricting. The framers of the Constitution created the first regularly scheduled national census and required, for the first time that I am aware, that representation in a legislature be apportioned according to population.
Neoconservatives, Reaganites and other militarily assertive factions in the United States are sometimes accused of thinking it is always 1938 (Britain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich) -- that there is always a Hitler-like aggressor being appeased and about to drag the world into conflict.
For the past two weeks, I've been traveling across the country interviewing law students who have applied for jobs at my law firm.
Like many Democrats over the past 40 years, Barack Obama has hoped that his association with unpopular liberal positions on cultural issues would be outweighed by pushing economic policies intended to benefit the ordinary person.
In 2005, Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo., sponsored the Stolen Valor Act that made it a federal crime to lie about receiving military medals or honors from the military.
Can you teach an old dog new tricks? In politics, the answer is usually no. Most elected officials cling to their ideological biases, despite the real-world facts that disprove their theories time and again. Most have no common sense, and most never acknowledge that they were wrong.
The mission of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's Cordoba Initiative is not just to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center near ground zero, but also to build "interfaith tolerance and respect."
Our astute political readership is well aware that the United States Senate has been divided into three classes since the beginning of the Constitutional Republic. That’s because, with a six-year term for each senator, only one-third of the Senate is elected every two years. Senators were elected by the state legislatures until the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, of course, but the classes were maintained with the electoral reform, and as new states were added to the Union, the principle of “one-third every two years” has been continuous. While the U.S. House of Representatives is (theoretically) “refreshed” in its entirety by the People at each election, the Senate is much more stable, since two-thirds of the Senate membership is immune from popular uprising in any given election. Passions are given a chance to cool, or to reconstitute, before the next election rolls around.
There’s a disturbing hypocrisy emerging from within the “establishment” wing of the Republican Party lately – a belief that it’s okay to work against fiscal conservatives who garner the support of the vast majority of GOP voters, just not fiscal liberals.
Clarence the angel has a tough job in "It's a Wonderful Life." He must show the suicidal George Bailey what terrible things would have happened had he not been born. Two prominent economists are playing Clarence to the multitudes who believe that forceful government intervention during the financial meltdown should never have been.
When I drive from downtown Washington to Reagan National Airport, I often encounter delays on the George Washington Parkway due to construction of a small bridge over an inlet of the Potomac.
Nothing tests a president like standing up against a wave of fear and prejudice, even at potentially great cost to his own party and prospects. That is what Lyndon Baines Johnson did when he signed the civil rights acts he knew would forfeit the South to the Republicans for a generation or more.
The Drudge Report headline declaring that "Murdoch Gives $1 Million to Haley Barbour" is not technically accurate.
With apologies to George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward and their 1935 classic song, "Summertime" (and the living is easy):
