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.
Political Commentary
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May 26, 2015
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.
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.
May 20, 2015
Dr. Capitalism By John Stossel
For years, my scientist brother Tom was the nonpolitical Stossel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
May 14, 2015
Democrats 2016: Sanders Now Clinton's Chief Rival By Geoffrey Skelley
“Inevitable.” That’s the word often used to describe Hillary Clinton and the 2016 Democratic nomination. Can anyone beat her? Anything’s possible, but the odds appear quite low. Still, her most threatening intraparty opposition could prove to be a man who isn’t even technically a Democrat (yet, anyway): independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-identified “democratic socialist.” We see him as a potential thorn in Clinton’s side, and to reflect that, we are moving Sanders to the top of the non-Clinton tier in our presidential rankings for Democrats.
May 13, 2015
Disobey! By John Stossel
Charles Murray, already controversial for writing books on how welfare hurts the poor, on ethnic differences in IQ and on (less controversial, but my favorite) happiness and good government, has written a new book that argues that it's time for civil disobedience. Government has become so oppressive, constantly restricting us with new regulations, that our only hope is for some of us to refuse to cooperate.
May 12, 2015
Online Dignity: Give It Up by Froma Harrop
Three female professors at Eastern Michigan University were shocked to learn that some young scholars in their lecture hall had been on their cellphones attacking them with lewd public posts, complete with imagery. It was all done anonymously, courtesy of an unusually obnoxious social media app called Yik Yak.
May 12, 2015
Big surprise in Britain: Conservatives Beat Labour --- and the Polls By Michael Barone
Big surprises in Thursday's British election. For weeks, the pre-election polls showed a statistical tie in popular votes between Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative Party and the Labour opposition led by Ed Miliband. It was universally agreed that neither party could reach a 326-vote majority in the House of Commons. A prominent British political website projected that Conservatives would get 280 seats and Labour 274.
May 8, 2015
Why Americans Oppose Economic Redistribution Despite Income Inequality by Michael Barone
Skeptics about democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries argued that the enfranchised masses would use their votes to seize the property of the relatively few rich. What could be more natural?
May 7, 2015
Getting the Sports Moguls off Our Backs By Froma Harrop
It was not out of a sense of decency that the National Football League recently let go of its tax-exempt status. You see, as a tax-exempt organization, the NFL had to disclose Commissioner Roger Goodell's compensation -- $44.2 million in 2012. That seemed an excessive sum for the head of a "nonprofit" freed from having to pay any federal income tax. Now the NFL can keep it secret.
May 7, 2015
The Map: 11 Angles on the Electoral College By Geoffrey Skelley, Kyle Kondik, and Larry J. Sabato
Earlier this week, we debuted our initial Crystal Ball Electoral College ratings in Politico Magazine. We’ve reprinted that column below for those who did not see it. As promised, we have elaborated on the map and our reasoning for the initial judgments.
May 6, 2015
Hillary's Armor By John Stossel
"This vast right-wing conspiracy," Hillary Clinton said, "has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced." That was the "feminist" first lady's response when her husband was accused of having sex with a 21-year-old.
May 5, 2015
Clinton Defenders Advance an Unpersuasive Argument By Michael Barone
Some of Hillary Clinton's defenders have taken to saying that voters shouldn't pay attention to the latest Clinton scandals -- the gushing of often undisclosed millions to the Clintons and their organizations by characters seeking official favors -- because the charges are just one more in a long series: Whitewater, the Rose law firm billing records, the Buddhist temple fundraising, the Lippo Group.
May 5, 2015
Let the States Make Drug Law By Froma Harrop
Howard Wooldridge, a Washington lobbyist, is a former detective and forever Texan on an important mission -- trying to persuade the 535 members of Congress to end the federal war on marijuana.
Liberals tend to be an easier sell than conservatives. With liberals, Wooldridge dwells on the grossly racist way the war on drugs has been prosecuted.
May 1, 2015
America's Politics Is Polarized, But Britain's Is Fragmented by Michael Barone
Next week, Britain votes in its first general election in five years. Some aspects of its politics will be familiar to Americans. Polls show voters are dissatisfied with politicians of both parties, cynical about whether they will keep their promises and closely divided between two major parties, which have been in existence for more than 100 years.
April 30, 2015
Defeatism in Baltimore By Froma Harrop
Using the most bloodless terms, an economist explained the failure or inability of so many African-Americans to rise from their impoverished circumstances. They do not respond to the economic incentives that push others to study and strive, he said.
