Philip Seymour Hoffman's death at the end of a heroin needle again spotlights the dangers of a poisonous drug. And so did the Vermont governor's plea last month to confront the "full-blown heroin crisis" plaguing his rural state.
Henry Waxman and George Miller are retiring from the House and not running for re-election after 40 years as congressmen from southern and northern California.
Also retiring and not running for re-election is Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana will resign if, as expected, he is confirmed as ambassador to China. Both were first elected to the House in 1974 and were later elected to the Senate.
These four are just about the last members serving in Congress of the 75 Democrats first elected to the House in the Watergate year of 1974.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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Not as bad as expected. That's my verdict on President Obama's fifth State of the Union address.
With his approval running well under 50 percent, Obama was not quite so confrontational as he has been in the past.
Republicans are again at war with themselves over immigration reform. Ideally, they would agree on the need to legalize millions of illegal immigrants now here and to better control the number of future unskilled foreigners competing with our struggling working class.
President Barack Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday wasn't what I wanted to hear. This is what the president should have said:
"I cannot imagine what I was thinking when I pushed Obamacare. I now see it is folly to entrust government, which cannot balance its books and routinely loses track of billions of dollars, with even greater power over health care.
"If something as simple as a website is too much for government to get right, imagine what government will do to complicated medical pricing and insurance plans.
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Just about everyone agrees that 2013 was not a good year for President Obama. His job approval plummeted as the Obamacare rollout cratered. His oft-promised pivot to Asia was as much of a dud as his oft-promised pivot to the economy.
But it must also be said that the Republican politicians who have been touted as possible successors to the 44th president didn't have sparkling years either. Each has encountered a setback to his prospects for either the Republican nomination or as a general election candidate.
Very few Republican operatives knew the Nixon gang as intimately as Roger Stone, the legendary trickster whose back is adorned with an enormous Tricky Dick tattoo. And very few know New Jersey politics as well as Stone, who toiled among the party faithful in many campaigns since 1980, when he first ran the Garden State for Ronald Reagan.
It is 41 years since the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision, effectively legalizing abortion everywhere in the United States. Ever since, it has been a source of controversy -- and confusion.
There is a difference between being married and not being married. That difference has come into sharp focus in the romantic life of French President Francois Hollande, a sort of Socialist Sun King around whom women revolve. All of his female companions are reputedly strong, but none seems strong enough to tell him to scram.
The Hill, the newspaper that covers Congress, says this year, there will be a major policy battle over "climate change." Why?
What do young Americans want? Something different from what they've been getting from the president they voted for by such large margins.
Evidence comes in from various polls. Voters under 30, the millennial generation, produced numbers for Barack Obama 13 percentage points above the national average in 2008 and 9 points above in 2012.
But in recent polls, Obama approval among those under 30 has been higher than the national average by only 1 percentage point (Quinnipiac), 2 points (ABC/Washington Post) and 3 points (YouGov/Economist).
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After decades of suffering environmental torture at the hands of polluting industries, West Virginians might regard a chemical spill that poisoned the drinking water of 300,000 residents -- and is still scaring folks after the dangers have presumably passed -- as a last straw. But there never seems to be a last straw for them.
The Census Bureau's holiday treat is its release of annual state population estimates, to be digested slowly in the new year.
The headline from this year's release is that population growth from July 2012 to July 2013 was 0.72 percent, lower than in the two preceding years and the lowest since the Great Depression 1930s.
This reflects continuing low, below-replacement-rate birth rates and lower immigration than in 1982-2007. Net immigration from Mexico evidently continues to be zero.
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When Karl Rove praises a politician's "straightforward" approach to an erupting scandal, it seems wise to expect that something very twisted will instead emerge in due course -- and to consider his real objectives.
In the beginning, Massachusetts opened the gates to same-sex marriage and universal health coverage. California started to liberalize drug laws by legalizing medical marijuana. The sky didn't fall on any of these efforts, initially regarded as dangerous social experiments by many conservatives.
Now red states such as Kentucky are launching state-run health insurance exchanges. Federal judges in conservative Utah and Oklahoma are calling bans on gay marriage unconstitutional. And purple Colorado has legalized recreational marijuana use.
The big online retailer Overstock.com now accepts payment in Bitcoin. That's good news for lovers of liberty because Bitcoins give us an alternative to government-controlled money. Bitcoins are a currency created by anonymous, private tech nerds, not by government.
Like just about everybody else in Washington and many across the country, I've been reading the excerpts from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates' book Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War.
It presents a significantly more negative picture of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton than Gates' statements in office led anyone to expect.
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The prospects for single-payer health care -- adored by many liberals, despised by private health insurers and looking better all the time to others -- did not die in the Affordable Care Act. It was thrown a lifeline through a little-known provision tucked in the famously long legislation. Single-payer groups in several states are now lining up to make use of Section 1332.
Vermont is way ahead of the pack, but Hawaii, Oregon, New York, Washington, California, Colorado and Maryland have strong single-payer movements.
Listening to Republican politicians these days as they talk (and talk and talk) about poverty and inequality can be a poignant experience. They want us to know they're worried about the diminishing economic prospects confronted by so many Americans. They hope we will admire their shiny new solutions. And they are so eager for us to believe they care.
But however concerned these Republican worthies may be, they still insist on promoting the same exhausted and useless ideas favored by their party for decades. The sad result is that almost nobody believes that they care at all -- and their "anti-poverty initiatives" tend to be dismissed, with a snicker, as public relations rather than public policy.
To find out more about Joe Conason, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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As Barack Obama scrambles to eviscerate key sections of his own signature health care law, he and other Democrats are trying to shift voters' focus to another issue -- income inequality.
Unfortunately, the solutions they advocate are pitifully inadequate or painfully perverse.
