Lugar Loss Highlights Sour Relationship Between Voters and Politicians By Scott Rasmussen
When relationships go bad, an early warning sign is that one side doesn't really hear what the other is saying.
Political Commentary
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May 11, 2012
May 10, 2012
Education Should Have Second and Third Acts By Froma Harrop
On the HBO series "Girls," Hannah asks her boss at a publishing house for a salary. The 24-year-old has been working as an unpaid intern for over a year, and her parents will no longer support her.
May 10, 2012
Long, Hard Slog Ahead in Presidential Race By Michael Barone
Just as the political air is filled with talk of the inevitability of Barack Obama's re-election -- we are told that the kids at his Chicago headquarters are brimming with confidence -- in come some poll numbers showing him behind.
May 10, 2012
A Senate That’s Fit to Be Tied? Updating the Battle for Congress By Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik
Some analysts have been making the case that 2012 is going to turn decisively one way or the other — perhaps evolving into a 2008-style margin for Democrats or Republicans.
May 9, 2012
Creating a Risk-Free World By John Stossel
A child leaving home alone for the first time takes a risk. So does the entrepreneur who opens a new business. I no more want government to prevent us from doing these things than I want it to keep us in padded cells.
May 8, 2012
Throwing American Tradition in the Cultural Mixmaster By Froma Harrop
The overnight rating for the Kentucky Derby telecast has slipped again, hitting a six-year low. This was despite NBC's best efforts to fill the hours with such celebrities as "Two and a Half Men" star Ashton Kutcher and Debra Messing from "Smash." Or was it because of them? A romantic 138-year tradition grown from the bluegrass soil and Southern gentility becomes a blob of homogenized commercial promotion.
May 7, 2012
Racial Preferences: Unfair and Ridiculous By Michael Barone
Washington Post editorial writer and liberal blogger Jonathan Capehart is puzzled. Why does the "non-issue" of Harvard Law professor and Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren's Native American ancestry "require so much attention?" he asked last week.
May 5, 2012
Romney Must Choose By Froma Harrop
You have to wonder why some gay advocates -- like a few believers in birth control, global warming and evolution -- remain loyal Republicans even as the right wing drags their party back to the beginning of the 20th century, if not the 19th. While governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney planted himself mostly in the future.
May 4, 2012
Trench Warfare Won't Resolve Anything in This Year's Elections By Scott Rasmussen
One hundred years ago, the European powers were hurtling down a path leading to World War I. Trench warfare became the dominant image of that war, as both sides dug in and the battle lines barely moved. Many called it the "War to End All Wars," but in the end it merely set the stage for World War II.
May 3, 2012
Obama's Chicago Politics: Thuggery Not Civility By Michael Barone
It has been reported that the Obama campaign this year, as in 2008, has disabled or chosen not to use AVS in screening contributions made by credit card. That doesn't sound very important. But it's evidence of a modus operandi that strikes me as thuggish.
May 2, 2012
Keeping Nature Exactly as Is ... Forever By John Stossel
The human brain is torn between simple intuition and the more complex hard work of figuring out the unintended consequences of any policy. Who doesn't like thinking about trees and greenery and happy animals? Who doesn't want to see steps taken to protect those things, all else being equal? But all else is not equal. Civilization doesn't work when central planners treat each tree as if its value is infinite.
May 1, 2012
Wishing the Worst for John Edwards By Froma Harrop
John Edwards allegedly misused campaign money to cover a tawdry affair while posing lovey-dovey with his dying wife for the cameras. All this happened in 2008, as the former Democratic senator from North Carolina was running for president. Accused of six felony counts for violating federal election laws, Edwards faces up to 30 years behind bars. Let's go for the max.
April 30, 2012
Obama Losing Rock-star Status Among Young Voters By Michael Barone
Last week, Barack Obama delivered speeches at universities in Chapel Hill, N.C., Iowa City, Iowa, and Boulder, Colo. The trip was, press secretary Jay Carney assured us, official government business, not political campaigning.
April 27, 2012
Will GOP Exploit Secret Service and GSA Scandals? By Joe Conason
Colombian prostitutes and lavish partying in Vegas inspire hot headlines -- and understandably infuriate the public. But concerned as President Obama must be over the unfolding embarrassments in the Secret Service and the General Services Administration, he may actually be comforted by the feeble attempts of a few politicians to wring political profit from those scandals. The likelihood that the White House is implicated can be measured by their stature.
April 27, 2012
Partisan Gender Gap Not Just About Women By Alfred J. Tuchfarber
It's interesting to hear politicians, political analysts and journalists use the term "gender gap." They do so with great frequency, and it is almost always explicitly, implicitly or contextually focused on women. It is true, of course, that women usually vote 8% to 12% more Democratic than do men.
April 27, 2012
Voters Understand the Immigration Debate; Politicians Don't By Scott Rasmussen
As the U.S. Supreme Court wrestles with the Obama administration's challenge of Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigration, the overall issue of immigration remains misunderstood by both political parties in Washington.
April 26, 2012
Shrinking Problem: Illegal Immigration From Mexico By Michael Barone
The illegal immigration problem is going away.
That's the conclusion I draw from the latest report of the Pew Hispanic Center on Mexican immigration to the United States.
Pew's demographers have carefully combed through statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Homeland Security and the Mexican government, and have come up with estimates of the flow of migrants from and back to Mexico. Their work seems to be as close to definitive as possible.
April 26, 2012
Plan of Attack: Obama, Romney & The Electoral College By Kyle Kondik, Larry J. Sabato and Geoffrey Skelley
The London Olympics isn't the only venue for world-class sport this year. Political gold is waiting to be won in November, and the only way to grab the top U.S.A. medal is to master Electoral College math. It is both deceptively easy and maddeningly complex. A candidate has to accumulate 270 votes in a tiny universe of 538, but those 538 will be generated by 130 million votes cast in 51 separate entities. A game that looks like checkers is really multi-dimensional chess.
April 26, 2012
Immigration Becomes a New Story By Froma Harrop
Those who saw mass migration from Mexico as a threat and those who did not all agreed on one thing: It was unstoppable without dramatic action by the federal authorities. They turned out to be wrong about that. The title of a new report from the Pew Hispanic Center, "Net Migration From Mexico Falls to Zero -- and Perhaps Less," says it all.
April 25, 2012
The Assault on Food By John Stossel
Instinct tells us to fear poison. If our ancestors were not cautious about what they put in their mouths, they would not have survived long enough to produce us.
Unfortunately, a side effect of that cautious impulse is that whenever someone claims that some chemical -- or food ingredient, like fat -- is a menace, we are primed to believe it. That makes it easy for government to leap in and play the role of protector.
