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March 15, 2012

Rising Gas Prices Don't Hurt Like They Used To By Froma Harrop

Here's why I'm not panicked about rising gasoline prices, as many headlines suggest we all should be. It's a personal story. Let me start at the beginning.

The automotive love of my life was my first. It was a 1979 Pontiac Grand Prix, already 10 years old when it drove to my door on that mild spring day. A cloudy ocean color, the mid-size car had a V6 engine, and boy, did it move. A whole lot of hood stood between me and the car ahead.

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March 14, 2012

Complex Societies Need Simple Laws By John Stossel

"If you have 10,000 regulations," Winston Churchill said, "you destroy all respect for law." He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That's what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can't keep up.

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March 13, 2012

The Real Problem With Online Anonymity By Froma Harrop

Who is writing that brilliant, stupid, nasty, brave and/or dishonest online comment? We haven't a clue, because the author hasn't shared his or her name, hometown, gender, age and/or nationality. Or even worse, the author pretends to be another real person. Scammers, misfits, crooks, creeps, criminals and nice people all venture through cyberspace without identifying themselves. We can only guess what they're up to.

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March 12, 2012

Romney May Recapture Upscale Whites for the GOP By Michael Barone

In the cold, gray numbers of election returns and exit poll percentages, a reader with some imagination can find clues to people's deep feelings, their hopes and fears, their self-images and moral values.

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March 9, 2012

After Snowe, Is Brown Next? By Froma Harrop

To many New Englanders, Olympia Snowe had come to resemble Marilyn of "The Munsters" TV family. The senator from Maine seemed a normal Northeast Republican surrounded by party leaders sprouting fangs and cooing at bats -- but who regarded her as the odd one.

"You can't be too careful these days," Herman Munster, a Frankenstein-monster clone, would tenderly advise the wholesome Marilyn. "There are a lot of strange people in this world."

March 9, 2012

The Real 'Entitlement Mentality' That Is Bankrupting America By Scott Rasmussen

Many Republicans talk of an entitlement mentality that threatens the character and finances of the United States. In their view, the problem is that too many voters feel entitled to goodies provided by the government and financed by taxpayers.

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March 8, 2012

Can Obama Muzzle the Dogs of War? By Joe Conason

When President Obama disparaged "loose talk about war" against the theocratic regime in Tehran, he wasn't minimizing the consequences of atomic weapons in the hands of the mullahs. The danger of terrorists acquiring a bomb would be multiplied by a regional arms race. The international nonproliferation regime would be crippled if not destroyed. The prestige of the United States would suffer fresh damage, and yes, Israel would be gravely threatened.

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March 8, 2012

On Iran and Entitlements, Obama Kicks the Can Down the Road By Michael Barone

Kicking the can down the road. That's been the Obama administration's response on issues from Iran's nuclear weapons program to America's entitlement systems.

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March 7, 2012

Vulture Capitalism By John Stossel

Now that Mitt Romney is likely to be the Republican nominee, we can expect new attacks on his "vulture capitalism." That's how Rick Perry characterized his private equity work. Newt Gingrich's supporters ran an ad about Romney's firm, Bain Capital, that said, "Their greed was only matched by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits."

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March 6, 2012

What Limbaugh Is Really About By Froma Harrop

Too bad the Republican candidates had to comment on Rush Limbaugh's flaming attack on a female law student at Georgetown University. El Rushbo plays troubadour to the party's right wing from his home in its entertainment wing. The business of the entertainment wing is show business.  That means making money off talk shows, books and TV appearances -- and running the publicity machine at hysterical volume. It does not mean keeping the interests of the Republican Party foremost.

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March 5, 2012

James Q Wilson: A Happy American Life By Michael Barone

Few social scientists, and even fewer political scientists, have done as much to improve American life as James Q. Wilson, who died last week at age 80.

His name is familiar to three decades of college students who studied the American government textbook he co-authored, though one wonders whether they would recall it without the distinctive middle initial.

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March 2, 2012

Snowepocalypse Greatly Harms Republican Chances of Senate Takeover By The Crystal Ball Team

And just when we thought we weren’t going to have any big Snowe storms this year, the decision by…

Eh, enough with the Snowe puns.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) shockingly announced her retirement on Tuesday night, which greatly frustrates Republican efforts to win back the Senate. This was a race that Snowe almost certainly would have won: She and her moderate Republican colleague, Sen. Susan Collins, are institutions not only in the U.S. Senate, but also in the Pine Tree State. Despite grumbles to her left and right, Snowe would have been very difficult to defeat in a primary or general election.

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March 2, 2012

Romney's Budget-balancing for Dummies By Joe Conason

Seeking applause from a right-wing audience in Michigan, Mitt Romney vowed on Saturday: "I will cut spending, I will cap spending, and I will finally balance the budget," saying that he will end federal funding for all the usual Republican budgetary scapegoats -- the Public Broadcasting System, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has said much the same thing many times in recent months, hoping to woo the tea party extremists who keep rejecting his candidacy.

March 2, 2012

Why Politicians Can't Connect With the Middle Class By Scott Rasmussen

Nearly every national political campaign emphasizes the importance of connecting with the middle class. So how come in the 2012 presidential race, none of the candidates are able to make that connection? A hint may be found in the results of a Rasmussen Reports survey showing that just 27 percent of voters nationwide believe government management of the economy actually helps the economy. Fifty percent think government economic activism does more harm than good.

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March 1, 2012

Tax the Rich ... First By Froma Harrop

We who've been going on and on about the need to raise taxes on the rich need to catch our breath. There's no need to reverse course, but also no obligation to totally love President Obama's approach for doing what we've been asking for. An explanation is in order.

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March 1, 2012

Why Liberals Like Taxing the Wealthy By Michael Barone

I have long been puzzled by the enthusiasm with which many young liberal bloggers cheer on proposals to raise tax rates on high earners. I can understand why they might favor them, but not why they seem to invest so much psychic energy in the issue.   

Some of this may just be team ball: You cheer when your side puts up numbers on the scoreboard. So Democratic cheerleaders are rah-rahing what they insist on calling repeal of the Bush tax cuts (which have been in effect now longer than the Clinton tax increases they rolled back).   

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March 1, 2012

Romney's Sigh of Relief By Larry Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley

Phew! The sound you hear is the loud sigh of relief from the Romney campaign. A great deal was on the line for Mitt Romney in the oddest of places -- the state of his birth, the state where his dad served as governor, the state he won against John McCain four years ago. A few months ago, no one could have imagined Mitt Romney being hard-pressed in Michigan, and yet it happened.

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February 29, 2012

Prohibition By John Stossel

Unlike Bill Clinton, President Obama admits he inhaled!. "Frequently," he said. "That was the point."

People laugh when politicians talk about their drug use. The audience laughed during a 2003 CNN Democratic presidential primary debate when John Kerry, John Edwards and Howard Dean admitted smoking weed. 

Yet those same politicians oversee a cruel system that now stages SWAT raids on people's homes more than 100 times a day. People die in these raids -- some weren't even the intended targets of the police.

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February 28, 2012

Racial Preferences in College Admissions: Time to Go By Froma Harrop

Nothing the Supreme Court deals with is not political. But a case over affirmative action in college admissions has arrived at an especially political time. This is an election year. Working-class whites are considered swing voters, and the president running for re-election is both African-American and a beneficiary of the finest higher education our country offers. Come early fall, the Supreme Court will probably hear a case in which a white student, Abigail Fisher, claims that a race-conscious policy for admissions to the University of Texas violated her constitutional rights.

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February 27, 2012

Romney, Santorum Represent Different White Americas By Michael Barone

If you were listening reasonably carefully to last Wednesday's Republican presidential candidate debate, you heard Rick Santorum say, "Charles Murray just wrote a book about this."

The question was about Santorum's remarks on contraception, but his answer addressed the broader issue of "the increasing number of children being born out of wedlock in America." That is indeed one of the subjects -- but only one -- of Murray's new book "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 to 2010."

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