Just days after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law legislation legalizing same-sex marriage, Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee and the coalition supporting similar legislation in that state effectively conceded defeat.
Anyone paying attention to the costs of U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan must have known that the president badly underestimated those numbers on June 22, when he told the nation that we have spent "a trillion dollars" waging war over the past decade.
The age of "residential adolescence" is upon us, apparently. Nearly 45 percent of adults ages 20 to 24 now live at home with their parents. That's 1.7 million more than in 2005.
It seems this is the Democratic answer for every single issue, every problem, every debate.
What's the fair way to run a large organization? That's a question that is squarely, and interestingly, raised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissenting opinion in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, a Supreme Court case decided last week.
It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes. In that context, the recent rise in oil prices seems to have turned the Obama administration into true believers (at least rhetorically) when it comes to the best method to keep gas prices down and the American economy growing.
For a Democrat, it's too good to be true. Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney running neck and neck in Iowa. Romney having to worry about the one in five who won't vote for a Mormon, and Bachmann hiring a cadre of top Republican consultants, starting with Ed Rollins and Ed Goeas.
"Centralizers," a conservative wrote disapprovingly in Reason magazine, "say that the responsibility for making tough decisions about how to keep health care costs under control ought to be made by enlightened, well-intentioned policy elites."
Which past leader does Barack Obama most closely resemble? His admirers, not all of them liberals, used to compare him to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
The decline of the Grand Old Party into an angry mob is gaining momentum, with crackpot rage displacing common sense on every major issue from public finance to marriage rights.
Did the International Energy Agency (IEA) just deliver the oil equivalent of Quantitative Easing 3?
Bill Clinton is far from the only "comeback kid" in American politics. As we noted last week, many presidents have experienced election losses before they reached the promised land of the White House. A similar story can be told in the U.S. Senate, with 31* senators leaving the chamber only to return at a later date, since the mandate of popular election was passed with the Seventeenth Amendment (a full list is available here).
There he goes again, fulfilling another promise. Imagine that. When he announced the surge in Afghanistan, he said it was temporary. Democrats, especially liberals, screamed bloody murder. How dare he do what he said he would do during the campaign: focus on Afghanistan, on the threat posed by al-Qaida, on capturing Osama bin Laden, dead or alive?
When I was growing up, it was widely believed that colleges and universities were the part of our society with the widest scope for free expression and free speech. In the conformist America of the 1950s, the thinking ran, few people dared to say anything that went beyond a broad consensus. But on campus, anyone could say anything he liked.
As we take a fresh look at next year's Senate races, one thing is clear: Barring an unexpected reelection landslide by President Obama, Republicans are at least slightly favored to take the Senate. It's just a basic matter of numbers.
Back in 1980, when I was working for Sen. Ted Kennedy, the Cardinal of Boston instructed priests to take to their pulpits to denounce the candidacy of Democratic Congressman Barney Frank because of his support for abortion rights. "Get me my brother's speech," the senator said to me.
They, some Republicans, are at it again with the pipe dream of helping the middle class by making the rich much richer. We speak of Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota governor and candidate for president. His extraordinary vision for reviving the economy: Stop taxing investment income, and money will come pouring into the U.S. Treasury.
Sen. John McCain, whose life is a continuing exemplar of the American heroic ideal, regrettably has got it quite wrong when he says that growing GOP opposition to the Libyan and Afghan wars is evidence of isolationism. In his words on weekend television:
While fetching my digital camera from the repair shop, I noted a bunch of clunky old film cameras and their flashes lining a back table. I thought no one used film anymore. Wrong.
Two years ago, in June 2009, the American economy emerged from recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. But as this week's Economist noted, with typical British understatement, "The recovery has been a disappointment."
