It isn't the earmarks, stupid. Bullying Republican Senate leaders into a "voluntary" ban on earmarks may represent a political triumph for the tea party movement, but as a measure to reduce the federal deficit it is a meaningless substitute for real action.
And so another class of high school graduates left home this fall, or said goodbye to their friends who left.
Has the recent Republican sweep of the House doomed President Obama's clean-energy agenda? Possibly. Has it doomed America's? Hardly.
"If only we had sold our stocks a few weeks ago." "If only I'd had the brakes checked before she drove up to the mountains."
While it lacks the panache of Patrick Henry’s impassioned “give me liberty” cry (which the Virginian borrowed from Cato, incidentally), the reality is that Republicans looking for a modus operandi in Washington next year could do a lot worse than “give us gridlock.”
Many liberals went bananas over the new plan to reduce deficits. The ideas put forth by the chairmen of President Obama's bipartisan deficit commission ignore their priorities, they lament.
George W. Bush is sitting on a hotel sofa in front of a south-facing window on a sunny November morning. His presidential memoir, "Decision Points," is No. 1 on amazon.com and is expected to be No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. "I've got a very comfortable life," he says.
The draft deficit-reduction proposal released last week by former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and retired GOP Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming -- the co-chairmen of President Obama's bipartisan commission on reducing the national debt -- has the feel of what two wonks might draw up on cocktail napkins in a bar. It's a bit too easy for two unelected guys to hash out a plan that tells other people what they have to give up -- just to be fair.
I can't quite remember certain things that happened in college, particularly during my junior year "abroad" at Dartmouth. I'm sure some of that is age (in this case, a rare blessing), but the larger part is that I don't want to remember. And I can't imagine wanting anyone else to, either, at least not with any greater accuracy than their equally limited memory should allow.
For political junkies of a certain age, it was a given that the House of Representatives would always be controlled by Democrats. They won the chamber in 1954 and held on for 40 years -- more than twice as long as any party in American history had before.
The wreckage of the Democratic Party is strewn just about everywhere. President Obama’s carefully constructed 2008 Electoral College breakthrough is now just broken, a long-ago memory of what might have been a lasting shift in partisan alignment.
The great Bernanke QE2 debate continues to heat up. In the run-up to the G-20 meetings, China, Russia, Germany and others have all come out against the Federal Reserve's quantitative-easing agenda. They don't want hot-money excess dollars to flow into their higher-yielding currencies.
37
The number of Senate races on the November ballot, the most since 1962.
2
The number of appointed U.S. senators to survive the election, Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). The four others didn’t run: Ted Kaufman (D-DE), Roland Burris (D-IL), George LeMieux (R-FL), Carte Goodwin (D-WV).
How interesting that one arm of the Agriculture Department is promoting sales of cheese as another urges the public to eat less of it for health reasons. Your tax dollars at work fighting other tax dollars.
Overstating the importance of a midterm election is understandably tempting for politicians and pundits, especially when the partisan turnover reaches historic proportions, as it indisputably did on Nov. 2. It is a temptation to which Republicans and conservatives seem particularly vulnerable.
Ten pounds separate me from most of the clothes in my closet. They are the cause of regular disaster in dressing rooms.
Last weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tried his hand at dissecting GOP foreign policy attitudes. I commend the senator for trying to come to grips with this vital question that is getting so little, if any, national discussion.
Imagine if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were a Republican. Imagine that the Republicans, including many moderates, just lost more than 60 House seats in the worst rout a party has experienced since 1938. Yet the hard-core conservative speaker -- of whom, polls show, a majority of voters have a decidedly unfavorable opinion -- decides to run for the step-down position of minority leader.
Let's try to put some metrics on last Tuesday's historic election.
Barack Hussein Obama, the mixed-race president born in Hawaii, partly educated in Indonesia -- defender of a controversial Islamic center near ground zero in Manhattan -- is tentatively scheduled to visit Jakarta's Masjid Istiqlal, the largest mosque in Southeast Asia. Mercifully, the American elections are over.
