Choosing a Supreme Court justice has become a deplorably dishonest process that hides ideological disputes behind petty and often personal matters. Nominees pretend to have no opinion about controversial issues such as abortion, when everyone listening knows they certainly do. Politicians pretend to worry about nothing except judicial qualifications, temperament and balance.
Fly from Atlanta to Houston, and you may start at an airport named after two mayors and land at one named for a president. While in the air, you pass over hundreds of bridges, roadways and public buildings -- all honoring politicians, alive or dead.
It's not hard to predict how the coming fight over financial regulation legislation will be framed by most of the mainstream media. Democrats like Christopher Dodd, the sponsor of the pending Senate bill, will be portrayed as cracking down on greedy Wall Street operators. Republicans will be portrayed as letting Wall Street operators have their way.
I was power walking up Broadway in New York City last Tuesday, when something went terribly wrong. The world started spinning. I literally couldn't see straight.
The Republican Party must break with its long-established cautious instincts and make a bold stand for first principles of freedom and constitutional limitations on government -- from full repeal of Obamacare to rolling back multitrillion-dollar deficits. This is not so much reproach of past Republican conduct as it is recognition of new opportunities.
They make less of a ruckus than the tea party people, but independents in New England are brewing their own revolution. Third-party governors may have been elected elsewhere -- Walter Hickel in Alaska (1990) and Jesse Ventura in Minnesota (1998) -- but in New England, such candidacies have become almost routine.
Sometimes you have to take out your political lenses and look at the actual statistics to get a true picture of the health of the American economy. Right now, those statistics are saying a modest cyclical rebound following a very deep downturn could actually be turning into a full-fledged, V-shaped recovery boom between now and year-end.
The retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens means that in coming months we'll have another hearing on a Supreme Court nominee. But it's not likely to be the sort of hearing we got used to in the two decades after Edward Kennedy declared war on Robert Bork in 1987.
There are two ways the Senate can approach a president's judicial nominees -- and specifically President Barack Obama's nomination of University of California, Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in San Francisco.
File this under: No good deed goes unpunished. In 2002, after now California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner sold his startup business for $1 billion, he became a volunteer, then volunteer teacher, at San Jose's Mount Pleasant High School. He even wrote a book about it and plans on donating the profits from the sales of "Mount Pleasant" to the school.
Over the last two decades, the United States has intervened militarily in several countries to protect human rights. Now, writes historian Mark Mazower in World Affairs, "the concept of humanitarian intervention is dying if not dead." And a good thing, too, he concludes.
If there is any subject that enrages those who now call themselves conservatives, it is federal spending -- and especially the stimulus program enacted by the Democratic administration and Congress last year. The government can do nothing right, they say. The stimulus was pure waste that created no jobs at all. The country would be better off without Washington taxing and spending at all.
A lot has happened since our last Senate update in January. And yet overall, the balance hasn’t changed dramatically.
The tax code needs fixing to be fairer and less complex. But let's set some rules for this debate. Here are the Five Commandments of Tax Reform:
Last summer, President Obama spent several months publicly anguishing over what he would or wouldn't do in Afghanistan. Finally, he agreed to ramp up troop levels but warned that he intended to start getting American troops out in 18 months. After anguishing in several columns over the president's anguishing, I concluded in November 2009:
The Rev. Al Sharpton says she must have "mystical powers" -- or the best luck anyone has ever seen. But if you ask me, there's nothing mystical about it. As for luck, if Kirsten Gillibrand has proved one thing during her brief tenure in the United States Senate, it is that you make your luck.
In June, comedian Bill Maher complained of President Obama, "You don't have to be on television every minute of every day -- you're the president, not a rerun of 'Law & Order.'"
If the new federal program to help homeowners pay their mortgage bugs you, read a Wall Street Journal article titled, "Bank of Mom and Dad Shuts Amid White-Collar Struggle." It will make you even madder.
Last summer, I wrote a column framed as a letter to a young Obama voter. It concluded: "You want policies that will enable you to choose your future. Obama backs policies that would let centralized authorities choose much of your future for you. Is this the hope and change you want?"
Here is why it is nearly impossible to fix the state budget.
