In his first year in the White House, Barack Obama’s job approval fell about fifteen points. (The source for all poll data analyzed in this article is the Roper Center.) This steep decline was unusual but not unprecedented for a new president.
When the Department of Homeland Security released a cautiously worded report on the potential dangers of right-wing extremism last April, the talk-radio wingnuts and certain Republican lawmakers went into spasms of indignation. Clearly, that report -- an innocuous nine-page document commissioned by the previous Republican administration -- had been conjured up by White House Democrats to smear conservatives.
Such is our gadget obsession that the launch of a new electronic reader has set off a death match between two new-media gorillas, Apple and Amazon.com. Apple's iPad seeks to end the Amazon Kindle's domination of the market for devices that let you download books and read them on a screen.
Over the past 14 months, our political debate has been transformed into an argument between the heirs of two fundamental schools of political thought, the Founders and the Progressives.
With everybody focused on Obamacare, and its new entitlement spending and taxing, the administration has tried to sneak in yet another bailout for housing. Yet again, Team Obama is rewarding reckless behavior, punishing the 90 percent of responsible homeowners who are making good on their mortgages, and setting up a greater moral hazard that will surely lead to an expansion of bailout nation.
Karl Rove knew how to fire up an already fired-up crowd at a Contra Costa County Republican Party lunch in Lafayette, Calif., on Tuesday. While a handful of protesters outside waved an "arrest Rove" banner, he hit ObamaCare, crowed about the "delicious opportunity" 2010 offers in defeating Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, and picked local tea party activist Sally Zelikovsky out of the crowd to extol her activism.
Yesterday, Stanford University announced it had accepted a mere 7.2 percent of the tens of thousands of high school seniors across the country who applied for admission to the class of 2014. Other highly selective schools will be making similar announcements in the days ahead.
The late, splendid Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously asserted, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." The senator was wrong. (Of course, for those of us who still believe that objectivity is objective, a fact is still a fact, though the heavens may fall.)
Treasury rates jumped last week as the 10-year bond moved up to around 3.85 percent, about 20 basis points or so in the last week or two.
When activists break the law protesting Republican policies, it is because lefties care so much. But when conservatives act likewise, it's because they are loudmouths and louts.
Political sages turn today's polling and past voter behavior into confident predictions about upcoming elections. That's their job. But fortune-tellers may do nearly as well, especially when the vote takes place months in the future.
Barack Obama's decision to postpone his trip to Indonesia and Australia -- to a democracy with the world's largest Muslim population and to the only nation that has fought alongside us in all the wars of the last century -- is of a piece with his foreign policy generally: attack America's friends and kowtow to our enemies.
Former Congressman Tom Campbell swears that former eBay CEO and gubernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman did not squeeze him out of the GOP primary for governor and prompt him to switch to the race to unseat Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. Whitman spokesperson Sarah Pompei also denied that Whitman Inc. was involved in Campbell's decision.
Not many people noticed amid the Democrats' struggle to jam their health care bill through the House, but in recent weeks U.S. Treasury bonds have lost their status as the world's safest investment.
We are now beginning to enter the Kansas-Nebraska Act stage of the socialist crisis of the Republic.
Looking back at last Sunday’s House vote on health care reform, it is crystal clear that the party leanings of congressional districts, not just the party identification of the congressmen, influenced the final tally. Currently, there are 46 Democrats in the House who represent districts won by John McCain in 2008.
Each party in the last two decades has benefited from “big wave” elections to win control of the House of Representatives – the Republicans in 1994, the Democrats in 2006 and 2008, when they turned a distinct minority in the House into a solid majority.
If you want to know how Americans may look at Sept. 11 in another 10 years, look to Libya. In a luxury villa in Tripoli, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi -- the convicted bomber of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that left 270 dead -- has been living in style since his "compassionate release" from a Scottish prison last August, precipitated by reports that al-Megrahi had less than three months to live. You may recall the scene at the Tripoli airport, where the Lockerbie bomber received a hero's welcome before a crowd waving Libyan flags and Scottish saltires.
Listening to right-wing talk radio on the day after Congress passed health care reform, Bill O'Reilly was stunned. To him, the hosts and the callers sounded "crazed" as they shrieked about "the end of the world, we're socialist now, we have to take the country back."
