I like to apply free market analysis to American politics. Within established laws, politicians compete for votes and are rewarded for maximizing voters' preferences. As in economics, there are sometimes market failures, but mostly the system seems to be self-regulating.
As in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973, the year our prisoners of war came home, America did not lose a major battle in Afghanistan.
Comparing how many seats they have versus how many the 2020 presidential results would have suggested.
— As we head into a once-a-decade redistricting cycle, we analyzed which states have one party that is currently overperforming in its House delegation compared to that party’s share of the 2020 presidential vote.
— Overall, the GOP has notched notable overperformances in 19 medium-to-large-sized states, compared to 11 for the Democrats. However, the total number of excess seats for each party from these states is roughly in balance, though Republicans have a slight edge: 32 for the GOP, 28 for the Democrats.
— The three biggest sources of excess seats for the GOP today — Texas, Ohio, and Florida — could provide additional excess seats in the coming redistricting round, given the fact that each state has unified Republican control of state government. The Democrats’ options for squeezing out additional seats are more limited because many of their biggest sources of excess seats have a commission system for redistricting.
Politicians say they pass laws to "protect Americans from big business."
I'm no lawyer, that's for sure, and so I don't have expertise on the intricacies of the law, but I am angry as a hornet by the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the federal "eviction moratorium."
As our July Fourth celebrations were beginning, the U.S. quietly closed and abandoned Bagram Air Base, the largest American military base between the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea.
Respect LBGT rights or get out of the EU, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte instructed Hungary's Viktor Orban at last week's gathering of the European Union in Brussels.
New York City's notoriously incompetent election officials have not finished tabulating the votes in the June 22 Democratic primary, with its novel ranked choice voting system. But the first choices of voters -- minus some 124,000 absentees -- nevertheless reveal some important things about the differences between different segments of the Democratic coalition in America's largest city.
— Following another presidential election in which pre-election polls often understated support for Donald Trump, the polling industry is once again trying to figure out what went wrong.
— An American Association for Public Opinion Research task force pointed to a lack of education weighting in its post-2016 assessment, but that did not fix the problems with 2020 polls.
— That the AAPOR has not identified a specific problem with the 2020 polls may actually be a good thing for pollsters.
No one is paying much attention, but Washington is building up a vast new multitrillion-dollar welfare class: corporate America.
About that clash between a British destroyer and Russian warplanes and warships in the Black Sea last week there are conflicting versions.
Give Charles Murray, longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, credit for courage. Again and again, despite outrageously unfair attacks, he has returned to the public arena and persisted in telling unwelcome truths. In his meticulous prose, with charts and tables so elegant as to betray an aesthetic bent, he makes his points with precision and clarity.
On Tuesday, Brooklyn Borough President and former police captain Eric Adams took the lead in the New York mayoral race with 32% of the Democratic primary vote, 10 points more than progressive Maya Wiley, who had the endorsement of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
A look at who controls statewide executive offices across the country.
— Currently, one party controls all of the statewide elected executive offices in 36 of the 50 states.
— Candidate decisions by down-ballot executive officeholders in Florida and Missouri could make Republican statewide sweeps easier in those states, and Democrats may have opportunities to sweep more states on their side.
Last week, I debunked three myths about capitalism. Here are four more:
President Joe Biden's performance at the meeting with foreign leaders in Britain last week was a disgrace. Biden cut deals with Britain that sold out America's interests, and for doing so, he won the worshipful accolades of the Europeans, the Brits and the Canadians. It's amazing how popular you are at a party when you pay everyone's bills. Except Biden isn't spending his own money, of course. He's spending ours.
Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 168-55, more than 3-1, to provide new guidance for receiving Holy Communion.
This week, the Senate unanimously passed a bill declaring Juneteenth a national holiday, commemorating June 19, 1865, when a Union general informed the last enslaved people in Texas that, thanks to the 13th Amendment, they were free. This was the denouement of a long process, begun more than four score years before and cruelly delayed for many decades.
By a vote of 30-1 in the House, with unanimous support in the Senate, Juneteenth, June 19, which commemorates the day in 1865 when news of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation reached Texas, has been declared a federal holiday
