Politics

As the election approaches, Barack Obama is now in full campaign attack mode. Actually, he’s always in campaign mode. It’s what he does best. He’s a failure as a chief executive, a diplomat, an economic policymaker, a leader and certainly as a uniter. But, to the gullible, he’s a smooth talker and he loves to…

With Republicans moving ever further to the right and Democrats to the left — though not so far as Republicans are to the right — there really is a crying need for a centrist alternative. President Barack Obama hopes to win re-election with populist appeals for “fairness,” meaning raising taxes on the highest earners regardless…

Much has been written in recent months about the future of the Republican Party, as “conservative” Rick Santorum proved popular among many primary voters against “centrist” Mitt Romney. This centrist vs. conservative meme is an oversimplification of the primary fight between Romney and Santorum, but it is not new. For years, the media have been…

Amelioration of today’s drug problem requires Americans to understand the significance of the 80-20 ratio. Twenty percent of American drinkers consume 80 percent of the alcohol sold here. The same 80-20 split obtains among users of illicit drugs. About 3 million people — less than 1 percent of America’s population — consume 80 percent of…

“I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” — Barack Obama, on the constitutional challenge to his health-care law, April 2  “Unprecedented”? Judicial review has been the centerpiece of the American…

The electoral map reveals how perilous is President Obama’s grip on the White House. Let’s start, as RealClearPolitics does, with a base of 170 electoral votes for Mitt Romney. It’s hard to imagine that Obama could win any of even the less-red states that comprise that batch (e.g. Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Montana). To get…

President Obama is an intelligent, judicious man who can see all sides of an issue. But every once in a while he tries to get politically cute, and he puts on his Keith Olbermann mask. I suppose it’s to his credit that he’s most inept when he tries to take the low road. He resorts…

Playing second fiddle to Mitt Romney won’t be easy, but somebody has to be his running mate. Let’s handicap the field: ●Florida Sen. Marco Rubio: The choice who offers the biggest potential reward — for the biggest risk. The telegenic young Cuban American could potentially shore up three of the Romney campaign’s weaknesses: He is…

AS oil and gasoline prices rise, political pressure to tap the roughly 700 million barrels in the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve is building, including among some in Congress. The global oil market is fundamentally strained and suffering from an array of unwelcome but unremarkable problems. Yet the oil reserve is neither designed nor well equipped…

How dare President Barack Obama brush back the Supreme Court like that? Has this former constitutional law instructor no respect for our venerable system of checks and balances? Nah. And why should he? This court, closseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word,…

During the presidential campaign, Cabinet departments are wide targets for candidates touting efficiency and fiscal responsibility. This makes for a nice sound bite, but how badly are these departments performing? It is high time to have a top-to-bottom review of all Cabinet-level departments to determine the purpose, mission and efficacy of the organization. Every Cabinet…

THE historian Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote a brutally clear-eyed piece in The National Review, looking back at America’s different approaches to Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan and how, sadly, none of them could be said to have worked yet. “Let us review the various American policy options for the Middle East…

I WONDER if we in the talk radio media aren’t inadvertently leaving the impression that there is a genuine debate among experts about whether an Israeli military strike on Iran makes sense this year. There really isn’t such a debate. Or rather, it’s the same kind of debate as the one about climate change –…

If there is one lesson from the financial crisis that should be indelible, it is that unregulated derivatives are prone to catastrophic failure. And yet, nearly four years after the crash, and nearly two years since the passage of the Dodd-Frank law, the multitrillion-dollar derivatives market is still dominated by a handful of big banks,…