Archive

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…

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama made a campaign promise to put abortion at “the heart” of any health care plan his administration would propose. President Barack Obama is making good on this promise. Through a mandate issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, nearly all private insurance plans must fully cover the abortion-inducing…

After playing (price) tag for more than a year, Apple Inc., the iconic symbol of Generation Y, recently blew past Exxon Mobil Corp. and is riding the wave of success following the release of its new iPad. With its market capitalization pegged at more than $550 billion, the technology giant achieved the uncontested title of…

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 admits it: His proposed “Buffett Rule” tax on millionaires is a gimmick. “There are others who are saying: ‘Well, this is just a gimmick. Just taxing millionaires and billionaires, just imposing the Buffett Rule, won’t do enough to close the deficit,’ ” Obama declared Wednesday. “Well, I agree.” Actually, the gimmick was apparent even…

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,…

On Monday the Supreme Court began three days of oral arguments concerning possible — actually, probable and various — constitutional infirmities in Obamacare. The justices have received many amicus briefs, one of which merits special attention because of the elegant scholarship and logic with which it addresses an issue that has not been as central…

They were born on August days 15 years apart, at opposite ends of the baby-boom generation, Bill Clinton in 1946 and Barack Obama in 1961. Both came into the world under circumstances that made it surpassingly unlikely either boy would grow up to be president of the United States. It is hard to imagine two…

Florida’s now-infamous “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law may not, in the end, protect the man who killed an unarmed teenager in a shooting last month that has sparked national outrage. That would be the most just outcome, given the mounting evidence that George Zimmerman followed and confronted 17-year-old Trayvon Martin before shooting him as he…