Christie’s Next Challenge
That was an impressive victory Chris Christie won in New Jersey the other day. True, he was up against a weak candidate without much support from her party—but that advantage was itself a reflection of...
View ArticleHold the Line on Medicaid
President Obama, speaking in Dallas, said he hoped that Texas governor Rick Perry would reconsider and accept the administration’s push to expand Medicaid under the new provisions of the Affordable...
View ArticleThe House Should Reject ENDA
This week the U.S. Senate has passed legislation, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, to make it illegal for any employer to discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity -- regardless...
View ArticleStand Firm on Iran
It is tempting to call this past week’s possible deal between Iran and the United States an exercise in futility. But it is also a lesson in the economic concept of utility, the relative values someone...
View ArticleDemon Alcohol
Americans who don’t try competing for the votes of Iowans every four years have long known that federal support for making ethanol fuel from corn is a costly and inefficient way to help the...
View ArticleDemon Alcohol
Americans who don’t try competing for the votes of Iowans every four years have long known that federal support for making ethanol fuel from corn is a costly and inefficient way to help the...
View ArticleExploiting Disability Rights
The U.S. Senate is taking up the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities this week, reconsidering the treaty it rejected last winter. Those making the case for the treaty are simply...
View ArticleCancel Obamacare
Under this president, even if you like the law of the land, you can’t keep it. His administration, no stranger to ignoring or refusing to enforce pages of the Federal Register, is now rewriting another...
View ArticleA Beautiful Mediocrity
By almost any measure, John F. Kennedy was a middling president at best, and an occasionally disastrous one. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban missile crisis, setting the nation on the wrong course in...
View ArticleWrong on Social Security
Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered a typical speech this week before the Senate: long on nostalgic rhetoric and factual delusions, and short on serious or innovative policy proposals. She identifies a...
View ArticleNuclear Fallout
What is the filibuster? It is “a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod,” according to our friends on the New York Times editorial page. But that...
View ArticleReading Weakness in Tehran
Tehran appears to be delighted over the so-called interim deal over its nuclear program, and it should be.The Obama administration says the agreement will degrade Iran’s nuclear capacity, halt its...
View ArticleA Token Response to China
Flying two B-52s over the East China Sea, through international airspace over which China has just declared control, was a nice symbolical gesture. But it is an inadequate response to the People’s...
View ArticleCore Incompetency
December 1 has come and gone without the Obama administration’s having delivered its promised “fully functioning” health-care website -- another item in President Obama’s catalogue of broken...
View ArticleToward a Ukraine–EU Link
What does the West -- in particular, the European Union -- want out of the current crisis in Ukraine? What do the Ukrainians as a nation want? What do the protesters in Kiev want?Almost certainly the...
View ArticleThe Minimum Wages of Politics
‘Economic inequality” is to be the great theme of the remainder of the Obama administration, the president announced in a speech that combined rank economic ignorance with shallow demagoguery. And the...
View ArticleNelson Mandela, R.I.P.
Among world leaders, Nelson Mandela had unmatched moral authority. When George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002, he said, “It is this moral stature that has made Nelson...
View ArticleACLU vs. Civil Liberties
There can be no truce in the culture war — the Left has made that abundantly clear. It is not sufficient that there be a nearly unrestricted abortion license, or that those who object to it nonetheless...
View ArticleA Disappointing Deal
A predictable consequence of Republicans’ losing a shutdown fight is exhaustion with spending fights. It’s what we saw in the 1990s, and the Ryan–Murray budget deal is, in part, a reaction to the GOP...
View ArticleFocus on Mental Illness
The mass shootings of recent years -- in Newtown, Aurora, and elsewhere -- have drawn attention to America’s decrepit mental-health system. The fact that mentally ill men are routinely perpetrating...
View ArticleJudges, Leave the NSA Alone
Federal judge Richard Leon’s ruling that the National Security Agency’s collection of telephone-call data violates the Fourth Amendment was based on slipshod legal arguments, and ruled on a question...
View ArticleCredulous and Tendentious on Benghazi
The New York Times has published a strange but unsurprising account of the attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012 -- strange in that it presents the explanations...
View ArticleSnowden, Defector
The New York Times has called for the U.S. government to offer amnesty to Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who broke his oath to that same government and has severely damaged the work it does to keep...
View ArticleSensible on Weed
Launching 17 million “Rocky Mountain High” jokes, Colorado has become the first state to make the prudent choice of legalizing the consumption and sale of marijuana, thus dispensing with the charade of...
View ArticleA Failure in Progress
Because the Obamacare website is performing better than it did during its admittedly disastrous first weeks, and because congressional Democrats have not defected in the numbers that would have put the...
View ArticleThe Fifty-Year War
This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s proclamation of a “war on poverty,” and the progress in this theater has not been encouraging. Trillions of dollars have been...
View ArticleObama’s Half-Hearted War
Because there is no such thing as an irrelevant abuse of power, the media’s keen interest in the Governor Chris Christie drama has been necessary and welcome. And yet, like many things, scandals come...
View ArticleInsurance-Company Bailouts
Among the many legitimate criticisms of the 2008–09 Wall Street bailout was that it created a situation in which profits are private but losses are public, being borne by taxpayers who extended liberal...
View ArticleSchool Discipline Racialized
The Obama administration is no stranger to trying to micromanage complex, intractable problems from Washington. But using the Civil Rights Act to direct schools’ disciplinary practices might be its...
View ArticleNeither Security nor Privacy
Hard-core privacy advocates and enemies of American power are disappointed with President Obama’s speech today; Americans who care about our national security should be too.The president didn’t,...
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