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August 11, 2015

A Tough Day for the President and His Party By Michael Barone

Thursday was the biggest night of the political year so far, for what happened on the stage at Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena and for what happened offstage as well.

The stage was the scene of the first two Republican presidential debates, hosted by Fox News, which together lasted some 200 minutes between 5 and 11 p.m. EDT. What happened there did not go unnoticed. According to overnight Nielsen ratings, the two-hour prime-time debate got a rating as high as the national basketball finals -- almost triple the highest rating of a Republican debate in the 2012 cycle and more than half that of the first Obama-Romney debate that fall. It was apparently the most watched primary debate in history.

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August 7, 2015

Too Many Candidates to Fit on a Stage: Democrats Then, Republicans Now By Michael Barone

Why did Fox News decide to schedule two Republican presidential debates rather than one? Simple arithmetic: 90 minutes divided by 17 candidates equals 5 minutes and 29 seconds apiece. That's scarcely enough time for the oral equivalent of a few tweets.   

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August 6, 2015

The Angry American Voter By Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven Webster

As Republicans take the stage in Cleveland for their first presidential primary debate tonight — with Donald Trump in the middle of it — one thing is already abundantly clear: A lot of voters are angry. Very angry. In fact, a lot of voters have been angry for some time. The phenomenon that we call “negative partisanship,” antipathy on the part of Democratic and Republican voters toward the opposing party and its leaders, has been on the rise since the 1980s, and today it is arguably the most salient feature of the political scene in the United States. Now voter ire appears to be shaping both parties’ 2016 presidential nomination races. The rise of Trump and Bernie Sanders in the Republican and Democratic nomination contests, respectively, is symptomatic of this increased anger in the American electorate.

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August 5, 2015

Gun Lies By John Stossel

My town, New York City, enforces rigid gun laws. Police refused to assign me a gun permit. The law doesn't even let me hold a fake gun on TV to demonstrate something.

But New York politicians are so eager to vilify gun ownership that they granted an exception to the anti-gun group States United to Prevent Gun Violence. New York allowed States United to set up a fake gun store, where cameras filmed potential gun customers being spoofed by an actor pretending to be a gun-seller.

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August 5, 2015

Obama's Climate Hubris By Betsy McCaughey

This week, President Obama is hailing his Clean Power Plan as "the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change." Obama is posing as the environment's savior, just as he did in 2008, when he promised his presidency would mark "the moment when ... the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Seven years later, that messianic legacy is in doubt. Obama's Clean Power Plan has never had legislative support, even when his own party controlled both houses of Congress. Now he's trying to impose it without Congress, an audacious ploy his old Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe condemns as "burning the Constitution."   

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August 4, 2015

The Trump Card By Thomas Sowell

With Hillary Clinton's multiple misdeeds coming to light and causing her political problems, reflected in her declining support in the polls, both she and the Democratic Party have reason to be concerned. But both of them may yet be rescued by "The Donald," who can turn out to be their Trump card.

Donald Trump has virtually no chance of becoming even the Republican Party's candidate in 2016, much less being elected President of the United States.

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August 4, 2015

Obama Bets Nuclear Deal Will Change Iran's Regime; Few Agree by Michael Barone

Faute de mieux. That means "for want of something better" in Secretary of State John Kerry's second language. It's also the best case made by its journalistic defenders for approval of the nuclear weapons deal Kerry negotiated with Iran. Or to be more exact, for rallying 34 votes in the Senate or 146 votes in the House to uphold a presidential veto of a congressional vote to disapprove.

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July 31, 2015

Desperate Dems Recycle Planned Parenthood's Mammogram Lie By Michelle Malkin

The gruesome hits keep coming for the baby butchers of Planned Parenthood. President Obama and his top health officials have one last-ditch response left: Quick, hide behind the imaginary mammogram machine!

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July 31, 2015

Asymmetrical Politics: Republicans Act Like an Unruly Mob, Democrats Like a Regimented Army By Michael Barone

As the presidential campaign heats up, and we head into the first debate among the 16 declared Republican candidates, there is an asymmetry between the two political parties.

Republican voters have been seething with discontent toward their party's officeholders and have not become enchanted with any one of 15 more or less conventional politicians who are running. Democratic voters support their officeholders with lockstep loyalty and seem untroubled by the serious flaws of their party's clear frontrunner.

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July 30, 2015

Eight Decades of Debate By Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley

Next week begins what has become a regular presidential primary tradition: the debates. As a way of previewing them, we decided to look back at the history of primary debates. Readers may be surprised to learn that primary debates existed before the advent of televised general election debates in 1960. Less surprising is that the number of debates has been steadily increasing over time, although it appears that both parties will have fewer in 2016 than they did in their last competitive primary seasons (2012 for Republicans, 2008 for Democrats).

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July 29, 2015

Governed by Zealots By John Stossel

The government's environmental rules defeat even environmentalists.    

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July 29, 2015

Obama Cronyism + Your Personal Data = Trouble by Michelle Malkin

It's the most far-reaching scandal in Washington that no one wants to talk about: Tens of millions of federal employees had their personal information hacked as a result of Obama administration incompetence and political favoritism.

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July 28, 2015

Is America Entering a New Victorian Era? by Michael Barone

Forty-seven years ago, the musical "Hair" opened on Broadway. Elderly mavens -- the core theater audience then, unlike the throngs of tourists flocking to cheap movie adaptations today -- were instructed that America was entering an "Age of Aquarius." The old moral rules were extinct: we were entering a new era of freedom, experimentation and self-expression.

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July 28, 2015

Documented Irresponsibility By Thomas Sowell

People who entered the United States illegally may be called "undocumented" in politically correct circles, but what is all too well documented is the utter irresponsibility of both political parties in dealing with immigration issues

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have left the border with Mexico porous for years -- porous not just for Mexicans but for anybody else, including terrorists from the Middle East.

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July 24, 2015

Conservatism With a Heart? It's Called Socialism. By Ted Rall

American conservatives are staring down the barrel of a future that looks increasingly bleak for them due to two major demographic shifts: The country is becoming more ethnically diverse, and younger voters -- Gen Xers, millennials, and presumably whoever comes next -- are left cold or even repelled by the Republican Party's Christian evangelical base and "social issues," i.e. its obsession over who everyone has sex with. Anticipating their imminent irrelevance, some on the right say it's time to reboot conservatism by bringing it more in line with the increasingly tolerant tone of most Americans on social issues, and by addressing their economic concerns.   

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July 24, 2015

Increasingly Divided Democrats Causing Problems for Their Party by Michael Barone

America's two major political parties have a difficult task: amassing a 51 percent coalition in a nation that has always been -- not just now, but from the beginning -- regionally, religiously, racially and ethnically diverse.

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July 24, 2015

Look Who's Coddling Denver's Social Justice Jerks By Michelle Malkin

"All cops are bastards!"   

"F**k cops!"    

"This is what white supremacy looks like!"   

On a tranquil Sunday afternoon in Denver, hate-mongering zealots hijacked a rally held by citizens and families of fallen police officers, who had gathered to pay tribute to Colorado's honorable men and women in blue. 

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July 23, 2015

A Small Senate Battlefield by Larry J. Sabato, Geoffrey Skelley, and Kyle Kondik

Since we last took a comprehensive look at the 2016 Senate races, a slew of new candidates have jumped in, some promising contenders have dropped out, and intraparty competition has intensified.

Sounds dramatic. Yet what most strikes us is the overall stability, thus far at least, of the Senate picture.

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July 22, 2015

Medical Monsters vs. Life-Giving Angels By Michelle Malkin

Another week, another money-grubbing Planned Parenthood baby-parts harvester exposed.   

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July 22, 2015

The Fact-Free Left By Thomas Sowell

The outrage over another multiple murder of American military personnel on American soil by another Islamic extremist has been exacerbated by the fact that these military people had been ordered to be unarmed -- and therefore sitting ducks.

Millions of American civilians have also been forbidden to have guns, and are also sitting ducks -- for criminals, terrorists or psychos.

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