Political Commentary

August 7, 2014

House 2014: Handicapping The “Drive to 245” By Kyle Kondik

A Republican at the end of 1928 could look back on the previous few decades and smile: His party was quite clearly the dominant force in American politics. Starting in 1896, Republicans had held the White House for 24 of 32 years, interrupted only by the GOP split that helped Democrat Woodrow Wilson get elected in 1912.* Another Republican, Herbert Hoover, was about to stretch that streak in the White House to 28 of 36 years.

In the House, Republicans also had held control for 24 of 32 years, and Hoover’s 444-electoral vote landslide in 1928 boosted the House GOP majority to 270 seats, a Republican edge whose size was only eclipsed by the 302-member Republican caucus elected in 1920 (the House expanded to its present 435 seats in 1913).

August 6, 2014

Patrolmen Without Borders By John Stossel

If I drive across a U.S. border, I expect to stop at a Border Patrol checkpoint. But imagine driving to the grocery store, or Mom's house, well inside America, and being stopped by the Border Patrol. Many Americans don't have to imagine it -- it's how they live.

August 5, 2014

Blue vs. Blue Does Not Equal Red by Froma Harrop

They are all Democrats, blue and blue. But like Republicans, they have opposing visions duking it out in the primaries.

August 5, 2014

Big Government Worked Better in the Industrial Age; Not so Much in Digital Era By Michael Barone

Earlier this week, I was thinking of writing a column about the lying and duplicity of Obamacare backers who argued that the difference between provisions providing subsidies in states with state-run health exchanges and providing no subsidies in states with federal exchanges resulted from inadvertence or a typographical error.

Typical among them was MIT health care expert Jonathan Gruber. The folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute found video of him in 2012 arguing that all or most states would create their own exchanges because they wouldn't get subsidies if they let the federal government run their exchanges. That was just a "speako" (the oral equivalent of a typo), Gruber replied.

August 4, 2014

From Clinton to Obama: Why GOP Impeachment Fever Is Now So Predictable By Joe Conason

Making predictions is a perilous practice for any political journalist. Too often, the would-be seers turn out to be dead wrong -- as can be attested to by George Will, Michael Barone, Larry Kudlow and the humiliated boy genius of Fox News, all of whom projected a big victory for Mitt Romney in 2012.

Yet there is at least one future event that could be safely forecast years ago, almost as soon as President Barack Obama entered the White House: a movement among House Republicans to impeach the president.

August 1, 2014

Bipartisanship is Alive and Well, but not in the Obama White House By Michael Barone

Bipartisanship is dead. That's the conventional wisdom, and there's a lot of evidence to support it.

But there's evidence to the contrary as well. On two important issues, veterans' health and job training, congressional Republicans and Democrats have, with little notice, reached constructive bipartisan agreements.

July 31, 2014

What’s the Matter With Kansas — And Hawaii? By Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley

Royal Blue Hawaii and Ruby Red Kansas are two of the most predictable states in presidential and Senate elections. Yet both states have incumbent governors from the dominant parties who are fighting for their political lives. What gives?

July 31, 2014

Doing Well by Doing Good -- but Better by Doing Bad by Froma Harrop

How curious to watch "60 Minutes," the famously hard-hitting TV newsmagazine, bless JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon with prime-time beatification for hiring some interns from poor backgrounds. The segment's headline is "Jobs program benefits Fortune 500 and underprivileged youth."

July 30, 2014

Healthy Profits? By John Stossel

I'm the underachiever in my family. My parents also produced Harvard Medical School research director Thomas Stossel. Mom called him the one who had "a real job."

For years, my brother annoyed me by not embracing the libertarianism that changed my life. It bored him. He was comfortable in his Harvard cocoon.

But then he realized that the anti-capitalist activists who fight with me on my TV show are also the people who make life more difficult for doctors, and for patients who want cures.

July 29, 2014

What Scares Americans About the Child Migrants By Froma Harrop

The numbers are small for a large country like this, but the alarm is big over the influx of Central American children coming over the southern border. People are merging this special case involving about 57,000 children with generalized anxiety about a broken immigration system that has resulted in an estimated 11 million illegal residents. At bottom are fears that the United States is incapable of managing an orderly immigration program

The surge of solitary children is especially disturbing because the arrivals are so pitiful. The public knows that they are innocents escaping war-like conditions and grinding poverty. But the public also knows that vast stretches of this troubled planet are soaked in misery. If fleeing war, violence and destitution is reason enough to be granted the right to stay in the United States, distressed souls in the hundreds of millions would qualify.

July 29, 2014

Fighting Parasitic Bureaucracies and Crony Capitalism by Michael Barone

"Pare down the parasitic fringe" of government. "Favor a gospel of work" instead of aristocratic entitlement. "Rationalize finance" and "reverse the Parkinson's law of bureaucracy."

All that sounds like rhetoric from the Tea Party or reform conservatives who assail what they call crony capitalism.

But it's not a contemporary criticism. Those are phrases from a long essay, written more than half a century ago, by the British historian H. R. Trevor-Roper, titled "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century."

Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, (www.washingtonexaminer.com), where this article first appeared, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

July 26, 2014

Kansas Experiment Blows Up Laboratory of Democracy by Joe Conason

When Louis Brandeis wrote in 1932 that a "single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country," he was suggesting that state innovations might advance reform on the federal level. The progressive Supreme Court justice surely wasn't imagining anything quite like Brownbackistan.

July 25, 2014

Obama Democrats Lose Their Big Bet on Health Exchanges by Michael Barone

Words mean what they say. That's the basis for the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Halbig v. Burwell invalidating the Internal Revenue Service regulation approving subsidies for Obamacare consumers in states with federal health insurance exchanges.

The law passed by Congress, Judge Thomas Griffith explained, provided for subsidies in states with state-created exchanges, but not in states with federal exchanges. That's factually correct, and under the Constitution, the government can't spend money not authorized by Congress.

July 24, 2014

To Share Is Not Always to Share Alike by Froma Harrop

The online rental booking service Airbnb is a fast-growing empire that pairs travelers with people wanting to profit off a room in their house -- or the whole house. Like VRBO, HomeAway and similar platforms, Airbnb occupies the lodging sector of the "sharing economy."

July 24, 2014

Senate: 2014 a Year All Its Own by Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley

Analysts always strain to generalize about elections. We want to “model” them, find the common elements, and project them as early as possible based on the commonalities. That’s a legitimate approach, but we need always remember that every election is different. Every single one.

July 23, 2014

Policing America by John Stossel

I want the police to be better armed than the bad guys, but what exactly does that mean today?

July 22, 2014

Obama Dragged Down by Chaos at Home and Abroad, not by the Economy by Michael Barone

Why do you think President Obama's job rating is falling, even though the economy is recovering? the interviewer asked.

July 22, 2014

Will the Blabbermouths Wake Democrats Up? by Froma Harrop

It is often said, believed and undoubtedly right that the Republicans' ace in midterm elections is apathetic Democrats not showing up at the polls. But that once predictable waltz into November is threatened by blabbermouths of the right's seeking self-aggrandizement by hurling darts at the sleeping Democratic bear.

It's not that they don't know better. It's that their fame and fortune rests not on electing Republicans but on nurturing their brands. Brands don't take summer vacations.

July 21, 2014

Border Crisis Tests Religious Faith -- and Some Fail Badly by Joe Conason

Flamboyant piety has long been fashionable on the political right, where activists, commentators and elected officials never hesitate to hector us about their great moral and theological rectitude. Wielding the Scriptures like a weapon, these righteous right-wingers are always eager to condemn the alleged sins of others but reluctant to examine their own. They seem to spend far more time in posturing and preening than spiritual reflection. Rarely does anyone call them out on their failures to fulfill their proclaimed devotion, because, in this country, that is considered rude.

July 18, 2014

How Obama is Turning Liberalism Into an Instrument of Coercion by Michael Barone

Liberals just aren't very liberal these days. The word "liberal" comes from the Latin word meaning freedom, and in the 19th century, liberals in this country and abroad stood for free speech, free exercise of religion, free markets, free trade -- for minimal state interference in people's lives.

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