As dawn creeps over New York's Jamaica Bay, flocks of wide-bodied red-eyes -- overnight flights from the West Coast -- land at JFK International Airport. The minute the wheels touch, cellphones click into action.
Mine shows a message (now lost) going something like this: Avoid the taxi lines. Use Uber instead.
What the Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl saga demonstrates beyond question -- to anyone who still nurtured any doubt -- is that the Republican right will junk just about any basic American value to satisfy its hatred of President Barack Obama. Fair play, due process, respect for families and the military: To most, if not all, so-called conservatives, none of these fundamentals matters nearly so much as the urge to undermine the nation's first black president. Which is another reason, among many, why they no longer deserve the honorific "conservative."
President Obama evidently was caught by surprise by the scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
So, apparently, was VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, who evidently took at face value the corrupt VA statistics -- and who, after a distinguished military career, resigned last week.
One who was probably not taken by surprise is longtime Yale Law Professor Peter Schuck, who identified the problems at the VA before the scandal broke in his recently published book, "Why Government Fails So Often and How It Can Do Better."
Barack Obama need not ask how well he's doing in coal country, because the answer is always the same: Not well.
In his classic book Southern Politics in State and Nation, V.O. Key Jr. wrote about the importance of “friends and neighbors” in one-party southern elections. More than half a century after the book was written, strength at home powered yet another Deep South candidate.
Tuesday night featured about as dramatic a race as we’ve seen in recent years, which not only delighted the political hacks on Twitter but, more importantly, produced a result that suggests a victory for the more conservative wing of the Republican Party.
"Young people are exploited!" "Income mobility is down!" "Poor people are locked into poverty!"
Those are samples of popular nonsense peddled today.
John Stossel is host of "Stossel" on the Fox Business Network. He's the author of "No They Can't: Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed." To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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Obamacare foes have portrayed the VA hospital scandal as a dystopian glimpse into the future of the Affordable Care Act. The temptation is understandable if one regards health care policy as just another battlefield for partisan strife.
Last week I set out a 2016 nightmare scenario for Republicans -- not one that seems likely, but one that can be extrapolated from current polling.
What America learned from Edward Snowden's interview with "NBC News" anchor Brian Williams on Wednesday evening was much less than what we still need to know. Snowden described himself as a highly trained espionage agent, rather than a low-level hacker; he insisted his actions were patriotic, not treacherous; and said he yearns to return to the United States. He claimed to have warned his superiors about the surveillance excesses committed by the National Security Agency, and he doesn't believe a fair trial would be possible for him under the Espionage Act if he did return.
The opinion pages, economic journals and liberal websites are atwitter (a-Twitter?) these days over French economist Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Left-wingers cite Piketty's statistics showing growing wealth inequality -- though some have been challenged by the Financial Times -- in support of Piketty's policy response, huge taxes on high incomes and accumulated wealth.
One suspects that many of his fans have another agenda in mind. They'd like to gull a majority of the 99 percent to vote for parties that would put their friends in control of an engorged state apparatus.
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.
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Real estate mania lives on at the HGTV cable channel, where house shoppers still holler for granite on their kitchen islands and his-and-her sinks in their en suite bathrooms. But in the non-TV reality of middle-class America, the bloom is definitely off the real estate rose.
The Democrats can use all the assets they can find as they approach a midterm election that grows increasingly challenging. The polls are daunting. The electoral map for both the Senate and House is unfavorable. And history is rarely kind to the president’s party in midterm voting.
But the Democrats have two significant assets in the form of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, the president and former president who have thrown themselves into the 2014 campaign with gusto.
It's easy to scare people about what's in their food, but the danger is almost never real. And the fear itself kills.
Take the panic over genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Ninety percent of all corn grown in America is genetically modified now. That means it grew from a seed that scientists altered by playing with its genes. The new genes may make corn grow faster, or they may make it less appetizing to bugs so farmers can use fewer pesticides.
The 2016 presidential election is shaping up as another close race, like the last four. From 2000 to 2012, both major parties' nominees received between 45 and 53 percent of the vote.
While Congress eagerly prepares its latest political stunt -- a resolution to oust Gen. Eric Shinseki as Veterans Affairs Secretary -- individual members might consider their own responsibility for the scandalous inadequacy of veterans' health care. Unlike most of them, especially on the Republican side, Shinseki opposed the incompetent war plans of the George W. Bush administration that left so many American service men and women grievously wounded. And unlike most of them, especially on the Republican side, Shinseki has done much to reduce the backlog of veterans seeking care, despite the congressional failure to provide sufficient funding.
Anyone paying attention knows by now that those secret waiting lists at VA facilities -- which may have led to the premature deaths of scores of injured veterans -- are a direct consequence of policy decisions made in the White House years before President Barack Obama got there. The misguided invasion of Iraq -- carried out with insufficient numbers of troops shielded by insufficient armor -- led directly to thousands of new cases of traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other physical and mental disabilities requiring speedy treatment.
To find out more about Joe Conason, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2014 CREATORS.COM
A plague of heroin addiction is upon us. Another plague. Heroin was the crisis that prompted Richard Nixon to launch the war on drugs in 1971.
Time marched on. Cocaine and then crack cocaine and then methamphetamine overtook heroin as the drugs of the moment. Now heroin is back -- and badder than ever.
Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2014 CREATORS.COM
Gummit don't work good. That conclusion, often that inelegantly expressed, seems to be more and more common, not only in the United States but around the world.
President Obama can do himself a big political favor this month by saying simply this: "I will not privatize the VA hospitals."
Democrats face several challenges in trying to maintain their majority in the U.S. Senate in the 2014 midterm election. In addition to the normal tendency of the president’s party to lose seats in midterm elections, Democrats are defending 21 of the 36 seats that are up this year including seven seats in states that were carried by Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. Moreover, six of those seats are in states that Romney carried by a double-digit margin.
