With $30 trillion of debt -- which has grown by $5 trillion in just the last two years, with another $2 trillion of red ink expected to get spilled this year -- you might have expected Congress at least to pretend it will temper its reckless spending proclivities.
In an interview with Reuters, Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman for decades, made a startling offer. Moscow could end the Ukraine war immediately, said Peskov, if four conditions were met.
It turns out that we live in a nationalist world. That's one of the lessons people are learning from the surprise early results of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
When several NATO nations revealed that they had dozens of Russian-made MiG-29s, the idea arose to fly them to Ukraine and turn them over to Ukrainian pilots familiar with the MiGs.
— If the Supreme Court overturns Roe vs. Wade later this year, it could hypothetically energize Democratic voters in the 2022 midterms. But it’s unclear whether abortion will become a big enough motivator for Democrats to overcome the historical pattern of unfavorable midterms for the party controlling the White House, particularly if concern about the coronavirus pandemic and inflation remains high.
— Our analysis suggests that 7 states are the likeliest to experience political tensions over abortion, because they have majorities or pluralities of voters who favor abortion rights but have GOP-led legislatures who may feel driven to restrict abortion access if the Supreme Court overturns Roe.
— Each of these 7 states has a highly competitive gubernatorial or Senate race on tap for this fall, and several of them have 2 such races.
Russia's invasion revealed big differences in how politicians deal with threats.
We live in a strange world. John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, helped provide the energy that powered the American century beginning in the early 1900s. Today, his grandchildren spend the billions of dollars that he donated to the Rockefeller Foundation to attack the same oil and gas industry that he almost single-handedly built. Likewise, Henry Ford's trust, the Ford Foundation, now spends millions of dollars on climate change -- as if the automobile was a sinister invention.
After Friday's NATO summit refused to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said the allies' failure to "close the skies" to Russian military aircraft gives "a green light for further bombing of Ukrainian cities."
When Hungarian rebels arose in 1956 to overthrow the Communist regime imposed by Joseph Stalin, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to send U.S. forces to aid the Hungarians.
It's been a week since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Kyiv, and even Kharkiv, 20 miles from the Russian border, remain under Ukrainian control. Contrary to many predictions, Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces have fallen short of their goals so far, but there can be no certainty about the outcome in Ukraine -- or Russia.
— North Carolina and Pennsylvania are 2 closely-divided states where the redistricting process this cycle ultimately fell to Democratic-controlled state courts.
— Democrats seem likely to gain at least 1 seat out of North Carolina, although the relatively favorable map that they got will only be in place for the 2022 election cycle.
— As we expected, a GOP-held seat was eliminated as Pennsylvania’s delegation was forced to downsize, but some of its Democratic members, particularly in the eastern part of the state, will have their work cut out for them.
President Joe Biden just gave his State of the Union Address.
To quote a screaming John McEnroe: You cannot be serious!
From his principal avenues of attack on Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin began this war with three strategic goals.
For those trying to keep up with the fast-moving events in Ukraine, it may be helpful to consider some lessons of history. Mistakes made in the past week, added onto developments covering the last two or three centuries, have left the United States and its European allies -- in particular the largest of them, Germany -- unable to prevent President Vladimir Putin's Russia from absorbing an as yet undetermined part of a theoretically independent Ukraine.
When Russia's Vladimir Putin demanded that the U.S. rule out Ukraine as a future member of the NATO alliance, the U.S. archly replied: NATO has an open-door policy. Any nation, including Ukraine, may apply for membership and be admitted. We're not changing that.
-- Based on presidential voting patterns, a much larger proportion of U.S. House districts strongly favor one party and a much smaller proportion are closely divided than 50 years ago.
-- However, gerrymandering is not the major reason for this trend. Partisan polarization has increased dramatically in U.S. states and counties, whose boundaries have not changed.
-- Moreover, despite the growing partisan divide evident in presidential voting, the competitiveness of House elections has changed very little over the past 5 decades because the personal advantage of incumbency has declined sharply during this period.
The American Medical Association now tells doctors: Use woke language! It's issued a 54-page guide telling doctors things like, don't say "equality"; say "equity." Don't say "minority"; say "historically marginalized."
What if two years ago, when COVID-19 first hit these shores, our politicians hadn't panicked?
Not so long ago, Democrats seemed the party of the future.
