Let's Stop Arguing About Birth Control By Froma Harrop
I'm looking forward to the year 2040, because that is when we won't be debating anymore whether birth control belongs in a basic health plan.
Political Commentary
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January 29, 2013
January 28, 2013
Republican Annihilation Is Not Likely by Michael Barone
These days, our political parties are defined by their presidents. Their policies and their programs tend to become their respective parties' orthodoxies.
January 25, 2013
The Thinking Gets Better, the Second Term Around : A Commentary by Froma Harrop
The Obama administration initially billed France about $18 million to cover U.S. military support for its mission in Mali, while Canada offered similar services at no cost.
January 25, 2013
Echoes of FDR: Obama's Inspiring Address Links Freedom With Security and Dignity By Joe Conason
So much for the "Grand Bargain" -- or at least for the not-so-grand gutting of Social Security and Medicare that the "very serious" thought-leaders of Washington political and media circles have always found so appealing. Whatever President Obama may have contemplated up until now, his second inaugural address, delivered yesterday on the steps of the Capitol, bluntly repudiated Republican arguments against the social safety net -- and forcefully identified those popular programs with the most sacred American values.
"We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity," said Obama -- not only because it is the responsibility we have to each other as human beings, but because security and dignity, for every man, woman, and child, are the existential foundations of freedom.
January 25, 2013
Obama Inaugural: Full of Audacity, but Little Hope By Michael Barone
Commentators both left and right agree that Barack Obama's second inaugural speech Monday was highly partisan, with shoutouts to his constituencies on the left and defiance of his critics on the right.
January 25, 2013
Politicians Need to Catch Up When It Comes to the People's Money By Scott Rasmussen
President Obama in his inaugural address made it clear he intends to protect the nation's entitlement programs. In the world of Washington politics, this amounts to a pledge that the president will make sure that no changes will be made to programs like Social Security and Medicare.
January 23, 2013
Shopping Around for a Better Life By John Stossel
Thanks, California! Thanks for your monstrous spending and absurd regulatory overreach! America needs you. We need Connecticut and Illinois, too! We need you the way we needed the Soviet Union, as models of failure, to warn us what happens if we believe those who say, "Government can."
Moving to California was once the dream for many Americans. Its population grew at almost triple the national average -- until 1990. Then big government, in the form of endless regulation and taxes, killed much of the dream. In the last decade, 2 million people left California.
January 22, 2013
More Thoughts on Aaron Swartz By Froma Harrop
Open-access people, meet the copyright laws. Much has been written about Aaron Swartz, the computer genius who killed himself after being charged with a variety of cybercrimes. Some ardent friends accuse the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of having cruelly called in the police to deal with him.
By then, MIT had foiled multiple attempts to illegally download academic journals and realized that someone had broken in to a wire closet to achieve the same end. MIT security analysts had also detected activity from China on the netbook being used, making them extra wary.
January 21, 2013
GOP Puts Spotlight on Feckless Senate Democrats By Michael Barone
Have the House Republicans come up with a winning strategy on the debt ceiling and spending cuts? Or just a viable one? Maybe so.
They certainly need one that is at least the latter, if not the former. Barack Obama is up in the polls since the election, as most re-elected presidents have been. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows him with 52 percent approval and 44 percent disapproval. Other public polls have similar results.
In contrast, the NBC/WSJ poll reports that only 26 percent have positive feelings about the Republican Party and 51 negative feelings. Toward Speaker John Boehner only 18 percent have positive feelings and 37 percent negative feelings.
January 18, 2013
Aaron Swartz Was Accused of Real Crimes By Froma Harrop
Aaron Swartz: Robin Hood or John Dillinger? He was not as virtuous as Robin and hardly as bad as John. Call the computer genius saint or sinner, few will argue with labeling his suicide at age 26 a "tragic loss."
His friends in the "free culture movement" now accuse federal authorities of having driven Swartz to kill himself over "baseless" charges. But he did break into a computer-wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and download academic papers for free distribution to the world. Had he been a street kid ripping off copper pipes, as opposed to tech star "liberating" information, would there have been much outcry over a prosecutor's threat of jail time?
January 18, 2013
Searching for Answers After Newtown By Scott Rasmussen
Following the school shooting horror in Newtown, Conn., our nation shares a heartfelt belief that something must be done. Polls instantly showed an increase in support for stricter gun control laws. Fifty-one percent of American adults expressed that view in Rasmussen Reports polling.
January 17, 2013
Before Default, Let Republicans Bump Up Hard Against The Debt Ceiling By Joe Conason
A prolonged confrontation over the nation's debt ceiling -- unlike the "fiscal cliff," which provoked many scary headlines -- could truly be grave for both America and the world. While press coverage often mentions the possibility of lowered credit ratings for the U.S. Treasury (again), that might only be the mildest consequence if Republicans in Congress actually refuse to authorize borrowing and avoid default.
January 17, 2013
Ivory-tower Obama Can't Abide Views He Doesn't Share By Michael Barone
To judge from his surly demeanor and defiant words at his press conference on Monday, Barack Obama begins his second term with a strategy to defeat and humiliate Republicans rather than a strategy to govern.
His point blank refusal to negotiate over the debt ceiling was clearly designed to make the House Republicans look bad.
But Obama knows very well that negotiations usually accompany legislation to increase the government's debt limit. As Gordon Gray of the conservative American Action Network points out, most of the 17 increases in the debt ceiling over the last 20 years have been part of broader measures.
January 16, 2013
First, the Bad News By John Stossel
We in the media rarely lie to you.
But that leaves plenty of room to take things wildly out of context.
That's where most big scare stories come from, like recent headlines about GM foods. GM means "genetically modified," which means scientists add genes, altering the plant's DNA, in this case to make the crop resistant to pests.
January 15, 2013
From "Downton" to Golden Globes, It's All Downhill By Froma Harrop
"When it comes to torture," Amy Poehler said Sunday night as she opened the Golden Globes award ceremony, "I trust a lady who spent three years married to James Cameron." Yuk, yuk, YUCK.
That same evening on PBS's "Downton Abbey," the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) admonished granddaughter Lady Sybil, "Vulgarity is no substitute for wit." Now that was clever.
January 14, 2013
History Suggests That Entitlement Era Is Winding Down By Michael Barone
It's often good fun and sometimes revealing to divide American history into distinct periods of uniform length. In working on my forthcoming book on American migrations, internal and immigrant, it occurred to me that you could do this using the American-sounding interval of 76 years, just a few years more than the Biblical lifespan of three score and 10.
January 11, 2013
Can Hillary Pace Herself? By Froma Harrop
The football helmet that State Department staffers presented Hillary Clinton upon her return to the office was cute, but only sort of. Same went for the "Clinton" football jersey bearing the number 112. That's how many countries she's visited since becoming secretary of state.
Clinton had been away sick for a month. She had suffered a stomach virus, which dehydrated her, which made her woozy, which led to a fall, which caused a concussion, which landed her in a hospital with a blood clot in her head.
January 11, 2013
Republican Establishment Declares War on GOP Voters By Scott Rasmussen
Official Washington hailed the deal to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff as a significant bipartisan accomplishment. However, voters around the country viewed the deal in very partisan terms: Seven out of 10 Democrats approved of it, while seven out of 10 Republicans disapproved.
Just a few days after reaching that agreement, an inside-the-Beltway publication reported another area of bipartisan agreement. Politico explained that while Washington Democrats have always viewed GOP voters as a problem, Washington Republicans "in many a post-election soul-searching session" have come to agree. More precisely, the article said the party's Election 2012 failures have "brought forth one principal conclusion from establishment Republicans: They have a primary problem."
January 10, 2013
'Most Antagonistic' Toward Israel? That Would Be Ronald Reagan's Defense Secretary By Joe Conason
When Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina warned on national television over the weekend that Chuck Hagel "would be the most antagonistic secretary of defense toward the state of Israel in our nation's history," either his memory served him very poorly -- or he was simply lying to smear his former Senate colleague. For whatever Hagel's perspective on Mideast policy may be, it would be absurd to compare him with the Secretary of Defense whose hardline hostility toward Israel became notorious during the Reagan administration.
January 10, 2013
Obama Lurches Left With Pick of Hagel for Defense By Michael Barone
Barack Obama, we have been told by his admirers on the left and right, is an instinctive centrist, a moderate always ready to negotiate compromises, a politician deeply interested in the nuances of public policy.
