It was a great car. A 1981 Toyota Corolla, white with blue interior, and no extras. Exactly $5,000 -- $1,000 down, the rest financed. To be honest, I really wanted a Honda Accord. My mother had one, and what a dream that car was. But it was also $1,000 more, and while that might not sound like so much, believe me, it was. So I "settled" for the Toyota. After nine years behind the wheel of a 1972 yellow Ford Maverick, it seemed like a very significant step up.
One of the sadder categories in the history of human misfortunes is the list of those things that are obvious, but wrong. By definition, if something is obvious, most people agree with it, and thus, it is likely to win the day -- but lose the verdict of history.
In January, the Senate joined the House in passing "pay-as-you-go" rules to require Congress to pay for new discretionary spending. On Feb. 12, President Obama signed the bill.
Americans who shopped till they dropped have stopped. Per capita consumption is down for two straight years, according to Booz & Company's new study of U.S. spending behavior. That hasn't happened since the Great Depression.
"More talk, no deal" was The Wall Street Journal's headline on Thursday's Blair House health care summit. "After summit flop, Democrats prepare to go it alone on Obamacare," proclaimed the headline here at The Washington Examiner. These were appropriate verdicts if you viewed the summit as an attempt to reach bipartisan agreement or even a limited consensus.
The villain in "A Time to Run," Sen. Barbara Boxer's first novel, is a conservative writer for The San Francisco Chronicle. A salvo at moi? Hardly.
A funny thing didn't happen today. People were not plugged in to their televisions, computers or radios. Someone did stop me at lunch to ask what I was having (the chicken salad), but no one solicited the latest on what was going on in Washington. There was no buzz. Can we be frank? Nobody is watching.
Before Najibullah Zazi is finally dispatched to a secure cellblock for good, it is important to remember how the taxi driver-turned-terrorist was brought to justice -- and why the critics who jeered his civilian prosecution were dead wrong. By convicting Zazi and pursuing the leads that his capture and interrogation have provided, the FBI has shown that traditional American methods -- rather than the "enhanced interrogation" and military tribunals favored by the right -- are highly effective instruments of national security.
You are victims. You are helpless against the wiles of big corporations and insurance companies, and you need protection. You need the government to take over and do things you cannot do for yourself.
Have you voted on any of the Democratic health care reform plans? Me neither.
With the other name Democrats out of the race, Attorney General Jerry Brown basically has a lock on his party's primary election. That's good for Brown, who won't have to blow millions of dollars on a primary. But it's only good if Brown can win in November.
When I was growing up, we never had a dog. My mother told us we would be too sad when it died. She was not one for that "better to have loved and lost" business. Loss, to be spared at all cost, could at least be avoided on the pet front by not having one. Later, my brother got a cat, but when he and my mother moved into an apartment, the cat went to the farm.
With his up-to-the-second published polls, Scott Rasmussen has revolutionized the way politics is practiced in America. Now, in his new book, In Search of Self-Governance, he bids us all remember that the real political debate is not left vs. right, but rather between being governed by a bureaucracy and self-governance.
If you want to see broken government, consider the fall of the constitutional Roman Republic and the rise of Julius Caesar: "Fortune turned against us and brought confusion to all we did. Greed destroyed honor, honesty and every other virtue, and taught men to be arrogant and cruel, to neglect the gods. Ambition made men false. Rome changed: A government which had once surpassed all others in justice and excellence now became cruel and unbearable." So said the historian Sallust at the time.
In an essay titled, "Why I'm Leaving the Senate," Evan Bayh brilliantly explains what's wrong with the Senate and how to fix it. If only the headline had read, "Why I'm Not Leaving the Senate" -- or better, "Things I Will Do If Indiana Voters Give Me Another 6 Years."
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced what amounts to the end of its investigation of former Bush administration lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo for writing the 2002 memos that authorized the CIA to use enhanced interrogation techniques. While assailing Bybee and Yoo's "poor judgment," Assistant Deputy Attorney General David Margolis rejected the "final report" written by the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility. It found that Bybee and Yoo had engaged in "professional misconduct."
No president enters office knowing everything he needs to know. His experience is limited to some greater or lesser extent; his knowledge of the people from whom he will choose appointees is incomplete; his mastery of the substance of public policy, after years on the campaign trail, is likely to be out of date. And like all of us, he does not know what the future will bring.
The New York Times ran a front-page story this week called "Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds New Fear of a Debt Crisis." As usual, they got it wrong. Instead, the headline should have read, "After Scott Brown's Astonishing Senate Win in Massachusetts, New Political Gridlock in Washington Could Spell the End of the Liberal Crack-Up We Have Witnessed over the Past Year."
Something has gone very wrong.
Was it just a year ago that Democrats assumed more control in Washington than the party has had in my lifetime? It was.
As America loudly repudiates the leftist agenda of President Barack Obama and his Congressional allies, a group of partisan GOP opportunists is busy promoting a theory of “Republican revisionism.”
