Imagine it's four years ago and an aide to President Bush posted a blog on the Whitehouse.gov website that bemoaned Internet criticism of the Iraq war, then continued: "These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversations.
You know that American voters aren't feeling the love for ObamaCare when House members hold town-hall meetings in their districts, only to be heckled and booed.
Because courts can sentence murderers to life without parole, why not get rid of the death penalty? It's a frequent question posed by readers and advocates who oppose the death penalty. For years, my answer has been: If death-penalty opponents ever succeed in eliminating capital punishment, their next target for elimination will be life without parole --or as lawyers call it, LWOP.
When the Senate passed a federal hate-crimes measure by a 63-28 earlier this month, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., proclaimed, "This legislation will help to address the serious and growing problem of hate crimes."
The video features an angry woman in red, armed with a birth certificate and a small American flag, scolding Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., at a town meeting. She is angry, she said, because President Obama "is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya."
In May, President Obama touted $17 billion in cuts he had planned for a budget of more than $3 trillion. Obama was quite proud of these cuts. Really. He told reporters that while $17 billion in cuts was considered "trivial" inside the beltway, "outside of Washington, that's still considered a lot of money."
In a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago this month, Department of Defense Secretary Robert Gates laid out the case for discontinuing the F-22 Raptor: "The F-22, to be blunt, does not make much sense anyplace else in the spectrum of conflict." In English that means that plane has not been used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Sacramento is so desperate to erase the state budget's $26.3 billion shortfall that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic Legislature seem poised to end decades of prohibition so that they can tap new revenue from a widely occurring natural resource -- one dear to many Californians and known for its unmistakable aroma.
Last weekend, the New York Times reported that after 9/11, the CIA developed a "secret counterterrorism program" to train hit squads to kill top al-Qaida leaders. It seemed like good news to me. After all, why bankroll an intelligence agency if you can't use it to kill an enemy against whom America has declared war?
Two schools of thought on the Senate's power of advice and consent on Supreme Court nominees: One -- which I support, but then-Sen. Barack Obama did not -- holds that barring extraordinary circumstances, senators should go along with a president's judicial choices.
When California voters rejected five measures on the May 19 special election ballot, but passed a sixth measure that barred legislative pay raises in budget deficit years, the message to Sacramento was clear: Voters did not like what Sacramento had to offer.
No wonder skeptics consider the left's belief in man-made global warming as akin to a fad religion -- last week in Italy, G8 leaders pledged to not allow the Earth's temperature to rise more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Here's the reason Californians don't trust Sacramento: In July 2003, the state controller's office figured there were 230,000 state employees. Since then, every budget deal has featured legislators' howling protestations that they've been forced to make horrific budget cuts, yet the controller now estimates the state has 244,000 employees.
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not why the ship is built," Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said last year to explain why Sen. John McCain picked her to be his running mate. Those words may come back to haunt her. When she assumed office in December 2006, Palin committed to Alaskan voters to serve four years. Having failed to do so, she will be in no position to campaign in 2012 for four years in the White House.
This is not a joke. Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision that required an Oregon public school district to pay a $5,200 monthly tuition (plus fees) for a private boarding school for a high-school senior whose psychologist had diagnosed him with ADHD, depression, math disorder and cannabis abuse.
As recent AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin tells the story, when a White House aide called him on June 10, Walpin thought the administration was calling him to enlist his support -- as a prominent Republican member of the New York bar -- for the confirmation of Sonya Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, Special Counsel to the President Norm Eisen informed Walpin that President Obama wanted Walpin out of his job.
"We certainly recognize that Chevron does not make a sympathetic victim here," company spokesman Kent Robertson told me over the telephone.
There are no legal grounds for prosecuting Bush administration lawyers who supported the use of enhanced interrogation techniques to thwart planned terrorist attacks, so civil libertarians have the tort system to try to ruin Bush lawyers.
After the shooting deaths of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller last month and security guard Stephen T. Johns at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum last week, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would receive an e-mail like one sent from Ann Pinkerton of Oakland:
