Last week, White House chief economist Christina Romer told reporters that there are "billion-dollar bills lying on the sidewalk" in America's health care system -- apparently there for the taking if only Washington would show the will to pick them up.
When the San Francisco school board voted last month to restore the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program, it seemed that sanity had prevailed -- three years after the board voted to kill the popular program. Finally, the board had put students' welfare ahead of its ruthless political correctness.
If you see the federal government as a benign force that seeks only to make your life better, then the questions in the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey may not bother you. But if you have a smidgen of doubt, or if you value your privacy, you probably aren't going to like some of Uncle Sam's invasive queries.
If law enforcement officials believe they can prove that Scott Roeder is guilty of Sunday's shooting death of abortion doctor George Tiller at the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kan., then they should work to put him away for life. Roeder is being held on first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault.
How will the GOP react to President Obama's pick to replace Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court? Who cares? It doesn't matter what Senate Republicans think of Sonia Sotomayor.
Within a decade, same-sex marriage probably will be legal in California. Thanks to the California Supreme Court 6-1 ruling on Tuesday to uphold Proposition 8, the law will be changed in the proper way -- not by judicial fiat, but with California voters determining whether, when and how best to broaden the state's marriage laws.
In 1992, after he stopped wearing clothes to his UC Berkeley classes, Andrew Martinez was something of a walking only-in-Bezerkeley joke as the campus' own Naked Guy. But his life was no laughing matter.
Britain's Parliament has been mired in a political scandal so damaging that Speaker Michael Martin resigned from office Tuesday. He's the first House speaker to step down in more than 300 years. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party is dreading the next election -- which must be held before June 2010 -- as members of Parliament have been snared in a series of Daily Telegraph stories detailing how they filed bogus claims of up to $40,000 to cover their expenses needed to maintain two homes.
Members of President Obama's Cabinet are three times more likely to have attended law school than boot camp. How things have changed since 2004, when Democrats were outraged that, in time of war, the GOP White House could be run by men with no combat experience.
Last week's briefing brought home to me the difficult challenges faced by the Central Intelligence Agency in the current threat environment.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued at a press conference Thursday that Republicans are focusing on how much she knew about CIA enhanced interrogation techniques in 2002 and 2003 as a "diversionary tactic to take the spotlight off those who conceived, developed and implemented these policies, which all of us long opposed."
Even when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals does the right thing -- as it did Monday in denying convicted killer Kevin Cooper a hearing on yet another of his dubious appeals -- there is always a judge, or in this case five, on the court with an overly active imagination. And those judges don't help the court's results-oriented reputation.
Elizabeth Edwards always seemed like the yin -- a genuine human being -- to her smarmy husband's too-slick yang. No more. With the release of her memoir "Resilience" and self-flagellation book tour about her life with her cheating hubby, Mrs. E now seems about as believable as her husband. That is: Add the prefix "un."
Doublespeak is alive as Democrats pull the strings in the White House and Congress 24 years after 1984. What do they mean when they engage in Democrat-speak?
When Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, proponents boasted that stiff mandatory minimum sentences would be bad news for major drug traffickers. Ha. Over time, drug kingpins learned that they had little to fear from the law -- especially if they were dealing crack cocaine.
Why are most newspaper reporters and editors liberal? I've been working in the business for more than 20 years, and I can't give a quick, definitive answer to the question. But I do think a contributing factor is that editors, like other managers, tend to hire and reward staffers who think as they do. They see their positions as neutral, which is human nature -- and is reinforced by the fact that the folks in the desks around them vote the same way they do.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been pushing for a "truth commission" to investigate the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques like waterboarding -- until Republicans started shining the spotlight on Pelosi herself. Now she is not so adamant.
The mantra from the left during the Bush years went something like this: The world is not black and white. Sophisticated minds should seek out different, nuanced opinions.
When she was a 13-year-old student at Safford Middle School in Arizona, Savana Redding was strip-searched by school officials in search of -- this is no joke -- ibuprofen. Now she is suing the district and the officials for violating her Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
After 9/11, Americans wanted one thing from Washington: to prevent future terrorist attacks. President George W. Bush, the CIA and other hard-working officials delivered. For their trouble, a handful of those individuals now have reason to fear that they may be ruined.
