On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates released a long-awaited Pentagon working-group report on the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy enacted under President Bill Clinton. Most troops, the review found, would not object to a repeal.
In Greece earlier this month, Al Gore made a startling admission: "First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake." Unfortunately, Americans have Gore to thank for ethanol subsidies. In 1994, then-Vice President Gore ended a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of an ethanol tax credit that added almost $5 billion to the federal deficit last year. And that number doesn't factor the many ways in which corn-based ethanol mandates drive up the price of food and livestock feed.
I am the opposite of a foodie. My favorite green vegetable is the pea -- fresh or frozen. My second favorite is celery. I like iceberg lettuce. At restaurants, I have been known to look longingly at the children's menu.
The latest controversy over Transportation Security Administration body scans and enhanced body pat-downs leaves no doubt: America truly is a nation of whiners.
The draft deficit-reduction proposal released last week by former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and retired GOP Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming -- the co-chairmen of President Obama's bipartisan commission on reducing the national debt -- has the feel of what two wonks might draw up on cocktail napkins in a bar. It's a bit too easy for two unelected guys to hash out a plan that tells other people what they have to give up -- just to be fair.
Imagine if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were a Republican. Imagine that the Republicans, including many moderates, just lost more than 60 House seats in the worst rout a party has experienced since 1938. Yet the hard-core conservative speaker -- of whom, polls show, a majority of voters have a decidedly unfavorable opinion -- decides to run for the step-down position of minority leader.
At his post-victory news conference Wednesday morning, Governor elect Jerry Brown showed why he won the election with a million votes to spare. He's steeped in the issues, he listens to what is happening on the ground, and he's not afraid to mix it up.
If you are a big fan of Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, you probably got a big kick out of the title of Saturday's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" on the National Mall in Washington.
Former Gov. Pete Wilson is the only politician to have beat Jerry Brown in an election. In 1982, Wilson, then-San Diego mayor, trounced Brown, then California's big-foot governor, in the race for U.S. Senate 51 to 45 percent. Now Wilson serves as Meg Whitman's campaign chairman. On Thursday, he told me not to believe polls that show Whitman losing by as much as double digits. Whitman, he says, has a real shot at beating Brown.
I love this quote from clean-tech exec Eric Dresselhuys to the San Francisco Chronicle's David R. Baker: "If California isn't leading the charge on implementing these technologies, why be here?
Here's a handy way to figure out which party expects to lose big in the next election: If its leaders are complaining about the unfairness of the other side raising buckets of money, that party is in trouble.
"Political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis, where you don't address reality," Juan Williams observed rather prophetically on Bill O'Reilly's show Monday night, before he made the comments that got him fired from his assignment as senior news analyst for National Public Radio.
Across the pond, British Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition is calling for 19 percent cuts in government spending.
"High school, for me, it sucked," Kristel, a 27-year-old lesbian who grew up in Honolulu, confided in her videotape; it was "kind of a hostile environment."
In 2006, voters in California's 11th Congressional District, which meanders from San Ramon to Stockton, fired Rep. Richard Pombo, once a highly popular congressman first elected in 1992. Pombo got caught up in a wave that cost the GOP 31 seats and its control of the House.
Californians do not face an easy choice in the race for governor -- as was clear in Tuesday night's debate at Dominican University in San Rafael.
Even though America is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, members of President Obama's Cabinet are three times more likely to have attended law school than boot camp.
There aren't a lot of walls around Carly Fiorina. While politicos have marveled at the missteps of Meg Whitman's $140 million Titanic of a campaign for California Governor, Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, has made herself accessible to journalists in her bid to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer.
President Obama killed the climate change bill. That's the brunt of the article "As the World Burns, How the Senate and the White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change" by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker. Lizza tells the tale of how Washington's erstwhile "Three Amigos" -- also known as K.G.L., for Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. -- cobbled together a cap-and-trade climate-change bill that had "the support both of the major green groups and the biggest polluters" -- until the deal fell apart.
Last week, CNN fired anchor Rick Sanchez after he called Jon Stewart a bigot in a radio interview during which he also questioned whether Jews face discrimination.
