Why Must Americans Clean Up a Foreign Sport? by Froma Harrop
The competent Loretta Lynch can no doubt handle the job of cleansing professional soccer of widespread corruption. But why is that the U.S. attorney general's job? One must ask.
Political Commentary
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June 2, 2015
June 2, 2015
Is it Time for Civil Disobedience of Kludgeocratic Bureaucracy? By Michael Barone
Is there any way to reverse the trend to ever more intrusive, bossy government? Things have gotten to such a pass, argues Charles Murray, that only civil disobedience might -- might -- work. But the chances are good enough, he says, that he's written a book about it: "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission."
May 29, 2015
Colleges and Universities Have Grown Bloated and Dysfunctional by Michael Barone
American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I've written before of their shameful practices -- the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society.
May 29, 2015
Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge? By Michelle Malkin
How many times have you heard President Obama and his minions pat themselves on the back for their noble "investments" in "roads and bridges"? Without government infrastructure spending, we're incessantly reminded, we wouldn't be able to conduct our daily business.
"Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive," Vice President Joe Biden infamously asserted. "Private enterprise," he sneered, lags behind.
May 28, 2015
House 2016: Gridlock Ahead for a Possible Clinton Administration By Kyle Kondik
If Hillary Clinton wins the White House, there's a decent chance that she will achieve a historic first, but not the one everybody talks about.
Clinton could become the first Democratic president in the party's nearly two century-long history* to never control the House of Representatives while she's in office.
May 27, 2015
How the World Has Changed Since World War I By Michael Barone
Over the past year, I've been reading books inspired by the centenary of World War I, a war with horrific casualties painful to contemplate. What helps in comprehending the scale of the slaughter is a book by one of Bill Gates' favorite authors, the Canadian academic Vaclav Smil, "Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact."
Smil leads the reader through the invention and development of electricity, oil production and distribution, the automobile, steelmaking, the telephone, the airplane and the production of synthetic ammonia -- to his mind the most important because without it agriculture couldn't feed the world's 6 billion people.
May 26, 2015
Why Do So Many Eggs Come From Iowa? by Froma Harrop
An outbreak of bird flu has forced American farmers to kill millions of egg-laying chickens, 32 million in Iowa alone -- hence the rise in egg prices.
May 22, 2015
Can Hillary Clinton Reverse the Six-Year Decline in Democratic Turnout? by Michael Barone
Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 by running as a different kind of Democrat from previous nominees. Hillary Clinton, Anne Gearan of The Washington Post reports, is hoping to win the presidency in 2016 by running as the same kind of Democrat as the current incumbent.
May 21, 2015
Senate 2016: Sorting Out the Democrats' Best Targets By Kyle Kondik
Former Sen. Russ Feingold’s (D) long-expected decision to challenge Sen. Ron Johnson (R) in a 2016 rematch crystallized for us that Johnson is the most vulnerable incumbent senator in the country. But it also helped put the other top Senate races into context.
First of all, let’s re-set the scene. Map 1 shows Senate Class 3, which will be contested in November 2016. The 34 seats up next year are lopsidedly controlled by Republicans: They are defending 24 seats, while the Democrats are only defending 10.
May 20, 2015
Dr. Capitalism By John Stossel
For years, my scientist brother Tom was the nonpolitical Stossel.
May 19, 2015
Death Penalty for Tsarnaev Hurts Boston By Froma Harrop
Why was 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sentenced to die in a state so generally opposed to capital punishment? A recent Boston Globe poll found that only 19 percent of Massachusetts residents wanted the Boston Marathon bomber put to death. The state hasn't seen an execution since 1947.
May 19, 2015
The Two-Point-Something Campaign by Michael Barone
This spring it seems as if there have been two-point-something Republican presidential candidacy announcements per week. And, since she made her own announcement April 12, Hillary Clinton has answered an average of about two-point-something questions from the press each week.
May 15, 2015
British Pollsters Failed in the Increasingly Difficult Struggle to Get it Right by Michael Barone
The world may have a polling problem. That's the headline on a blogpost by Nate Silver, the wunderkind founder of FiveThirthyEight. It was posted on 9:54 ET the night of May 7, as the counting in the British election was continuing in the small hours of May 8 UK Time.
May 14, 2015
The Left Is So Wrong on Trade By Froma Harrop
The left's success in denying President Obama fast-track authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership is ugly to behold. The case put forth by a showboating Sen. Elizabeth Warren -- that Obama cannot be trusted to make a deal in the interests of American workers -- is almost worse than wrong. It is irrelevant.
The Senate Democrats who turned on Obama are playing a 78 rpm record in the age of digital downloads.
May 14, 2015
Democrats 2016: Sanders Now Clinton's Chief Rival By Geoffrey Skelley
“Inevitable.” That’s the word often used to describe Hillary Clinton and the 2016 Democratic nomination. Can anyone beat her? Anything’s possible, but the odds appear quite low. Still, her most threatening intraparty opposition could prove to be a man who isn’t even technically a Democrat (yet, anyway): independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-identified “democratic socialist.” We see him as a potential thorn in Clinton’s side, and to reflect that, we are moving Sanders to the top of the non-Clinton tier in our presidential rankings for Democrats.
May 13, 2015
Disobey! By John Stossel
Charles Murray, already controversial for writing books on how welfare hurts the poor, on ethnic differences in IQ and on (less controversial, but my favorite) happiness and good government, has written a new book that argues that it's time for civil disobedience. Government has become so oppressive, constantly restricting us with new regulations, that our only hope is for some of us to refuse to cooperate.
May 12, 2015
Online Dignity: Give It Up by Froma Harrop
Three female professors at Eastern Michigan University were shocked to learn that some young scholars in their lecture hall had been on their cellphones attacking them with lewd public posts, complete with imagery. It was all done anonymously, courtesy of an unusually obnoxious social media app called Yik Yak.
May 12, 2015
Big surprise in Britain: Conservatives Beat Labour --- and the Polls By Michael Barone
Big surprises in Thursday's British election. For weeks, the pre-election polls showed a statistical tie in popular votes between Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative Party and the Labour opposition led by Ed Miliband. It was universally agreed that neither party could reach a 326-vote majority in the House of Commons. A prominent British political website projected that Conservatives would get 280 seats and Labour 274.
May 8, 2015
Why Americans Oppose Economic Redistribution Despite Income Inequality by Michael Barone
Skeptics about democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries argued that the enfranchised masses would use their votes to seize the property of the relatively few rich. What could be more natural?
