One question I'm asked in every electoral cycle is, "What are the surprise races in this election?" My answer in recent years has been, "There are no surprises, because any unexpected development becomes universally known in seconds."
There exists a government boondoggle that offends conservatives, liberals, environmentalists, oil refiners, cattle ranchers and taxpayers alike. It's not easy to get that kind of Kumbaya going, but the corn-based ethanol program has done it.
This has put Joni Ernst, the tea party favorite for Iowa's open U.S. Senate seat, in an awkward position. The Republican has vowed to both end government subsidies and preserve the freight loads of taxpayer dollars chugging into Iowa's corn belt in the name of ethanol.
Her footwork goes as follows: She says she'll end this subsidy when every other subsidy in the American universe also gets the ax. And, she forgot to add, when Martians colonize Neptune.
With the first diagnosed case of the deadly Ebola virus in the United States located in Dallas, Texans are understandably alarmed. The patient just died. Gov. Rick Perry has established a task force to address the Ebola threat.
Not a bad idea but still a feeble response coming from a governor who refused to expand Medicaid in his state, leaving millions of his people outside the health care system. About 6 million Texans are now walking around without health insurance. That's almost 1 in 4 residents -- the highest rate of uninsured in the country.
Things are spinning out of control. Out of control, at least, by government, and by the United States government in particular. You don't have to spend much time reading the news -- or monitoring your Twitter feed -- to get that impression. Armed fighting in Ukraine. Islamic State beheadings in Iraq and Syria. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Hong Kong.
Even if Africa's Ebola emergency never mutates into a global catastrophe, those of us who live in the world's most fortunate country ought to consider what this fearsome virus can teach us. The lessons are quite obvious at this point -- and contain implications that are political in the most urgent sense.
Governors frequently report on the state of their states, but what’s the state of the governors? To judge by many of the ongoing gubernatorial campaigns, it’s not great. Out of 36 contests, one governor (Neil Abercrombie, Democrat of Hawaii) has already lost his primary, another is headed for almost-certain defeat next month (Tom Corbett, Republican of Pennsylvania), and 10 others are in toss-up or close “lean” races.
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson declared "War on Poverty." It sounded great to me. I was taught at Princeton, "We're a rich country. All we have to do is tax the rich, and then use that money to create programs that will lift the poor out of poverty." Government created job-training programs for the strong and expanded social security for the weak.
It seemed to work. The poverty rate dropped from 17 percent to 12 percent in the programs' first decade. Unfortunately, few people noticed that during the half-decade before the "War," the rate dropped from 22 percent to 17 percent. Without big government, Americans were already lifting themselves out of poverty!
"Even opposition lawmakers who have spent the last six years fighting his every initiative have expressed deep worry for his security."
I was hungry and between flights at Atlanta's airport, "the world's busiest." So I wandered the corridor looking for a clean place to sit and eat something not dripping in grease.
Republicans seem to be pulling away in the race to win a majority in the U.S. Senate. At least this week.
In mid-September, several polls seemed to be going the other way. The well-informed Washington Post analyst Chris Cillizza wrote that for the first time in this election cycle, odds favored the Democrats keeping their majority.
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Thirty years ago, a college kid in Kentucky was caught growing marijuana plants in his closet. That turned him into a convicted felon, and though he's been on the right side of the law ever since, he still can't vote. On any job application, he must check the box next to "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?"
All this misery for growing a plant whose leaves the past three presidents admit having smoked.
We know this story because Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky keeps telling it. That a Southern Republican probably running for president is condemning such prosecutions as unfair speaks volumes on the collapsing support for the war on marijuana -- part of the larger war on drugs.
Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.
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The race for the Senate is perceptively moving in the Republicans’ direction, but not so dramatically that we’re ready to call the race definitively for them.
While we’ve long said the 2014 map and midterm dynamics make a GOP takeover of the Senate a probable outcome, there are just too many close races left and more than a month to go, when big gaffes, unexpected legal actions, and national events can potentially flip a Senate seat or two.
Americans now face beheadings, gang warfare, Ebola, ISIS and a new war in Syria. It's natural to assume that the world has gotten more dangerous. But it hasn't.
People believe that crime has gotten worse. But over the past two decades, murder and robbery in the U.S. are down by more than half, and rape by a third, even as complaints about "rape culture" grow louder.
John Stossel is host of "Stossel" on Fox News and author of "No They Can't! Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed." For other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.
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MOBILE, Ala. -- It's been noticed by just about everyone except what we call the "liberal establishment" that of the eight Senate seats now up for grabs, four are in the South -- Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and North Carolina. H. Brandt (Brandy) Ayers, the publisher of The Anniston Star in Alabama, has certainly noticed the neglect. And boy, is he frustrated.
Ayers is both a staunch liberal and Southern to the core. If the Democratic Party wants to establish a healthy dialogue in the Southern states, he told me, it has to first say, "We like you." Liberals can't just sigh at the troublesome region's sharp move right and say, "That's a Southern thing."
President Obama's speech at the United Nations last week was "an important turning point in American foreign policy -- and in his presidency." That's the verdict of Brookings Institution scholar and former Clinton White House aide William Galston, a Democrat who has not been an unqualified admirer of this Democratic president's foreign policy.
Whether Obama's decision to launch air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Khorasan terrorists is a turning point, it was at least a move in the direction of a tradition in American foreign policy that has been conspicuously lacking in his administration.
Last week, the voters of Scotland, in a heavy turnout and from age 16 up, decided not to disunite what has been arguably one of the most successful and beneficial nations over the last 307 years, the necessarily clunkily named United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
It was a relatively close-run thing: 45 percent voted for an independent Scotland, just 383,000 fewer than voted for Scotland to remain part of the now-not-necessary-to-be-renamed UK.
It shouldn't be this way, but the well-to-do tend to dominate public conversations in this country. The result has been a national preoccupation with the comfort, safety and psychological health of children like theirs -- that is, children who go to college.
Thus, the students' problems get customized attention. Government asks: How can we protect women on campus from sexual assault? How can we stop students who drink too much or are "underage"?
It's hard to believe that sexual predators roam more freely at the dorms than in society at large. Or that there's more drunkenness around student hangouts than at working-class bars
The national numbers indicate that Republicans should be on the verge of big House gains. But a district-by-district analysis suggests a different story.
As the Republican right's fear swells in advance of Hillary Clinton's anticipated presidential campaign, conservatives' feverish smears increasingly resemble the desperate gambits of a certain Wile E. Coyote. The latest episode in their cartoonish crusade appeared in The Washington Free Beacon, which headlined "The Hillary Letters" the other day with an ominous subhead: "Hillary Clinton, Saul Alinsky correspondence revealed."
Democrats often call themselves "pro-choice." Republicans defend "freedom." Unfortunately, neither party really believes in letting individuals do what we want.
When Democrats say they are "pro-choice," they are talking about abortion. Some act as if a right to legal abortion is the most important freedom in America.
