Political Commentary

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March 15, 2013The Silliness of Demographic Panic By Froma Harrop
If you drove to work today, did you worry about too few cars on the road? Do you wish more people were waiting in line at the public tennis courts? Are you eager to see new housing developments replace your favorite truck farm?
If your answer to all three questions is "no," you're like most people. And America's falling fertility rate would seem to have its benefits. But if you're scraping for new ways to undermine Social Security and Medicare, portraying this demographic reality as a major disaster offers new opportunity to stampede the public into turning against these entitlements.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                
                
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                            March 15, 2013Beware of the New Elites By Scott Rasmussen
James Carville famously kept the 1992 Clinton campaign on message with the simple refrain, "It's the economy, stupid!" That's just as true for politicians today as it was two decades ago.    
March 14, 2013Ryan's Blurred Vision: What the 'New' Republican Budget Reveals (and Conceals) By Joe Conason
Someone needs to tell Paul Ryan that his party -- and the economic platform of austerity and plutocracy he crafted for it -- lost a national election last year. Someone also needs to tell the Wisconsin Republican that he still chairs the House Budget Committee mainly thanks to gerrymandered redistricting.
Someone clearly needs to remind him of those realities because the "vision document" he proposed on Tuesday as the Republican federal budget is only a still more extreme version of the same notions (and the same evasions) that he and Mitt Romney tried to sell without success last fall.
March 14, 2013Cardinals Would Be Wise to Ignore Journalists' Advice By Michael Barone
The College of Cardinals met in conclave on Tuesday to begin the process of electing a new pope. The cardinals have been getting plenty of advice from American journalists.    
March 13, 2013Frack to the Future By John Stossel
Celebrities are now upset about fracking, the injection of chemicals into the ground to crack rocks to release oil and gas. With everyone saying they want alternatives to foreign oil, I'd think celebrities would love fracking.   
March 12, 2013Harvard Profs Steamed at Opened Emails By Froma Harrop
"Harvard Search of E-Mail Stuns Its Faculty Members," the headline says. University officials rifled through the messages of resident deans to learn who passed on a confidential communication about a student cheating scandal to the media. The profs are steamed at this alleged invasion of their privacy.
Too bad, but hey. The wounded response has many outsiders scratching their heads. Most of us have a reasonable expectation of no privacy whatsoever.
There's also the recent example of former CIA Director David Petraeus having private emails to his lover/biographer intercepted. The two tried to cover their tracks by setting up an online service account and using fake names. The FBI found them anyway, leading Politico to ask the obvious question, "If the nation's top spy can't hide his personal communications from law enforcement -- who can?"
March 11, 2013Obama Flails as Republicans Stand Firm on Sequester By Michael Barone
They're flailing. That's the impression I get from watching Barack Obama and his White House over the past week.
Things haven't gone as they expected. The House Republicans were supposed to cave in on the sequester, as they did on the fiscal cliff at the beginning of the year.
They would be so desperate to avoid the sequester's mandatory defense cuts, the theory went, that they would agree to higher taxes (through closing loopholes) on high earners.
March 8, 2013Eventually Sequester Will Cause Real Pain -- And Among First to Suffer Will Be Hungry Children By Joe Conason
The difference between a natural disaster and a disaster caused by politicians is that the latter will almost always hit the poor and the obscure most heavily, while a hurricane or a flood will at least sometimes spread the suffering more evenly.  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                
                
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                            March 8, 2013Health Care Law Now Faces Biggest Challenge: American Consumers By Scott Rasmussen
President Obama handily defeated congressional Republicans in the political fight over his health care law. But the law will now face a much tougher opponent.
March 7, 2013Spending Cuts May Be Answer to Slow Economic Growth By Michael Barone
The Dow set a new high on Tuesday, but the larger economy is a different story. What if today's sluggish economic growth turns out to be the new normal? That's the unsettling question asked by some of our most creative economic thinkers.
And the people asking it are not necessarily partisan opponents of the Obama administration. They argue that economic growth rates were disappointing even before the financial collapse and recession of 2007-09.
Take Tyler Cowen, author of the e-book (belatedly published in print) "The Great Stagnation." Economic growth is the product of increases in the labor supply and productivity, he argues uncontroversially.b
March 7, 2013Some Taxes up, and the Sky's Still There By Froma Harrop
"Most of the media is so sold out to Obama that they're missing the obvious," Jim DeMint said on Fox News only last week. "The policies the president has in place, especially the tax increases that just got in, are going to hurt our economy, probably actually bring it down." The former Republican senator from South Carolina was speaking as president-elect of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
March 6, 2013Sequester: Not Even a Cut By John Stossel
If you're reading this, you've survived the "sequester" cuts!
That may surprise you, since President Obama likened the sequester to taking a "meat cleaver" to government, causing FBI agents to be furloughed, prosecutors to let criminals escape and medical research to grind to a halt!
The media hyped it, too. The NBC Nightly News said, "The sequester could cripple air travel, force firefighter layoffs -- even kick preschoolers out of child care!"
March 5, 2013Is the Sequester That Awful? By Froma Harrop
The sequester may be "dumb," as the president says, but one thing it is, is interesting. Especially the politics.
First off, it slashes defense spending, which Democrats want and most Republicans don't. With the exceptions of Hawaii and Maryland, the deepest defense cuts are being felt in the red (or purple) states so intent on shrinking government.
Irony abounds. Note the spectacle of red-state politicians fighting off tax hikes that would hit hardest on the blue states, where incomes are higher.
Let's talk about Virginia, whose economy will be most hurt by the squeeze on civilian defense jobs. Thanks to the war on terror, a civilization of gleaming new office towers had spread across its northern countryside. No doubt these people are doing useful work, some of them. But inadequate attention has been paid to what the taxpayers were getting in return.
March 4, 2013For Obama, Politics Always Trumps Governing By Michael Barone
Do we have a president or a perpetual candidate? It's not an entirely unfair question.
Even as Barack Obama was warning of the dreadful consequences of the budget sequester looming on March 1, he spent days away from Washington, apparently out of touch with Democratic as well as Republican congressional leaders.
In the meantime, Obama fans were lobbing verbal grenades at none other than The Washington Post's Bob Woodward.
March 1, 2013How to Live Long Is Everybody's Guess By Froma Harrop
The latest dispatch from the food wars: For those at high risk of heart disease, following the Mediterranean diet results in 30 percent fewer heart attacks and strokes. Focused on nuts, beans, fatty fish, fruits and vegetables -- all washed down with olive oil and wine (separate glasses, please) -- the diet is said to be more effective in combating cardiovascular disease than the low-fat regimens now in vogue.   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                
                
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                            March 1, 2013Let's Speak Plain English About Spending Cuts By Scott Rasmussen
To borrow a phrase, Mainstream America and Washington's Political Class have become two nations separated by a common language. This gap was highlighted by a recent Pew Research Center poll showing that "for 18 of 19 programs tested, majorities want either to increase spending or maintain it at current levels."
February 28, 2013While Republicans Warn Against 'Greece,' That Is Exactly Where Austerity Budgeting Will Lead U.S. By Joe Conason
Indebted America is in danger of turning into destitute Greece, or so congressional Republicans and conservative commentators have been warning us for years now. For many reasons, this is an absurd comparison -- but it may not always be quite so ridiculous if Washington's advocates of austerity get their way
The Republicans actually want to impose Greek-style budget slashing on the United States. And the federal budget sequestration scheduled to take effect next week could represent the first serious step here toward the kind of fiscal policies that have proved so ruinous not only in Greece -- raising unemployment, destroying hope and encouraging extremism -- but across Europe.
February 28, 2013Discord and Disarray Won't Help Obama Legacy By Michael Barone
Barack Obama is said to believe that he can win the political fight over the sequester. That's certainly the conventional wisdom. 
February 27, 2013Libertarians' Awkward Bedfellows By John Stossel
Last week, Conservative pundit Ann Coulter told me and a thousand young libertarians that we libertarians are puss- -- well, she used slang for a female body part.
We were in Washington, D.C., at the Students for Liberty conference, taping my TV show, and she didn't like my questions about her opposition to gay marriage and drug legalization.
"We're living in a country that is 70 percent socialist," she says. "The government takes 60 percent of your money. They take care of your health care, your pensions ... who you can hire ... and you (libertarians) want to suck up to your little liberal friends and say, oh, we want to legalize pot? ... If you were a little more manly, you'd tell liberals what your position on employment discrimination is."
February 26, 2013Price-gouging in 'Free Market' Medicine By Froma Harrop
When folks pan the Affordable Care Act for being nearly 3,000 pages long, here's a sensible response: It could have been done in a page and a half if it simply declared that Medicare would cover everyone.
The concept of Medicare for All was pushed by a few lonely liberals. And it would have been, ironically, the most conservative approach to bringing down health care costs while maintaining quality.