For now, let's drop the talk about wanting a liberal America or a conservative America. What we truly need is a modern America. No country can be modern spending twice what its rich competitors do on health care while leaving millions without any coverage.
We pundits have been busy crunching the results in last Tuesday's Wisconsin recall election and have noted that the public-employee unions sustained a huge defeat.
If the Wisconsin recall is truly second in importance only to the presidential race, as many media outlets have trumpeted lately, then why have those same outlets so badly neglected one of that election's most salient aspects?
Mayor Michael Bloomberg ignited a firestorm of debate with his proposal to ban super-size sugary drinks in New York City. Critics bashed his nanny-statism, but supporters like first lady Michelle Obama hailed his courage.
My right-wing friend, ginned up (literally) from his team's impending "victory" in Wisconsin, called me on Tuesday night. I took some of his glow off by noting that I, too, would have been hard-pressed to remove a governor who had committed no crime. Opposition to the recall did not necessarily signal affection for Gov. Scott Walker. Furthermore, I expressed my satisfaction in the electoral reforms being tried in California, changes that would weaken the partisan clubhouse in which my friend found political and social refuge.
The results are in, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has beaten Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in the recall election. That's in line with pre-election polling, though not the Election Day exit poll. Even before the results came in, we knew one thing, and that is that the Democrats and the public employee unions had already lost the battle of ideas over the issue that sparked the recall, Walker's legislation to restrict the bargaining powers of public employee unions.
President Obama would do us all a big favor if he'd ask himself this: "Would I start or expand a business without knowing what regulations or taxes government will impose next year?"
The now storied Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to Miami has opened debate on unruly children in crowded airplanes. It seems a 3-year-old, having had his iPad removed in preparation for takeoff, threw a tantrum. Sitting with his father, Mark Yanchuk, little Daniel would not be calmed and refused to properly wear a seat belt. His mother, grandmother and a 1-year-old sibling had escaped to first class.
Demographic forecasts generally take the form of predicting more of the same. Old people have been moving to Florida for the past several years, and old people will move there for the next few years. Immigrants have been streaming in from Mexico, and they will continue to do so. You get the idea.
Cory Booker's emotional televised plea to "stop attacking private equity" may have been the single greatest service he could perform for the Romney campaign. His immediate attempt to revise his remarks on behalf of President Obama, for whom he is supposed to act as a surrogate, only highlighted his earlier insistence that the harsh campaign criticism of Bain Capital, which he specifically defended, is "nauseating."
The Obama campaign's early attempts to attack Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital or present him as too extreme to be president have not worked out all that well so far. The early stumbles have created a flurry of commentaries wondering what's wrong with the team that performed so flawlessly in Election 2008.
"Axelrod is endeavoring not to panic." So reads a sentence in John Heilemann's exhaustive article on Barack Obama's campaign in this week's New York magazine.
In the beginning, there was pump and dump. In the dot-com bubble of the late '90s, the stock-analyzing arms of investment banks would pump up a new stock's price with rave reviews.
It seems intuitive that a free market would lead to a "race to the bottom." In a global marketplace, profit-chasing employers will cut costs by paying workers less and less, and shipping jobs to China.
Alan Simpson let loose at a group of Californians who charged in a brochure that he and Erskine Bowles were "using the deficit to gut our Social Security." The former Republican senator from Wyoming sent the California Association of Retired Americans a characteristically colorful response, which I quote: "What a wretched group of seniors you must be to use the faces of the very people (the young) that we are trying to save, while the 'greedy geezers' like you use them as a tool and a front for your nefarious bunch of crap."
The ham-handed Barack Obama campaign attack ads on Mitt Romney's former firm Bain Capital have drawn a lot of ire from other Democrats.
For Mitt Romney, the president's greatest vulnerability seems to be that Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton -- and he is seeking to exploit that perception in his public speeches attacking the incumbent. On Tuesday, the presumptive GOP nominee drew the contrast for an audience in Iowa, harking back to a famous Clinton speech in 1996.
The entire debate is clouded by a refusal of political leaders to talk honestly about spending. The air is filled with talk of brutal spending cuts in financially troubled Europe, but Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center, a pro-free market U.S. think tank, has shown that to be a lie.
Instinctively, we look for people's motives. We need to know whom we can trust and whom we can't. We're especially skeptical of business because we know business wants our money.
We recently saluted Leslie Sabo for giving his life to save fellow soldiers in Vietnam 40 years ago. Injured after shielding a comrade with his body, the Pennsylvanian grabbed his grenade and stormed the foe's bunker. He died in the explosion. For his selflessness, America awarded Sabo the Congressional Medal of Honor.
