Year: 2012

Stop the presses: Big-spending Democrats are finally up in arms over a federal boondoggle. Details of the U.S. General Services Administration bacchanalia get worse by the day. We’ve graduated from overpriced breakfasts in Vegas, friends-and-family junkets galore and in-house videos mocking their own profligacy to extravagant bonuses, alleged kickbacks, obstructionism and bribes. But the scandal […]

We spend too much time waiting for orders — and money — from Washington. The collapse of the housing bubble gave politicians a license to do what they wanted to do all along: spend. The usual checks on extravagance, weak as they are, were washed away. Budgets? We’ll worry about that later. Inflation? We’ll worry […]

It’s difficult to be a good economist and simultaneously be perceived as compassionate. To be a good economist, one has to deal with reality. To appear compassionate, often one has to avoid unpleasant questions, use “caring” terminology and view reality as optional. Affordable housing and health care costs are terms with considerable emotional appeal that […]

With most current presidential polls of likely voters showing 9-10 percent undecided, the question of where the undecided votes go becomes of paramount importance. To answer this question, I compared the final Gallup Polls with the actual results in every race in which an incumbent president was opposing an insurgent since 1964. This included the […]

So many imaginary villains and so little time. This week, President Barack Obama is taking the fight to “oil speculators” and “market manipulation” (nee “free enterprise”), demanding that traders put up more money for transactions and government ratchet up enforcement and monitoring. “None of these will bring gas prices down overnight,” Obama helpfully explained in […]

America is a land of class mobility. That’s what makes America a magnet destination for people all over the world: Come to America and make something of yourself. If you want great welfare benefits, try to bust into Europe; if you want to work for a living and get rich, come to the United States. […]

Republican strategists should generally be wary of campaign advice from liberals — and when it’s from the media, generally becomes definitely. Washington Post political writer Chris Cillizza recently suggested Mitt Romney’s general-election strategy should start with getting a “positive first introduction” to voters through the liberal media because “only the national media can provide that […]

My boyfriend and I are college juniors, happily together 10 months and living together for five. An article I read said it’s healthy to argue with your partner, and I got a little worried. We sometimes bicker about what to watch on TV, but one of us quickly gives in, and that’s it. It does […]

“The choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class and that gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids a chance to get ahead, and an economy that continues down the road we are on, where a fewer and fewer number of people do very well and […]

A busy executive was being pressured by his 7-year-old son to pay attention to him, and the father kept putting him off. In one last effort for attention, the youngster said, “Dad, who do you like best — Batman or Superman?” The father impatiently replied: “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose Superman,” and immediately went […]

Apparently the soaring national debt and the threat of a nuclear Iran are not enough to occupy the government’s time, because the Obama administration is pushing to force Westchester County, N.Y., to create more low-income housing, in order to mix and match classes and races to fit the government’s preconceptions. Behind all this busy work […]

President Barack Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department have a new obsession to obstruct any state’s passing of voter identification laws, even recently attacking South Carolina and my own state of Texas. Holder calls voter ID laws “unnecessary” and says voter fraud “doesn’t exist,” but new video proof in his own voting […]

Of all the myriad scandals of the Obama administration, there is one, largely ignored by the mainstream media, that could actually be its worst. That scandal is the operation run from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, under the Justice Department, known as “Fast and Furious,” through which the federal government actually encouraged […]

As all baseball fans and many other Americans know, the manager of the Miami Marlins, Ozzie Guillen, told Time magazine that he loves Fidel Castro. The news focus has been on Guillen’s remarks — for which he has profusely apologized — and whether the Marlins were right to suspend him for five games. More important, […]

Virtually everything said and done in a presidential election year distorts the truth, much like concave and convex mirrors in a carnival attraction alter one’s true reflection. That kind of distortion occurred in the recent dustup over whether women who choose to stay at home can completely understand the economic challenges and personal struggles faced […]

President Barack Obama calls his proposed tax on millionaires the “Buffett rule,” based on financier Warren Buffett’s claim that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Obama claims that the “Buffett rule” asks millionaires to “do their fair share” by paying the same income tax rate that middle-class families pay. Despite a sluggish […]