Year: 2012

There was quite a fuss this week over how ObamaCare will trample religious freedom by requiring religious hospitals, colleges and charities to provide insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization and the ”morning-after” abortion pill, all of which are opposed by the Catholic Church and the latter opposed by most protestant denominations. Romney stepped into the brouhaha […]

California has a huge state debt and Washington has a huge national debt. But that does not discourage either Governor Jerry Brown or President Barack Obama from wanting to launch a very costly high-speed rail system. Most of us might be a little skittish about spending money if we were teetering on the brink of […]

Congressman Jim Moran is an old white Democrat from Virginia who thinks he can judge whether we minority conservatives are acting sufficiently non-white enough. Moran’s an inveterate bully, a brawler, a crook and a bigot. And not one of his civility-preaching liberal colleagues has the courage to call him out. Responding on cable news to […]

Years ago a friend told me a story from her days living in South America. The movie “Wayne’s World” had come out, and she went to see it. She spoke English, but it was interesting to read the Spanish subtitles. For instance, early in the film, Wayne says: “Shyeah, and monkeys might fly out of […]

Obama’s latest homeowner mortgage relief plan is perfect for him: It both is consistent with his ideology — duh — and allows him to buy more votes with someone else’s money, all the while pretending there is in fact such a thing as a free lunch. The painfully superficial liberal approach to poverty gets old, […]

“Hell is paved with good intentions,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “not bad ones.” And Shaw never wrote about the unintended consequences of American campaign finance law or the Florida GOP primary, which provide ample proof that the more good-government types try to regulate money and politics the more convoluted campaign finance becomes. Mitt Romney won […]

In 1831, Henry Clay formed a new political party. He called it the Whig Party. His goal was to ensure Jeffersonian democracy and fight President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat. Over the course of the next 20 years, the Whig Party achieved several presidential victories. But as slavery assumed more and more national importance in the […]

Barack Obama’s favorability in the polls falls when he is himself — overexposed, hard left in his press conferences, and boastful about legislative achievements like Obamacare and a stimulus of more than $1 trillion. Then a strange thing happened. Obama largely went quiet. Often he was out of sight, vacationing in Hawaii or golfing. It […]

Forgive Republican candidate Mitt Romney for his alleged failure to adequately explain why he paid “only” 14 percent of his income in taxes. The honest answer — “Well, because my accountants couldn’t figure out how to get them any lower” — does not work in this or very many other election years. Romney seemed flat-footed […]

One of several casualties of the vitriolic name-calling between Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich is what to do about Iran. In interviews, Romney has spoken about tougher sanctions, but it’s been difficult to consider the candidates’ positions on Iran — or much else — with the childish talk about who is the […]

Mitt Romney’s impressive victory Tuesday makes it very likely that we will look back on the Florida primary as the contest that determined the 2012 Republican nomination. To be sure, the campaign fight will go on, and Romney is by no means assured of a sweep of the relatively few February contests. Newt Gingrich has […]