And I mean absurd in the most literal sense. We all know that the U.S. tax code is riddled with “loopholes”, exemptions and deductions intended to incentivize certain activities. Many of these are of dubious provenance and questionable utility. But,
Heading into his second term, President Obama will have to start taking responsibility for his economic record. The recession officially ended just a few months into his first term and he has ushered through a host of policies he said
With today’s surprise announcement that Sen. Jim DeMint would resign his Senate seat, all eyes have turned to South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley who will name a replacement. While the state has a deep bench of conservative politicians, Rep. Tim
The DC GOP may be looking for creative ways to surrender its principles, but in the states, the GOP is pressing its advantage to reform the country. Today, in Michigan, the GOP Legislature and Governor made a surprise move to
South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, often the conservative conscience of the Senate, will resign his seat next month and assume leadership of the Heritage Foundation. He will replace long-time Heritage President Ed Fuelner. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley will name
Apparently, a narrow election loss is all you need to convince GOP Leadership that taxes are too low. President Obama won reelection by a smaller margin than his first victory, yet it was enough to upend a foundational principle of
One negative consequence of a government spending trillions of dollars it doesn’t have is that lots of people have a stake in that spending. Any attempt to curtail that spending is met with ferocious lobbying and howls about the “end-times”
The DC political world thrives by obfuscating and making things seem more complicated than they actually are. The entire government edifice is built on buzz-words and euphemisms intended to obscure that’s happening. When Speaker Boehner promotes a Democrat-inspired “balanced approach”
For most of my adult life, there has been one thing I could rely on with the Republican Party; they weren’t going to raise my taxes. Sure, President George H.W. Bush did it in 1990, but his shock reelection loss
If the recent election taught us anything, it’s that Barack Obama certainly knows how to campaign. While to many of us his speeches were full of seemingly small-bore issues like Sesame Street and contraceptives, these turned out to be perfectly
The media is reprising its role as a modern-day Diogenes, searching for “honest” GOP legislators who will save Democrats from their own policies. While Democrats are never pressed on the need to go against their own constituencies and advocate spending
This morning, the sun rose in the East. At the end of the day it will set in the West. In between, another Illinois Democrat has been indicted for fraud. Just another day in the erstwhile “Land of Lincoln.” A
If you want a sign of how the GOP Leadership have cornered themselves in the fiscal cliff negotiations, look no further than an e-mail the Obama White House sent today to its supporters. In the message, Obama rallies the public
Most parties to the “fiscal cliff” negotiations employ a rhetorical veneer about the importance of compromise on both sides. They riff off Obama’s “balanced approach” talking point and stress that “everything is on the table.” Of course, it isn’t really
President Obama likes to say that he wants a “balanced” approach to address our nation’s fiscal challenges. Presumably, this means a mixture of spending cuts and tax hikes to get our fiscal house in order. He has been very specific
There is no doubt a lot of disappointment around dinner tables this Thanksgiving. The groundswell of conservative opposition to Obama and the Democrats, after delivering a landslide GOP victory, seemed to crash on the rocks as Obama was reelected. The
An existential weakness of the Romney candidacy was that criticism of ObamaCare, the President’s signature initiative, was off the table. As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney had pushed through a health law centered around a mandate on individuals to purchase health
This US Government is staging another legislated crisis to close out the year. This year’s version is negotiations over the “fiscal cliff,” a combination of expiring tax breaks and across-the-board automatic spending cuts. President Obama has promised a “balanced” approach
In the wake of the GOP’s election losses, media mavens and party elders inevitably express deep concern that the party has become “too conservative” to win elections. The party, we are warned, must moderate its positions to better appeal to
The most interesting tidbit in the sad demise of Hostess is the fact that the Teamsters union ignored a strike by a fellow union and crossed the picket-line in a bid to save the company. The Teamsters, not exactly a
Frankly, I have a hard time getting my mind around this story. A teacher in a 6th Grade “journalism” class at a public school in Southern California distributed the materials below to students. The materials are highly critical of ALEC,
One of the left’s favorite parlor games to play on Republicans is to ask them, hypothetically, if they would accept $1 in tax hikes for something like $9 or $10 in spending cuts. The game is designed to show that
The great lefty parlor game in DC is to come up with some theory about how conservatives are killing the GOP and then find a few “conservatives” to reinforce the argument. People like David Frum, Russ Douthat, and David Brooks
The DC GOP and its attendants in the punditry are bent on diminishing the influence of conservatism generally and the tea party specifically. Its been this way for a long time. The DC GOP establishment mobilized all its resources, for
I was obviously depressed in the immediate wake of last week’s defeat. Even worse than another four years of Obama was the notion that the electorate had changed in a fundamental way. It looked like I was wrong about the
