So we must grieve for those who were killed in New Zealand. And then let’s think hard and get ready for the next attack, because if we are prepared, maybe we can prevent it.
If Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or anyone, attacks Ronald Wilson Reagan, it is fitting and proper for loyal Reaganites, including this one, to rise to the Gipper’s defense.
Howard Schultz is due for some Strange New Respect. That’s the jokey term applied to someone who bends the Main Stream Media’s way—and that’s exactly what Schultz is now doing.
The human soul is the one place that can’t be spied on. The government of the People’s Republic of China fears religion because it doesn’t know what its people might be praying about or otherwise thinking about.
On February 12, Sen. Marco Rubio issued the most important report yet seen in this new Congress—and it might possibly be the most important congressional document published this year.
Pat Caddell, who died on February 16, was to me one of the nicest—and most interesting—people I have ever met in politics.
AOC will be on the ballot in 2020—because her ideas are all over the place, including, “70 percent top income tax rate,” “Green New Deal,” and “Medicare for All,” to name just three.
The abortion extremism of Govs. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and Ralph Northam (D-VA) has crossed a line in American public opinion. It has made President Trump a pro-life stalwart and has given the Right to Life movement its biggest comeback in decades.
His opponents—within the president’s party, in the opposition party, and in possible new parties—are lining up. Indeed, the insider pundits mostly agree: The president is a failure, and is likely a one-termer. The president I’m describing, of course, was Harry Truman.
If would-be presidential contender Howard Schultz follows the Evan McMullin approach in 2020, he’ll buy his way onto the ballot only in red states in order to hurt Trump’s electoral college votes. If so, the Democrats who have been trashing Schultz will start cheering him.
“And like this is the war, this is our World War II.” So said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), speaking on January 21.
According to a new poll, 68 percent of Americans believe that providing “Medicare for All” should be an “extremely important priority.”
Political star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) enjoys vastly more Twitter interactions than any other Democrat and any media portal. Will she be content with her social media platform or reach for something new?
BP announced the discovery of $59 billion worth of oil in the waters south of New Orleans. Will Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal stifle that economic boom for U.S. workers or use it?
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the essay that changed the world: Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” Her words are as relevant to today’s foreign policy challenges as they were to 1979’s.
Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, was sworn in on January 1. He won a landslide election in October on a platform that’s pro-business, pro-gun, pro-United States, and pro-Israel. At the same time, his platform was also anti-crime, anti-political correctness, anti-Cuba, and anti-Venezuela.
The news that Nancy Pelosi’s House Democrats will create a select committee to draft legislation might seem to be mere dry proceduralism, and yet in fact, it’s a significant signal that Democrats intend to fast-track Green legislation.
In Part One of this series, we observed that politicians such as Beto O’Rourke have proven that they are “digital natives.” That is, they’ve grown up with social media, and their “fluency” is already reshaping campaigns.
As we know, Ocasio-Cortez has put forth many ideas, from “Medicare for All” to “Abolish ICE” to “Stop Amazon.” Yet one of her ideas looms above all the others: a “Green New Deal.”
In the wake of federal judge Reed O’Connor’s December 14 ruling that the entirety of Obamacare is unconstitutional, President Trump applauded the decision, saying, “It’s a great ruling for our country.” He added, “We will be able to get great healthcare. We will sit down with the Democrats if the Supreme Court upholds.”
In politics, every new communications technology creates, or at least empowers, a new style of politician.
Now that the 2018 midterm elections are in the rear-view mirror, candidates are gearing up for the 2020 presidential election. So here comes … Elizabeth Warren.
I’ve always said that if Tom Brokaw’s 1998 book about World War II veterans, “The Greatest Generation,” had come out a few years earlier, George H.W. Bush would have been re-elected in 1992.
According to news reports, virtually the entire city of Paradise, CA, has been destroyed. In the words of one now-former resident, the burnt-over town “looked like Iraq.” Or as a fire official said even more succinctly, Paradise, once home to 27,000 people, is now “Armageddon.”
According to the exit polls, the biggest issue in the 2018 elections was healthcare. It’s time for Republicans to get on the same side as the American public on this issue. Isn’t it the essence of strong nationalism to say, We take care of our own?
The standard view of World War I is that it is a testament to the futility of war. But maybe the better lesson to learn on the 100th anniversary of WWI’s end is that if war comes, it is better to win than to lose.
The 2018 midterm results show that if the GOP wants to be a full-spectrum longterm majority party, it must unite its disaffected suburban liberal voters with its new Trumpian working class voters, just as Reagan once did.
If you think everyone on the left believes in open borders and utopian world-federalism, you ought to meet John Judis, or at least check out his new book, “The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization.”
The embattled Republican president is besieged by hostile Democrats and an even more hostile media, who regard him as politically dubious (he was, after all, elected with less than a majority of the popular vote), ideologically out of step (he is deemed “wrong” on the big issues of the day), and personally gauche, even repulsive (the mocking of his physical appearance is perhaps the most savage in American history).
News stories report that President Trump has asked Bill Shine, the former Fox News co-president, to come aboard the White House staff. Shine’s new job, at least in part, would be to direct communications. This news might not strike some observers as a very big deal.
From the perspective of this year, 2038, we can see that three very different events from 20 years ago set in motion the profound partisan realignment in California. It was, indeed, an epic reversal, as the Golden State switched from being overwhelmingly Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican.
Spending is rising faster than revenues, with no end in sight. Meanwhile, a key Trump priority, infrastructure, is at risk of being squeezed out, unless there’s a tax increase proposal—which would be its own epic fight, with no certain outcome.
Nobody seems to agree on how much the federal government should actually spend, nor do folks agree on how much the deficit-ridden feds can actually pay for any new infrastructure.
As the 2017 wildfire season in California recedes in time, if not in memory, the 2018 wildfire season is looming into view. And so if you live in the Golden State—now the Scorched State, as more than 500,000 acres were burned in 2017—you should be worried about a fire-haunted future.
Populist-Nationalism, Right and Left
Here’s a headline that a lot of people—especially among the entrenched elite—won’t want to see: “2017 Was the Year of False Promise in the Fight Against Populism: The populist wave seems like it may have crested. The data proves otherwise.” In other words, the populists are still on the march. Uh oh.
How did it happen that that most people in, say, Poland, or Hungary, still believe that the old verities—of faith and family, of patriotism and nationalism—are valuable and worth conserving? And at the same time, how did it happen that so many people in the West have come to believe that those old verities are obsolete, if not downright false?
The future of Obamacare repeal and replace lies with the GOP’s past success in converting federal welfare funds into block grants that allow governors to tailor the funds to their own local needs. However, like welfare reform in the 1990s, healthcare reform today will only succeed if it demonstrates that it can improve lives and not just reduce spending. The flesh-and-blood well-being of folks is more meaningful to people than abstract budget numbers showing a deficit reduction.
It’s sort of poetic, in a sad way, that the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price on September 29 coincided so closely with the expiration of the 2017 budget resolution on September 30. Those two events signaled the end, at least for now, of Congressional Republicans’ efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare through reconciliation; thus closing the 2017 chapter of the ongoing healthcare fight. However, the fight will likely continue next year. And so, we might consider ways to shift an approach that failed in 2017 to a strategy that could win in 2018.
If we look beyond politics to a most extreme example of massed persistence—World War One’s Battle of Passchendaele, a century ago—we might gain insight into the value of adjusting one’s strategy in the face of heavy fire. And in fact, as we shall see, disaster in the short run can sometimes sow the seeds of long-run success.
With the failure of the healthcare repeal-and-replace effort behind them and mindful of that survive-so-as-to-fight-again-and-win ethos, GOP leaders on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have been making what’s been described by one insider as “a hard pivot to tax reform” and other Trump agenda items with a better chance of #winning.
