June 27, 2018

Ryan's political judgment

Paul Ryan's lack of political judgment and the chaos that his political cluelessness regularly causes the GOP are nowhere more evident than in his nonsensical plan to lead his House membership into the 2018 midterm election just before retir...

September 4, 2017

Robert Mueller and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Did President Trump have a right to be annoyed with Jeff Sessions for recusing himself? A plausible case can be made that Sessions didn’t have to do it, but then there’s an equally plausible case that he did. The real grounds for criticiz...

March 8, 2016

Without Carson and Kasich, Trump would have lost Super-Tuesday and the following Saturday decisively

Now that Super-Tuesday is over, many are thinking: if only the anti-Trump vote were not divided. How serious the issue is can be seen in the Super-Tuesday results: Trump won three states by margins of only 2-3%, but Ben Carson’s average vote wa...

March 2, 2016

Rubio's Lies on Immigration

At the February 25 debate in Houston, Marco Rubio revisited an issue that had first come up at the previous debate. On February 13, Ted Cruz said that Marco Rubio told Spanish television he would not rescind President Obama’s illegal executive ...

September 28, 2015

Will the GOP keep repeating the same mistake?

When a leadership post is vacant, Republicans don't ask: who can advocate most persuasively for the party, who would be the best tactician and strategist, who could best forge a consensus among the party’s disparate elements?  The...

September 15, 2015

The GOP Leadership's Dubious Achievement: Donald Trump

The spectacular rise of Donald Trump as leading presidential candidate should at last force Republicans in Washington to face the chronic ineffectiveness of their party: rank and file Republicans are turning to the Donald because he, unlike the party...

August 27, 2014

Obama is Seeing ISIS in the Wrong Context

President Obama’s decision-making about ISIS is dominated by the history of US actions in Iraq, especially his own. It’s this context that determines what he will and won’t do. Getting troops out of Iraq was his promise, that promis...

July 18, 2013

Janet Napolitano's Nomination for UC President: a Disaster in the Making

California's constitution provides that the University of California shall be kept free of all political influence. That clause should have made the Regents think twice before nominating a nationally prominent political figure such as Janet Napolitan...