September 15, 2016

Obamacare may be the GOP’s ace in the hole

Signs are growing that the Obamacare fiasco could be the factor enabling the GOP to maintain a Senate majority.  And, wonder of wonders, the GOP may be intelligently playing the ace in the hole Obamacare dealt it. According to The Hill: ...

September 11, 2016

Coffee, Cigarettes, and the Fog of War: Air Force One on 9/11

One of the untold stories of 9/11 has been a comprehensive telling of what it was like for the President, his staff, the Secret Service, members of the military, guests and the traveling press corps who were aboard Air Force One that day. Bits and pi...

September 2, 2016

Down ballot may be OK

This poll matches my thoughts on the shape of the election.  Voters may dislike Clinton a bit less than they dislike Trump, but they aren't about to give her a mandate in the form of Democrat control of Congress. In a nationwide US...

September 1, 2016

Justice for George Zimmerman in Florida’s Tuesday voting

Remember Angela Corey?  She is the state's attorney for the Florida 4th Judicial District who had been appointed as special prosecutor in the George Zimmerman case.  As of January, she will be a former state's attorney.  On Tue...

August 31, 2016

A long night for the newlywed Graysons

Back in May, recently divorced Congressman Alan Grayson, who was running to be the Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate in Florida, married Dena Minning, one of the candidates running for his congressional seat.  She immediately changed her la...

August 19, 2016

Trump’s strategy on race issues

Why did Donald Trump give a speech about how the Democrats have failed black Americans in a city that is the seat of a county with a black population of only 0.4%?  Trump could have spoken in Milwaukee County, just across the county line to the ...

August 17, 2016

Will His Lawsuit against an Iron Chef Give Trump Indigestion?

While the Trump University lawsuit has been getting the lion's share of the media, there is other litigation involving Trump that is currently in deposition stage.  It involves Trump's luxury hotel project in Washington, DC, which is set...

August 17, 2016

State Fair Food Follows Fashion

Taste buds in my native Minnesota certainly have changed over the years.  This year's new Fair food offerings include some Japanese Influences. I think I'll pass on the Spam sushi but the Taiyaki influenced ice cream cone is cute.  ...

August 14, 2016

Speculation over Trump campaign strife abounds

It’s too early to say for sure what is going on inside the Trump Family Campaign Show, but Bill Kristol's Twitter feed is speculating as to the identity of the unnamed sources in this NYT article, Inside the Failing Mission to Save Donald T...

August 13, 2016

A long line of losers in the White House

One little noted trend in recent presidential politics is that the winning candidates all experienced an election loss at some point in their political careers.  One has to go back to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to find a successful candidate for pre...

August 13, 2016

The real Trump tweets

Jonah Goldberg linked to this analysis of tweets from @realDonaldTrump on the site Variance Explained, in the Various & Sundry section of Friday's Goldberg File, The analysis notes that tweets come both from an Android platform and from an...

August 12, 2016

Just when you thought it couldn't get any crazier

Just when you thought it couldn't get any crazier  Donald Trump’s North Carolina state director allegedly pulled a gun on multiple Trump staffers but was never admonished by the Trump campaign, according to a lawsuit filed Wednes...

August 11, 2016

Election threat assessment

The internals of a recent Monmouth University poll provide a lot to think about coming into the last 90 days of this election cycle.  Question 27, in which 803 registered voters were asked to rate the level of threat they feel from six ...

August 11, 2016

Media seize on man behind Trump at Florida rally

See a familiar face behind the podium at this Trump rally in Florida?  The chap in the dark blazer over the red polo shirt?  That's disgraced Republican representative Mark Foley of the homosexual sex scandal that helped the GOP lo...

August 10, 2016

The Battle of North Carolina

It's a PPP poll, and those always skew Democrat.  Plus Hillary's 43%-to-41% lead is within the margin of error.  Cross tabs can be found here. That said, I suspect that this poll may be close to what is happening in North Carolin...

August 10, 2016

Ryan vanquishes Nehlen

As many are aware, Wisconsin held its primary for Congressional and state legislative races yesterday.  One Congressional contest, that of Speaker Paul Ryan against Paul Nehlen, a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, became a national news story....

August 9, 2016

Where Trump needs to focus

A road map of sorts for Donald Trump to identify which groups he must win over has been handed to him by one of his prominent conservative critics.  Jay Cost compared the internals in the recent ABC/Washington Post poll to the demographic c...

August 7, 2016

Check out the internals on the latest Trump/Clinton poll from McClatchy

There is a lot of information in the cross tabs in this poll from McClatchy-Marist.   The sample size is small, so the margin of error in the cross tabs is high. That said, it is still a fascinating look into voter motivations. I was especial...

August 5, 2016

All in the (Trump) Family?

Looking through some recent internal leaks about chaos in the Trump campaign a couple of things jumped out – besides, that is, that campaigns with falling poll numbers always seem to sprout a lot of leaks about unhappy staff people. One...

August 4, 2016

Campaign double talk?

"Well, first of all the candidate is in control of his campaign. That's No. 1," Manafort said. "And I'm in control of doing the things that he wants me to do in the campaign. Is the above a very clever comment by Trump c...

August 4, 2016

A major anti-Hillary donor vents

Stanley S. Hubbard is the billionaire Chairman and CEO of Hubbard Broadcasting, The corporation owns interests in broadcast outlets in Wisconsin, New York, New Mexico and Minnesota. Its flagship is KSTP radio1500, a 50,000 watt clear-channel Class A ...

July 31, 2016

Why Trump Has No Investments in Russia

This Fortune article echoes what I have thought ever since the story of Trump's connections in Putin's Russia started simmering - that Trump has benefited from the huge exodus of capital from Putin's Russia, but that may be as deep as his...

July 31, 2016

Children of Monsters

I just finished Jay Nordlinger's Children of Monsters: an Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators.  The book details the offspring of 19 of the 20th century's most repellent dictators. I found it a text in acute need of edi...

July 27, 2016

A 52 Pickup of Victim Cards

Norma Patricia Esparza, a Hispanic psychology professor who has been a cause célèbre in feminist circles, was finally sentenced to six years in prison earlier this month for her involvement in the April 1995 murder of Gonzalo Ramir...

July 22, 2016

Not your usual convention

Hoary political fixer and longtime Trump friend Roger Stone with conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones mix it up with Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks Internet news operation in a free-for-all at the media area at the Republican National Convention....

July 21, 2016

Job title: Official Scapegoat?

In 2005, Timothy O’Brien wrote a book on Donald Trump, who sued him for billions because O’Brien claimed Trump was not worth anything close to what he claimed to be worth.  The case was dismissed, but not before the discovery pr...

July 20, 2016

Was Melania intentionally rickrolled?

Melania Trump was quite engaging as she delivered a fairly weak speech.  It did contain an amateur mistake, and I am not talking about the plagiarism.  Instead of sprinkling the address with smart anecdotes about life with her husband to sh...

July 20, 2016

Did Melania go rogue?

It appears official, and I can see how this could be the source of rumors that it has put the marriage in hot-water jeopardy.  She's reportedly upset, he's angry, and no fingers can be pointed within the campaign. I feel sorry for Mel...

July 8, 2016

BLM just met a police department that serves the university elite

Stories about the fatal shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota on Wednesday night have been a bit misleading when they identify the area where the incident occurred as suburban.  Falcon Heights, were the shooting took place, does have a lot o...

July 5, 2016

Still no respect for LBJ

I had the TV on in the background Saturday morning and heard an ad for a new History Channel show, What the Hell's the Presidency For?  LBJ's Battle for Civil Rights.  I found the teaser interesting, as it showed LBJ worki...

July 1, 2016

Hillary’s ad blitz and the defining of Trump

North Carolina is a battleground state.  At 9:03 this morning I saw my fist Hillary ad.  It ran on one of the channels of Discovery Communications.  It was a positive ad that highlighted Hillary's work as a first lady on children...

June 30, 2016

Trump and the GOP Party Activists: Report from North Carolina

I went to Congressman Mark Meadow's annual Faith and Freedom rally last night.  The past two years the crowd filled the entire event hall at the Western North Carolina Ag center. This year two thirds of the hall was curtained off. ...

June 22, 2016

The Trump campaign and the Trump Organization

Not only did the Trump campaign have less cash on hand at the beginning of June than the suspended campaigns of Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, but it appears that a lot of its spending went into the bank accounts of Trump-related entities, aka The Tru...

June 21, 2016

Bumpy GOP Convention Ride Ahead?

Is the Republican Party anticipating a floor fight in Cleveland? That's how I read the Trump campaign's out of the blue firing of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.  It will be seen by many insiders to mean that the hoary, appallingly c...

June 20, 2016

Voter Photo ID: North Carolina Proves it works Very Well, Indeed

One of the favorite arguments Democrats use against requiring voters to provide a photo ID is that it risks disenfranchising masses of the poor. The numbers are now in from the first election in North Carolina in which voters had to present one of se...

June 18, 2016

Afghanistan fallout three decades later

I have a pet peeve against all attempts to rewrite history that goes well beyond the usual disdain for those who speciously boast of 20/20 hindsight. Thus as soon as I read that the American born shooter in the Orlando nightclub incident* was 29...

June 17, 2016

Afghanistan fallout three decades later

I have a pet peeve against all attempts to rewrite history that goes well beyond the usual disdain for those who speciously boast of 20/20 hindsight. Thus as soon as I read that the American born shooter in the Orlando nightclub incident* was 29...

June 14, 2016

Daniel Gilroy, the co-worker who warned of Omar Mateen’s deranged hatred, earlier was a victim of political correctness

Political correctness is a theme woven through the backstory of the Orlando nightclub jihad killer.  Law enforcement and his employer were unable to cull out Omar Mateen from his job as a security guard and access to serious weapons, enabli...

June 11, 2016

How Trump plans an event

In Donald Trump's interaction with reporters on Wednesday, this took place. The call showed the extraordinary role Trump has taken in his campaign, often acting as his own political strategist, communications adviser, and even schedule...

June 9, 2016

Trump and the down-ballot

With the last primaries now in the record books, Donald Trump won 44.2% of all Republican primary votes cast.  In 2008, John McCain won 46.7%.  The last Republican to win an open presidential election contest, George W. Bush, won 60.4% of t...

June 4, 2016

Who will be using opposite sex bathrooms under cover of being ‘transgender’?

The political left says that the notion that men do not belong in the same public bathrooms as girls and women proves the political right are full of hate towards the LGBT community because it stereotypes transgendered individuals as dangerous. The t...

June 3, 2016

Alan Grayson’s unusual wedding present to his bride

Alan Grayson, the attack dog former congressman now running for the Senate in Florida, got married a couple of days ago.  Not for the first time. Between March 2014 and April 2015, Floridians were entertained by the contentious divorce of Dem...

May 13, 2016

The real minimum wage is zero

Thousands of jobs at Wendy's are about to be replaced by robots because of the increases to the minimum wage. This decision to replace counter help with self-serve touch-screen kiosks doesn't even take into account the benefit that no newl...

May 10, 2016

Judicial-driven election chaos in North Carolina

If you thought last Saturday's Kentucky Derby field was crowded, consider this.  There will be 22 names on the ballot for Congress in the 13th Congressional District in North Carolina during the June 7 special primary election – f...

April 30, 2016

Choosing GOP convention delegates in North Carolina

On Wednesday evening, I was a delegate at the convention of the 11th Congressional District of North Carolina.  The convention convened at 6 pm and lasted until the maintenance staff of the public high school complex closed down the auditorium a...

April 27, 2016

2016, the year of idealism, nihilism and obliviousness

Watching Donald Trump with the media I am reminded of the time my mother took me to a St Paul City Council meeting for an informal lesson in civics. The meeting was incredibly boring and exceedingly civil. Except, that is, for one obviously staged 45...

April 12, 2016

The world belongs to those who show up

I am a delegate to both the North Carolina state GOP convention to be held in May and my congressional district convention next week.  My political insider connection is that I showed up at my precinct caucus/county convention last month, where ...

April 8, 2016

There is no New York presidential primary

The New York primary is rather 28 separate primaries, as 81 of the delegates will be distributed on the basis of results in the state's 27 congressional districts and 14 will distributed at large based on the statewide results.  It take...

March 26, 2016

Trump’s wives and the women voters

Do Trump apologists have a clue as to the visceral dislike many women, especially married women, have for any man who ditches his wife for a younger model? In the latest polling, “73 percent of registered female voters in the United States had ...

March 22, 2016

Spot the true crime

Investigation Discovery Channel is a true crime channel that knows that its audience likes a vicarious scare.  It is owned by Discovery Communications and is received in roughly 86 million households, just under three quarters of American homes ...

March 21, 2016

Trump and Clinton: Mutual Assured Destruction?

One of the most aptly named strategies of the Cold War era was MAD, or mutually assured destruction.  In geopolitical terms MAD meant that should either the United States or the USSR escalate their longstanding disagreements into war, each would...

March 14, 2016

Polled twice in 24 hours in North Carolina

I always answer my phone when a pollster calls because I have found that by participating in polls, I can learn a lot.  Indeed, over the years, I have been able to give several local candidates a heads-up on what issues they may expect to be cha...

March 3, 2016

NBC preparing a blast from the past for Trump?

Why did NBC recently ask to buy The Madness Of Donald Trump, a British 1995 documentary, including its unused footage? Selina Scott, a British journalist who rose to fame co-hosting BBC’s morning show in the 1980s, has a history with Tr...

February 27, 2016

When the smartest guys in the room forget the value of tradition

What can go wrong when the smartest marketers in the room forget there can be great common sense behind some traditions? In every football game I've watched at all levels over 59 years, one team has worn white jerseys trimmed in their team col...

February 22, 2016

Trump and the angry voters

Trump dominates each day's news cycle by multiples of the coverage given his rivals.  Yet he still seems to have a marked ceiling in his appeal, despite a record turnout in an open presidential primary with no Democrat contest on the other s...

February 21, 2016

Trump and the DREAMers

The other day Neo-neocom caught something the media has mostly ignored.  Trump had this exchange with a reporter, who was referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, The children allowed into America under this program as u...

February 20, 2016

Trump's fib of Hillaryesque proportion?

What is it about politicians and fibs that can easily be shown false? On the campaign trail in 2008, Senator Barack Obama told black audiences stories about his parents' involvement in the civil rights protests of 1960s that were not even remo...

February 19, 2016

The Felonious Friends of Donald Trump

It is amazing what just a 15-minute search on the internet can turn up.  Did you know Donald and second wife Marla once lavishly entertained Gary Triano, a fellow real estate developer/gaming operator and Triano's second wife?  The T...

February 19, 2016

The pope and the Donald: A matter of perspective

As soon as I read the pope's actual words, my first thought was that he probably was not speaking of physical walls and bridges, but rather of emotional, spiritual, and verbal walls and bridges.  Admonitions to tear down all the barriers one...

February 16, 2016

Formative experiences: The young Sanders supporters

Children often first become aware of politics through their parents and teachers talking about political events.  For many people my own age, 62, the earliest vivid political memories are of the JFK assassination.  I had just returned ...

February 11, 2016

Gaming Food Stamps (and not where you think)

Several years ago many Maine residents were surprised at how high their state ranked in percentage of the population receiving welfare benefits. It went against the self-image of the state's population for rugged self-sufficiency.   Thus the...

February 4, 2016

What the voting patterns in Iowa tell us about the strengths and weaknesses of the top three GOP candidates

I was curious to see the patterns that might emerge from the Iowa Republican caucus results.  When I looked at the map by county, several immediately popped out.  First, I noticed that while Marco Rubio won only five out of the 99 counti...

November 29, 2015

Interesting family background of the Colorado Springs shooter

Many outlets have been saying the Colorado Springs shooter was from Western North Carolina, where I live. Since I have been active in the local prolife community, this bothered me.  So I did a little snooping on-line.  I found that ...

October 19, 2015

Chicago Public Schools scandal affecting 2016 election

The scandal in the Chicago Public schools is likely to affect the Democrats’ primary contest for the US Senate.  The Chicago Machine’s Great Black Hope, Harvard educated Andea Zopp, was a member of the Chicago School Board when it ap...

October 15, 2015

More polling sample shenanigans?

The latest CNN poll on South Carolina and Nevada reports this sample information: A total of 1,009 South Carolina adults were interviewed, including 521 who said they were likely to vote in the Republican presidential primary. In Nevada, interv...

October 13, 2015

What is being measured here?

A recent CBS poll shows that Trump is holding his lead.   I have to wonder what CBS was measuring, for the internals do not bear close inspection among those who study election turnout.  It was a telephone poll of a random s...

October 8, 2015

The Trump bubble

In an interview with, Fox News’s Bret Baier, Donald Trump was typically vocal about his support for the government's use of its powers of eminent domain.  This support was not just for public projects, but also to force private owners ...

September 27, 2015

The Next Speaker?

During last January's challenge to House Speaker John Boehner, the Congressman who came in second with 12 votes was little known to me.  Dan Webster of Florida had announced his challenge to Boehner only hours before the vote.  ...

August 16, 2015

'Scientific' Internet polling

Supposedly “scientific” internet polling is all the rage these days. But something that recently happened to me raises issues about just how extensively internet pollsters can now tailor so called scientific polls to achieve the results t...

July 24, 2015

Nonsense and Sensiibilities among the Transgendered

Common sense seems to have eluded those who placed the following hypersensitive editor's note on an article in the UCLA student newspaper about gender inequality in health care. The author's argument for free or government subsidized tam...

July 5, 2015

Is Marriage On the Way Out?

While many homosexuals take pride in being up with all the current trends, marriage has been trending down for some time now.  Instead of being trend setting might same sex marriage be the last gasp of an institution in vital need of a major rev...

July 5, 2015

Calvin Coolidge the most underappreciated president of the last century

Eighty-nine years ago today, President Calvin Coolidge gave this speech about the 4th of July. It is well worth reading in its entirety today.   …Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historic...

June 15, 2015

Rachel Dolezal case: Prepare for more shocks

It gets wilder each day.  Rachel Dolezal is assisting the victim who accused her older brother of assault.  There is a hearing next week.  That explains her parents' outing her this week.  They needed to destroy her credibilit...

June 15, 2015

What did Rachel Dolezal do to her adopted brother Izaiah?

At the center of the story of Rachel Dolezal are her disagreements with her parents about the rearing of Izaiah, one of the four children they adopted.  This is the boy she told many people was her own son.  Izaiah voluntarily came to live ...

June 14, 2015

N. Carolina GOP puts the lie to media stereotypes with its new chairman

Meet the new chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, Hasan Hartnett, age 39. He was an upset winner over Craig Collins, a lawyer who had been endorsed by the top Republican statewide office holders, at the recent North Carolina Republican St...

June 2, 2015

SCOTUS rules Muslim headscarf must be accommodated at Abercrombie & Fitch

Two takes on the ruling.  Rosslyn Smith writes: In a ruling Monday, the Supreme Court held that the chain of Abercrombie & Fitch, which is known for some pretty scanty outfits, must accommodate a sales employee who wears a head scarf...

June 1, 2015

The properly diverse candidate, Chicago Style

Some Democrats in Illinois are trying to frame next Spring’s primary contest for the US Senate as a question of picking the candidate who is the most diverse. That leads to the question of what, exactly, such people mean by diverse and why isn...

May 31, 2015

Hastert: the gift that keeps giving (to the Democrats)

I read Thomas Lifson’s thoughts on Hastert, yesterday.  Here are some links to stories about his land deals while he was in office. Note the crucial pre 2006 election dates of these stories.  The Democrats made Hastert the face o...

April 20, 2015

Hillary's Nightmare: The Startling Parallels Between 'Inevitable' LBJ in 1968 and Hillary in 2016

Watching the "inevitable" Hillary Clinton campaign across Iowa reminded me of another profoundly flawed human being whose nomination was also seen as inevitable 18 month before Election Day: Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1967.  Actu...

April 13, 2015

Stiffing the Tax Man: The part of the economy that has grown under Obama

According to the Federal Reserve as of March 11, 2015 there was $1.36 trillion US currency in circulation.  In 2007 that number was approximately $803 billion.  Why has the amount of currency in circulation increased at a time when there ar...

March 24, 2015

Strange bedfellows indeed

The 32 signature pages attached to the letter Congress sent President Obama about negotition over Iran's nuclear program contains names that cross party, race, and ethnic lines.  I can't wait for the White House to complain that Alcee...

February 26, 2015

Is Rahm's rebranding fail a warning for Hillary?

There will be a run off in the Chicago's Mayor's race as the incumbent, Rahm Emanuel, only won 45.4% of the vote on Tuesday in a race marked by abysmal turnout.  The second place finisher was County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Ga...

February 23, 2015

A different perspective on Hope and Change

Recently Juan Williams called Clarence Thomas "America's Most Influential Thinker on Race" in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.  In a comment to this article, I learned that while Williams is a registered Democrat, both his sons id...

January 22, 2015

Only thing not leaking is party affiliation

Here's an attention grabbing headline: Breast implant leak delays congressman's wife's bigamy trial He says their 1990 marriage is invalid because she was still married to husband #1.  She says he has allowed the home she a...

January 5, 2015

No justice, no quiche?

Over the weekend the #BlackLivesMatter activists barged into many Manhattan and Bay Area eateries as diners were trying to enjoy brunch.  Needless to say, the demonstrations were not seen as particularly effective by the diners. Of course, th...

December 11, 2014

A Rolling Stone Does Gather Catfish

In internet slang, a "catfish" is someone who pretends on social media to be who or what he is not, usually in the pursuit of deceptive online romance.  Unlike Rolling Stone, the Washington Post has interviewed the three frie...

December 9, 2014

You can't make this stuff up

In 2004, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a University of Pennsylvania graduate, wrote a review of a movie about another Penn grad, fabulist Stephen Glass.  It ran in the student newspaper, the Daily Penn, and Erdely describes Glass as her former clas...

November 24, 2014

Food Network's Hunger Games

The Food Network is currently promoting a crusade to end childhood hunger in America. Had the Food Network not been relentless promoters of the Obamas, I could almost see this as an ironic comment on the utter lack of appeal of the food being produce...

November 15, 2014

Yipee ki yay, Mr. Gruber

Forbes contributor Michael F. Cannon covered details about Jonathan Gruber's changing stories about Obamacare back in July.  Either he or his editors had some fun, as this is the photo and the caption used with the article.   ...

November 4, 2014

Startling Change in North Carolina Early Voting Pattern

There is one set of numbers in this breakdown of North Carolina early voting that really jumps out.  This year 52.2% of early voters in North Carolina were age 60 or over.  In 2012, that percentage was 35.5%.  Young voters were sc...

October 8, 2014

Jane Austen in the White House

Some people seem to be just discovering the odd position Valerie Jarrett has held in this administration.  They also seem to be struggling to find a metaphor for her role.   I have seen her compared to Rasputin, but that doesn't fi...

September 26, 2014

It's official: trolls are fiendish

I think everybody instinctively knew this, but now it's official: according to a new study, trolls are very sick puppies, indeed.  Here's what the study itself concluded (emphasis added): Overall, strong positive associati...

September 25, 2014

Bitter abortion advocate demonstrates to Rush Limbaugh that no good deed goes unpunished

Merritt Tierce, budding novelist, former executive director of a not for profit and, of course, like all under appreciated artistes, a former moonlighting waitress, thought the $2000 in tips from Rush Limbaugh on a couple of meals at a high end Dalla...

September 16, 2014

TCM's Israeli Film Festival Tonight!

Turner Classic Movies is featuring movies made about Israel this evening into the overnight hours.  Three of them are seldom seen.  The line up is as follows: Hill 24 Doesn't Answer (1955)  is the first feature film produced in ...

September 3, 2014

Obama: The presidency that wasn't there

Can a two term presidency disappear down the academic memory hole? Yes, it can!  This past weekend, the American Political Science Association (ASPA) held its annual meeting in Washington, DC. It was a huge affair, involving 53 “di...

July 16, 2014

Genes: Cue the Twilight Zone music

Re: how much genetic material we share with friends, I have been pondering how much of who we are, what we do and what we believe is hard wired ever since I read about author Bernard Cornwell's life several years ago.   He is the product of ...

July 11, 2014

The return of tuberculosis

I do have to wonder about intent here because the revival of TB as a public health issue was a concern among community organizers and pubic defenders in Chicago back in the late 1980s and early 90s. There were some highly publicized public ...

July 11, 2014

World Cup schism?

Cartoonist Jason Bach imagines native Argentinian Pope Francis and Pope Benedict VI, a German, discussing the upcoming World Cup Final.  Some of Bach's humor is purely Catholic -- such as trying to play hide and seek with St. Anthony of...

July 6, 2014

Cracks -- and wrinkles, too

When I read Cracks Appearing in Democrat Coalition over at Powerline, my first thought was OMG,  she's still alive!   Phyllis Kahn was perhaps one the most vocal members of the Minnesota House of Representatives when I was an inter...

July 3, 2014

Fauxcahantus, beware

For centuries the term Pyrrhic victory, named after a military action in the third century BC, has come to mean winning a short term gain at a cost that ultimately  lost the war.  Perhaps it is may be time for that phrase to be retired in f...

July 1, 2014

A check does not an employee make

The idea to carry away from Quinn v. Harris may be that calling a person an employee of the state does not necessarily make him or her such.  The common law test of employee status has always been that of supervision and control over the manner ...

June 25, 2014

Was Koskinen sent over from Central Casting?

As I watched IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testify, I couldn't help but think the latter may have a second career in the making.  He has the makings of a great Bond villain.  It's all there- the arrogance, the wealth, the air of pr...

June 19, 2014

The ruling class ignores at its peril two important anniversaries coming up

June 24th marks the 700th anniversary of the Scots’ defeat of the English at the Battle of Bannockburn, an event that drove the English army out of Scotland and firmly established Robert the Bruce as king.  Although the war for Scottish in...

June 17, 2014

Democrat governor apologizes for gun control law he signed

When the upset of two Democrat state senators who had been recalled because of their votes for gun control became news last September, I wrote about the role the elected sheriffs in Colorado had played in the debate.  The sheriffs had not been a...

June 14, 2014

New poll shows another incumbent Senate seat (and governorship) may be trouble for Dems

It pays to remember that 58.01% of Minnesota voters did not vote for Democrat Al Franken for the US Senate in 2008.  Also, 56.4% of Minnesota voters did not vote for Democrat Mark Dayton for governor in 2010.  When the incumb...

June 11, 2014

Hillary's selective memory

Hillary's claims to financial hardship upon leaving the White House seem to omit not only her own 2000 book deal for $8 million  but also the existence of the Clinton Legal Defense Trust.   If the Clinton's had massive debts after t...

June 10, 2014

Just Another Narrative About Privilege

Back in 2008 US Senator Kay Hagan, now 61, sold herself to North Carolina voters as one of them: wife, mother, and business owner who knew all about the problems of trying to make big government more responsive to citizens and small busines...

June 9, 2014

The Democrats' bench strength

While many see Senator Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren's strong showing as the story from the Presidential Straw Poll at the 2014 Wisconsin Democrat Convention, I found the lackluster quality of the entire ballot noteworthy.  Who t...

June 8, 2014

An out for the Democrats?

A lot of people have speculated about Obama's mental stability over the year's on and off the record.  I am also certain many in the administration and in Congress have had the same surreal experience Francis Cardinal George had in 2009 ...

June 5, 2014

Mainstream media fleeing Obama

I've always thought of the editorial slant of the NYDN as a sort of NY Times for the working class, so this is very harsh from a usually liberal source. (Image, story and editorial linked at Instapundit). Editors know their readers. The pa...

May 22, 2014

Homeland Security likely to remain homeless

When the Department of Homeland Security was created in the aftermath of 9/11 the question quickly arose where to permanently house this huge new department.  In 2007, in a move that seems completely tone deaf to irony, the decision was made to ...

May 14, 2014

Dem voter ID fear-mongering collides with reality in rural North Carolina

Last year when North Carolina adopted laws requiring voters to show an authorized form of photo ID, the usual suspects screamed that a great many people, particularly the poor and the elderly, would be disenfranchised.  While the law does not be...

May 8, 2014

Another North Carolina Senate Primary

The race I was watching Tuesday Night was that of my State Senator, Ralph Hise.   No Democrat filed for the office but Hise did have a primary opponent, a county commissioner whose voting record had been to the left of Hise's, particula...

March 11, 2014

Dems running into more Texas trouble

There is another roadblock on the Democrats' plan to turn Texas blue. On Monday Michael Barone belatedly noted the unexpected showing of Ray Madrigal indicates possible dissatisfaction by Hispanics with the pro-abortion feminists beloved by ...

March 7, 2014

Who is Ray Madrigal?

And how did he get over 20% of the vote in Tuesday's Texas Democrat gubernatorial primary?  In fact, Reynaldo "Ray" Madrigal, age 71, actually won several counties along the Mexican border.   It's a good question, ...

February 26, 2014

Is AARP getting Obamacare blowback?

Do you get solicitations from AARP?  They have been trying to sign me up for a decade now.  Until recently I always tossed everything except the business reply envelope, which I would often drop in the mail empty because I have always disap...

February 25, 2014

The warm winter that wasn't

...

February 5, 2014

Twilight of Pelosi?

Nancy Pelosi's list of allies grows ever thinner with the decision of New Jersey Congressman Rob Andrews to resign from Congress for a job with a law firm.   This could mean more than an open seat in a solidly Democrat district.   As...

January 31, 2014

The next senior Democrat to drop out?

Senior Democrats are retiring from the House of Representatives as the prospect of Democrats taking the majority appear slim.  The latest to announce his departure is Henry Waxman. As Ed Lasky comments, "He casn't stand being in the minority -- ...

January 28, 2014

Wendy Davis: As the Soap Churns

The political fortunes of Wendy Davis seem to have hit a whole new level of silliness when she decided she needed to respond to criticism about her choices in life from single mother Bristol Palin.  Davis was responding to a blog post...

January 22, 2014

Wendy Davis is more tone deaf than Joe Biden

Shades of "Stand-up, Chuck!" What Wendy Davis says about here exaggerated and misleading campaign biography. I am proud of where I came from and I am proud of what I've been able to achieve through hard work and perseverance. And I guarantee you t...

January 15, 2014

Poverty, White Privilege, and Short Memories

The poor whites of Appalachia may have become unfashionable, but they have not gone anywhere. The current political left's obsession with both income inequality and so called White Privilege overlooks a lot of history. How quickly does the lef...

December 24, 2013

Reality Bites Gays

At the heart of the Duck Dynasty controversy is a modern paradox: those who most loudly celebrate the gay lifestyle seem to go into a Victorian swoon whenever anyone even obliquely mentions actual gay sex practices such as anal sex.  As we watch...

December 14, 2013

Female sexual predators in government schools

It seems that a veritable ongoing epidemic of sexual offense by female teachers is mostly unnoticed by the national press.  I found out about this epidemic when blogger Stacy McCain recently wrote about a Michigan public school teacher wher...

December 13, 2013

Barack and Michelle: The Love Story

I thought the photo below was interesting. I wonder if some of the White House photo restrictions are to avoid shots in which it is obvious that  Michelle and Barack are not on the same page. They are a fantasy couple to many black women who ha...

December 12, 2013

What does Amazon know?

Amazon is a godsend for rural America. I do most of my shopping other than for gorceries and large home improvement items online.  Amazon regularly sends me product recommendations. I was online reading about the state of affairs in our nation's...

December 12, 2013

Obamacare's opportunity cost

How much in actual health care could have been paid for with the taxpayer amounts currently being spent on developing websites for people to sign up for health insurance plans they aren't happy with?.    Consider Oregon.  According to...

December 11, 2013

What will Andrew Sullivan say?

It turns out under Obamacare an insurance company may not refuse to cover someone who is HIV positive but they can make them pay for their own costly prescription drugs. The issue applies to many of the chronically ill that Obamacare was supposed to ...

December 11, 2013

A long flight back home for Barack (updated)

Check out the pictures below.  Did an irate Michelle make misbehaving Barry switch seats at Mandela's funeral?   Update (hat tip: Lucainne Goldberg) Looks like somebody knows he's been a bad boy: Hat tip: Small Dead Animals...

December 4, 2013

The right comparison to healthcare.gov

People are using the wrong private sector systems to compare with healthcare.gov.  The complexity, the security issues, as well as an interface with government data bases, are routine issues for the Tax Preparation Software companies.  Amaz...

November 29, 2013

Technical Knock Out?

Here's a little gem as we wait to see just how the promised fix to HealthCare.gov works.  Boxer Mike Tyson isn't known for his towering intellect but he does seem to have command of the obvious.  On Wednesday Tyson, who previously support t...

November 28, 2013

One way to avoid a recall

Facing a recall effort for her part in last spring's controversial Colorado gun control law  State Senator Evie Hudak announced on Wednesday that she is resigning.   Fell on her sword for the good of the Democrat party may be more accu...

November 23, 2013

Another reason Senate Dems will rue the day they ended the filibuster

One reason senators of both parties liked the ability to filibuster judicial appointments was because it allowed them to have it all ways.  The could tell the party whip they would vote "aye" on a controversial nominee- pleasing party activists ...

November 19, 2013

New York Times signals Dems that it's time to ditch Obamacare?

Ever since Obamacare was foisted on an unwilling American electorate I've been noting the example of the 1989 repeal of the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act.  It seems the NY Times now also sees the similarities in how both health programs ove...

November 4, 2013

Virginia to Washington, D.C.: Take this county, please!

According the Emerson College Polling Society: [Terry] McAuliffe's strongest area of support are in the north within Congressional district 8(75%-13%), district 11 (58%-32) and district 10 (52%-37%). Cuccinelli is winning all the other districts w...

November 2, 2013

Obamacare apologists' faulty assumption

In What Obamacare Pollyannas Miss, Mickey Kaus challenges the remaining Obamacare apologists in the media in language that he thinks is likely to strike home.  As he notes, one erroneous assumption in the Omabacare scheme is that physicians are ...

October 30, 2013

Pelosi's latest whopper

Nancy Pelosi, who was born in Baltimore in 1940, recently opined on the latest left wing cause, changing the name of the Washington Redskins. Pelosi noted that when she was growing up in Baltimore, the city didn't have a football team. "So one of t...

October 18, 2013

The Ghost of Vietnam Will Haunt Obamacare

Over at The American Spectator Jeffrey Lord compares Obamacare to Vietnam on the basis of how civil disobedience grew, the anti-war meme took root in the common culture and the way Congress, which had stood by Johnson in the face of evidence the...

October 15, 2013

Colorado recall effort targets another anti-gun state senator

Last month, two Colorado State Senators, both Democrats, were recalled.  Now State Senator Evie Hudak, who thought she had escaped an earlier recall effort, is back on the hot seat.  On Monday October 7, the issue committee "Recall Hudak ...

October 12, 2013

Good questions

My congressman, Mark Meadows, is one of the 94 representatives who has sent a letter to Jonathan Jarvis, director of the National Park Service with some questions about that agency's recent activities.  Meadow's district, NC-11, includes Smoky M...

October 10, 2013

National Park Service: Wolves in Service Dog Harness

When people look back on the past week, I suspect the key images they remember will be the various shots of barricades, traffic cones and police tape around national monuments and across the entrances to national parks, national scenic parkways and e...

October 9, 2013

Arbitrary and Unconscionable

The story of how the National Park Service had closed down the Claude Moore Colonial Farm was one of the first to break last week.  The farm is on federal land but it has not taken federal money for decades.  Here is an incredible update to...

October 8, 2013

National Park Service Gone Wild (updated)

Top of the World is a residential development around Lake in the Sky in Blount County, Tennessee.  It borders Smoky Mountain National Park.  Foothills Parkway, a national scenic parkway managed by the National Park Service, is the only majo...

October 5, 2013

Hurting your friends?

I have to wonder about the reversal of the decision to cancel the Navy-Air Force football game.  Was it because the game is self supporting or was it because the game is to be broadcast nationally.  It costs a network money to find another ...

October 3, 2013

All your parks are belong to us

It now appears a lease with the federal government is only as good as the President occupying the White House.   From an 18th century living history farm in Virginia  to campgrounds in Arizona, the federal government is forcing private oper...

October 1, 2013

Oops!

It seems those visiting the Healthcare.gov website have other things in mind than rushing out to enroll in the insurance exchanges.   According to the site the most popular question is how to get an exemption from having health coverage....

October 1, 2013

Dems Going for Broke

Recently John Hinderaker over at Powerline excerpted some of the more over the top solicitations he has received from various Democrat groups trying to capitalize on the shutdown crisis.  Now comes this story from that the desperation may be jus...

September 29, 2013

Why are Incumbent Dems Hiding from Sunday Talk Shows?

When I glanced down this list of Suday talk show appearances I had to wonder, where are all the Democrats who don't have "former"  in their titles?   It not only seems to be weighted towards Republican, but most of the Democrats are fo...

September 26, 2013

Detroit's Pension Ponzi Scheme

Since the taxpayers could be compelled to make up the eventual shortfall the trustees of Detroit's pensions ignored their fiduciary duties. They did not follow the actual terms of the plans; instead, according to a report in the NY Times: Detro...

September 20, 2013

A new kind of woman popping up in advertising

I am not sure what to make of this ad, which is called Hijack. I saw it this week on one of the National Geographic channels.  I've noticed several ads in the past year or so that have turned the all too common "all men are dumb" theme on its ea...

September 18, 2013

Solar panels big issue for fire fighters

Talk about unintended consequences.   A company installs solar roof panels to save energy costs, Then when there is a fire, the building burns down because the solar panels impeded firefighters.  Delanco, New Jersey, volunteer fire crews ...

September 13, 2013

The Colorado recall was about more than gun control

There was much more going on in Tuesday's recall elections Colorado than an up and down vote on Second Amendment Issues. We may be looking at a bipartisan rebellion against a problem that afflicts both parties: lawmakers passing laws that make them f...

September 7, 2013

Too Close for Comfort

This personality assessment was written by a noted historian about a major world leader.  ...gifted, with a quick understanding, sometimes brilliant, with a taste for the modern,-technology, industry, science-but at the same time superficial, ...

September 5, 2013

The Guns of September?

There are grand forces in human history.  Then there are the actions of fools who think they can control events and who then start actions that spiral out of control. Ninety nine years ago this summer, a small series of events soon sparked a Wor...

September 5, 2013

Syria splintering Dems

The unofficial whip count list on Syria is fascinating in political terms.  The issue with the Republicans may be how hard the House leadership tries to whip members into line. Republican leaders are in a position in which they at least have...

September 2, 2013

Grinding to a halt

Labor Day 2013 marks the demise of The Lusty Lady, the nation's only unionized peep show.  It almost goes without saying this employee owned affiliate of the SEIU is a relic of  San Francisco circa the mid 1970's. Customers weren't allow...

August 29, 2013

Who's the oppressor now in Harlan County?

The First Lady's healthy food initiative recently ran into some blunt critics.   Students in a rural Kentucky county - and their parents - are the latest to join a growing national chorus of scorn for the healthy school lunches touted b...

August 17, 2013

Why journalists are so liberal

Much is being made of the recent revelation via Paul Bedard that journalism school graduates don't read newspapers and magazines any more. But this from the article (via Legal Insurrection) may be even more interesting The last sentence of Bedard's...

August 17, 2013

Oprah's Farewell to Middlebrow

Oprah Winfrey has always been able to read her audience keenly.  I have to wonder if she now is targeting a different audience, because she always seems to have a purpose. She became rich convincing middle class women she could be a next door n...

August 16, 2013

Medicine's Whiz Kids?

As the federal government adds more bureaucratic dictates to a health care system that already ignores several basic economic principles, I am concerned it may end in a disaster that will define an era, much as the Vietnam War defined my youth....

August 16, 2013

Bullfighters, not rodeo clowns

Because their primary job is to draw the bull way from a fallen rider and entertaining the crowd with clownish antics between rides is a secondary function, many of these rodeo entertainers now call themselves bullfighters. That seems to be a really...

August 15, 2013

Court slaps down Obama for disreagrding laws he doesn't like

I wonder if Obama and his cohorts can appreciate the irony the recent decision on the Yucca Mountain waste issue has helped create.   President Obama asserted the unilateral power to "tweak" inconvenient laws in last Friday's news confere...

August 1, 2013

Detroit City Charter is big problem

  In a Wall Street Journal article by an individual who was head of the city Department of Transportation for a year details how the way Detroit's government is organized creates a bureaucratic logjam that makes the decline in services impossibl...

July 31, 2013

Poster Girl

  It appears the vandal defacing public buildings and monuments in Washington DC is a 58 year old illegal immigrant.  The woman, who has a Chinese passport, arrived in Washington a few days ago and was traveling on an expired visa, prosecu...

July 27, 2013

LA Times in search of the elusive black victim

As I was browsing the News stories at Lucianne.com I came across this LA Times story. North Carolina lawmakers approve sweeping voter ID bill, by David Zucchino. When I clicked on the link to the full story I did a double take at the byline. Not Ra...

July 23, 2013

Detroit: Organized for failure

Read these descriptions of the structure of city government in Detroit.   I find it a bit reminiscent of the bloated  organization charts that were in place in the American auto industry during the era when it foisted cars such as the ...

July 20, 2013

New pop culture villains?

I don't follow pop culture closely enough to say if this is a trend, but in the last month I've read two recently released mystery suspense novels with surprising villains.  This may bear watching for the future as politics is certainly dow...

July 18, 2013

Angela Corey, bringing people together

Let's do talk about Angela Corey, the special prosecutor of George Zimmerman. In addition to seeing that the Zimmerman family lives in fear, Angela Corey seems to see the world as a better place when a profoundly abused 12 year old boy is, in effect,...

July 8, 2013

Beyond parody

Did the New York Times really need to fret over  the inequalities between coach and first class passengers mere hours after one of the most dramatic air crashes in the US in over a decade?  On a Web site called Flyertalk, I learned from...

July 4, 2013

Happy Independence Day!

Here are some pictures of the Revolutionary era flags I string from my front porch to the big tree next to the branch every Fourth of July.     ...

July 4, 2013

Texas abortion fanatics too much even for Satan?

In case you missed it, abortion supporters chanted "Hail Satan" in Texas yesterday, leading to the tweet below from the UK Church of Satan.  But you know you've gone too far when the followers of Satan rebuke your message. Unfortunate to see Sa...

July 3, 2013

Language lesson for pro-life people

I often get irked by those who fail to understand that the first step in winning most political arguments is to engage the target audience's emotions. In the political arena the best reasoned argument becomes moot if no one is listening. Over at...

July 2, 2013

Time to update a classic?

Seeing the anti Obama and anti-Ambassador Anne Patterson protest signs in Cairo and now reading this article, this article and this one, too, not te mention this image from Germany,   I can't help but wonder.   Is it time someone ...

June 28, 2013

Common problem

What does the Governor and Legislature of Illinois have in common with the Management of the New York Times Company -- besides a liberal worldview, that is?   Both groups now find themselves operating under the constraints of huge underfunded pe...

June 25, 2013

Prominent Blacks Deserting the Liberal Plantation

In the last few months we have seen the rise to national prominence of the conservative Dr. Ben Carson of Maryland, the surprise emergence of  Bishop E.W. Jackson as the Republican candidate for Lt. Governor in Virginia, and now Louisiana S...

June 19, 2013

On the 12th Day of Xmas the NSA gave to me

Strange as it may seem, there is apparently an entire collectible series of NSA themed Christmas Ornaments. Could the NSA be how Santa knows who's been naughty and who's been nice? Here are some current or recent offerings on ebay. Note that at l...

June 19, 2013

Where are the adoring crowds today?

s the blank slate known as Obama gets filled in the size of his adoring crowd seems to greatly diminish. The stage for the president's speech is set up on the East side of the Brandenburg Gate, in the old East Berlin. The sun is pounding down and ...

June 15, 2013

Blaming Cincinnati for IRS scandal is so wrong

I have a question for the politicians of Cincinnati complaining that the IRS scandal is giving their city a bad name.  Can you show me where these offices are in your fair city?  One of the arcane bits of information in this scandal is th...

June 15, 2013

What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?

The New York Times asked a very good question in a headline in its Sunday Magazine: What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?   They then have a bunch of so called experts gainsay the answer, buried about 2/3 of the way through the a...

November 29, 2012

Former IL Rep. Mel Reynolds seeks 'redemption' by running for Congress again

It seems that former Congressman Mel Reynolds  is running for his old seat. Disgraced former U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds said he will ask voters to focus on his congressional experience rather than his state and federal criminal record as he announc...

November 29, 2012

Who's getting rich off of GOP defeat?

Eric Erickson at Red State has been tracing the web of ownership and (conflict of?) interests among the various Republican consulting operations, the 527s and staff at the RNC, NRCC, NRSC, etc. It is complex, but here is a sample. TargetPoint ...

November 18, 2012

Our Winter of Discontent?

First Hostess has to fold its operations because of union demands, now we have this. Employees at Los Angeles International Airport were considering plans Friday to walk off the job on what is traditionally the busiest traveling day of the year. A c...

November 11, 2012

Conservatives Harpooned by Orca

Obama's campaign effectively used tech to identify voters but the approach was good old fashioned door knocking and calls by Democrat neighbors with scripts based on hot button local issues or local pride.   Here in Madison County North Carolina...

November 11, 2012

Orca implications

I can't imagine Romney is happy with what happened with the GOTV but it looks like it could go further than that. Ben Howe at Red State: According to all the sources I spoke to, the breakdown of the campaign can be traced to the primaries. One ...

November 11, 2012

Jesse Jackson Jr. Reported Plea Bargaining

In August, I suggested that Jesse Jackson Jr. picked the Mayo Clinic for his health care because he wanted to check out his new home.  If he accepts this deal, which is said to include some jail time, he most likely will be heading back to Roche...

November 10, 2012

Lucky O

Obama was always been lucky.  The October Surprise was Hurricane Sandy and the resultant photo op for Obama played right into the hopes of many who had voted for him in 2008 and weren't ready to let go of who they had always wanted Obama to be....

November 7, 2012

So who stayed home?

I generally like to wait a few days before doing an complete analysis but one thing that immediately comes to mind is that while they are still counting some West Coast votes when they are all counted about 13 million people who voted in 2008 st...

November 6, 2012

A stunning admission on polling

This article by John Podhoretz of Commentary, about how one newspaper now admits the poll it commissioned was sent back to be adjusted to fit the narrative is interesting.  I always suspected this is what happens but now some in the press a...

November 4, 2012

Confession of a Former Low-Information Voter

I have an embarrassing confession to make: I was once a low-information voter.  Indeed, I entered the voting booth that Election Day with only sketchy ideas about some of the candidates based upon bits and pieces of news I had caught on the fly,...

November 1, 2012

Minnesota and Oregon Newspapers Not Endorsing Obama

The Oregonian in Portland did not include the presidential race in their list of endorsements for 2012.  The Salem Statesman Journal endorsed Romney for President. Both papers endorsed Obama in 2008.  Here is what the Statesman Journal had ...

November 1, 2012

Driftglass Republicans

Heard the term Broken Glass Republican -- meaning someone who would crawl over broken glass to get to the polls to vote? Maybe we should be talking about Driftglass Republicans, too. Someone in hurricane-devastated Point Pleasant who sent a...

October 31, 2012

A Sickly Pale Blue

When maps using red and blue came out a few election cycle back, many Republicans were upset because the color assigned our party was one long associated with Marxism while blue seemed to be closely associated with patriotism -- as in "He's a True Bl...

October 30, 2012

More signs Minnesota moving toward Romney

The StarTribune in Minneapolis reports, "As presidential race tightens, President Clinton plans a Minnesota visit." When I saw this I had two thoughts. Slick Willy's his track record campaigning for others has never been strong to begin with and he w...

October 28, 2012

A Mile South & Four Years Later....

On election night 2008 Grant Park was thronged with Obama supporters waiting to see their man emerge on the specially-built stage at the south end of huge lakefront park to bask in his historic victory. The planning process for such an event requires...

October 28, 2012

Minnesota in play?

The notoriously biased Minnesota poll commissioned by the Minneapolis StarTribune has Romney within the margin of error. Thomas Lifson adds: Today on Fox News Sunday, Karl Rove noted that the Romney campaign has bought TV ad time on Twin Cities ...

October 26, 2012

The Dems' long term strategic mistake?

There have been recent stories about the Democratic Party embracing the affluent, single, and childless metropolitan voting block as its new power base -- to replace working class white voters.  My gut feel from years of politicking is that sing...

October 24, 2012

Obama's gonna need a bigger October Surprise than this

It looks like that Gloria Allred's October Surprise is Maureen Stemberg, the woman who divorced the Staples founder a quarter of a century ago in a bitterly fought contest and who seems to try to re-litigate the matter every few years since then....

October 23, 2012

Horse Laughs for Obama

A couple of weeks back I read Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, by Doug Stanton.   I had picked it up because I still remember the obvious relish in Don Rumsfeld's press conferen...

October 19, 2012

Minnesota

Since 2007, Minnesota's Fifth Congressional District, which includes Minneapolis, has been represented by Keith Ellison, a Muslim with ties to the Nation of Islam whom many find to be both a duplicitous radical and a bit of a phony.  It may be t...

October 18, 2012

Could Perot endorsement of Romney swing Minnesota?

Ross Perot's endorsement of Romney was made in an op-ed in the Des Moines Register but could it have an effect in Minnesota, too?   The national media sees Minnesota as solidly Democrat.  It isn't. In 2010 Mark Dayton became the first ...

October 13, 2012

My must read in the coming days

With the Benghazi story unraveling this blog by a retired State Department Foreign Service Officer seems a daily must read.  His take on the hearings struck me as spot on, especially his reading of Kennedy's testimony.  Take away quote: Th...

October 12, 2012

Biblical Biden

Vice President Biden may have thought his smirks and chortles showed the base there was no need to take Romney/Ryan Ryan seriously but what came across to many was that Biden didn't take the topics under discussion seriously.  After the Presiden...

October 12, 2012

Let the leaks begin

Vice President Biden doubled down on the bad intelligence excuse in last night's debate when the question of the deaths of American personnel in Libya was raised.  Among other stories today,  Senator Bob Corker and The Daily Beast's Eli Lak...

October 11, 2012

Media's Obama Narrative Collides with Reality

It's been a week since a 90-minute debate shifted the narrative of the 2012 election.  I had been trying to think if there was a comparable example of when a live television event had had such a profound effect upon what had been a widely accept...

October 6, 2012

The 70 million who watched the debate

What do you make of the now 70 million audience estimate for Wednesday's debate?  I think it means the conventional wisdom about there being few undecideds is all wet.   I suspect a lot of people who either voted for Obama or sat out i...

October 5, 2012

Trouble in Obama's back yard?

Six weeks ago a poll that suggested Obama may be in trouble in suburban Cook County was widely dismissed as an outlier.  Not only does a new poll of Illinois' 10th Congressional District, which includes parts of northern Cook County,  show ...

October 3, 2012

Elizabeth Warren and the 'little guy'

Over at Legal Insurrection Professor Jacobson looks Elizabeth Warren's role in the Dow Corning bankruptcy.  At the time Dow was facing thousands of lawsuits over complaints about a range of medical problems stemming from their business of manufa...

October 2, 2012

Yes, we have no researchers

The government employees union AFSCME is running an ad featuring a member who says he collects Mitt Romney's garbage.  The worker, a black man, claims Romney doesn't care about "invisible people" like him and the services they provide. See for ...

October 1, 2012

We are the 91%

The most important unnoted characteristic of telephone polls (on which most of the political journalism these days seems focused -- instead of on the economy) is that 91% of people refuse to participate in them. In other words, only 9% of the populat...

September 30, 2012

Your Universal Service Fee at Work

That Universal Service Fee we pay as part of our phone bill each month has helped double the number of "free Obamaphones" in the hands of people in Ohio since last year to more than 1 million.  While the mainstream media has ignored this story, ...

September 22, 2012

Chick-fil-A wronged by media again

It pays never trust a news story these days.  Chick-fil-A's charitable foundation didn't back off supporting groups that oppose gay marriage because of pressure by big city politicians.  They had never supported any political groups to begi...

September 14, 2012

Insight on the Middle East from an unusual data point

The indispensable Walter Russell Mead notes that a recent story about a mansion for sale in London's Hyde Park explains a great deal about both anger on the streets in the Middle East and the absence of easy solutions for bringing modern economic and...

September 14, 2012

A lot of explaining to do

I am used to Michelle Malkin being passionate and the Ace of Spades being caustic but the attacks and deaths on  the anniversary of 9/11 have even turned Powerline's usual source of inside the beltway thinking, Paul Mirengoff, quite sarcastic....

September 11, 2012

Strictly a local problem?

A candidate for Congress drops out the race because of a scandal and the story goes no further than the local section of the Washington Post.   I suppose it's an improvement that the Democrat is labeled as such in both the headline and the ...

September 8, 2012

How solid is the black vote for Obama?

Urban poverty has skyrocketed under Obama.  Black unemployment rates are shameful.  Horrible stories of urban violence, such as a shot recently fired into a parochial school bus in Chicago in the Black and Hispanic South Deering neighborhoo...

September 7, 2012

Marching thru Charlotte

At noon on Wednesday I marched to help carry the pro life message to the Democratic National Convention.  The rally was organized by America, Defend Life!  a Charlotte area pro life group.  The marchers met at the Diocese of Charl...

September 4, 2012

Welcome to the Hornet's Nest, DNC

On September 26, 1780 British General Cornwallis entered Charlotte hoping to use what he saw to be an agreeable little village as a base for his campaign to pacify the Carolina back country. He left a couple of weeks later, declaring that Charlotte w...

September 4, 2012

Boffo Box Office for 2016

According to Office Mojo 2016, Obama's America ranked 9th over the Labor Day holiday weekend.  While this was down from 7th last weekend the film expanded its release by 656  to 1,747 theater.  What has to be impressive to theater owne...

September 2, 2012

If this had been a Republican...

Would this remain a local DC story if the accused had been staff director of an important committee in a Republican controlled Senate?  A former senior congressional aide was indicted this week in D.C. Superior Court on charges that he sexually...

September 1, 2012

My name is OBAMANDIAS (updated: karma has struck)

Look upon my works and laugh your ass off!  This is not a joke.  Or it at least it isn't meant as one.  It seems sand from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina was shipped to Charlotte, North Carolina to create this 16 foot tall monument for t...

August 31, 2012

Is Mitt Becoming More Conservative?

It is axiomatic that all political campaigns move towards the political center as election day approaches.  That doesn't seem to happening in this one.  In "It's the Ideology, Stupid," Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal notes that the R...

August 31, 2012

Imagine if a Republican...

If "golf" and "Chicago" now are code words for black people, what does the media make of this?  Very little it seems, since the offender is a Democrat. An Assembly candidate whose campaign sent mailers using the word "negrohood" to residents i...

August 31, 2012

He Made My Day

Clint Eastwood's appearance at last night's convention is getting mixed reviews.  Of course the left hated him but even some Republicans found it odd.  They miss the point.  Eastwood wasn't meant for political junkies.  The TV con...

August 27, 2012

Captive Audience

Tony Harnden of the British Daily Mail filed an article about the differences between covering Obama;s campaign in 2008 and in 2012.  The title summarizes the story:  Low blows, lower turnouts and low expectations: Four years after he was s...

August 27, 2012

A Silver Lining

The media is so obsessed with the impact of the still mundane Tropical Storm Isaac on the political scene they may be missing the bigger picture.  Here is Isaac's predicted path versus the current drought monitor.  Nothing spells drought re...

August 20, 2012

Southern Poverty Law Center's Lucrative 'Hate Group' Label

Last week's shooting at the headquarters of the Family Research Council (FRC) has placed the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) back into the news.  The SPLC recently had placed the FRC on its list of hate groups because the SPLC claims that in ...

August 20, 2012

Obama Underwater in Cook County?

According to the Daily Caller a recent poll of 629 registered voters has Obama under 50% in Cook County, Illinois.  A poll conducted by Illinois-based pollster and political strategist Michael McKeon found Obama leading Republican Mitt Romney...

August 8, 2012

Ominous silence for Obama

I often keep the Catholic network EWTN on in the background as I do housework.  This afternoon featured live programming from the 130th Supreme Convention of the Catholic fraternal and charitable organization the Knights of Columbus from Anaheim...

August 8, 2012

Another example of Obama's Chicago Values

This coming Saturday Chicago will hold its annual Bud Billiken Parade.  This parade, which bills itself as the biggest and oldest African American parade in the nation, is also one of biggest public celebrations held in Chicago each year. ...

August 7, 2012

Lefty Wannabe Superman v homeless man

Who is Spencer Thayer and why was he mocking a harmless old black dude reading his bible?  It seems the lead mocker of the black man who was reading his bible near the Chick-fil-A franchise in Chicago is also part of OWS.  Indeed he seems a...

August 3, 2012

Media finally find something to cover at Chick-fil-A

There was so little major media coverage of Wednesday's nationwide "buycott" on Chick-fil-A appreciation day that the Weekly Standard's Michael Warren labeled it a media blackout. (Isn't that "racist"?) But you wouldn't know anything about the natio...

August 2, 2012

Chicago virtue versus Chicago values

It seems a great many residents of the Chicago area exhibited the admirable virtue of patriotism Tuesday by using their wallets to support the right of free speech. This is a right which Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel does not seem to believe is a Chicag...

July 31, 2012

Chicago Native Has Questions for His Mayor

Last Sunday a man who was born and raised in Chicago asked a few questions for Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel on a Chicago blog. Recent comments by those who administer our city seem to assume that the city government can decide for everyone what are th...

July 21, 2012

Jokers then and now

Back in 1996 when the internet was still a novelty, the media created a firestorm that sucked all the momentum out of the campaign of  a conservative candidate for the US senate who had jumped to an erroneous conclusion about a vocal critic. ...

July 9, 2012

Carrying coal to Dusseldorf

What the frack is happening?   Americans are using less coal than ever thanks to our burgeoning supplies of natural gas.  Meanwhile green worshiping Europe has been importing more American coal to power its electric plants.   ...

June 28, 2012

The White House Fast Food Soap Opera

An odd tale of marital tension may be playing itself out before the nation's eyes, as Michelle Obama devotes herself to cajoling Americans into eating healthier food and exercising more while her husband eagerly stuffs his face out on the hustings wi...

June 28, 2012

Back to We the People

The promises Roberts made during his confirmation hearings cut both ways.  If Roberts doesn't believe in legislating from the bench, as the Warren court did in the face of legislative inaction, he made clear today that he also doesn't believe in...

June 22, 2012

Obama,the bride at every wedding

Hmmm.... I wonder if he was thinking of this when he reversed his position on gay marriage? ...

June 20, 2012

Biden goes full Howard Dean

Watch Vice President Biden rile up AFSCME (below).   No Joe, the members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal  Employees do not provide all those good things that makes this a middle class nation.   The t...

June 19, 2012

To the Olympics for Ann Romney

Ann Romney's dressage horse Rafalca won a place on the 2012 US Olympic Team this weekend. Rafalca, the 15-year-old Oldenburg mare co-owned by Mrs. Romney, won a spot on the Olympic dressage team, along with trainer Jan Ebeling. The U.S. Equestrian ...

June 8, 2012

Payback Is a Hound Dog

Some are trying to pass off Bill Clinton's seemingly pro-Romney comments on the campaign trail as a sign the 65 year old former president is is rusty and indeed that he might even be getting a bit senile.  (Funny how they never say that about th...

June 3, 2012

Oh those Geico commercials

Have you seen this ad?   It ran during the History Channel mini series on the Hatfield-McCoy feud.   My first thought was they are poking fun at the credentialed but not necessarily educated affirmative action hires that populate so ma...

May 23, 2012

The Left and Con Men

I don't know if you been following the stories about the problem some bloggers such as Robert Stacy McCain, Patterico, Liberty Chick, Aaron Worthing, and Virginia attorney Aaron Walker have been having with harassment by a convicted felon, domestic b...

May 20, 2012

Obama and Warren, the fabulists

Mark Steyn did a great job tying together this week's revelations about twin fabulists Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama.  I find his conclusion particularly intriguing.  Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof ...

May 20, 2012

Arrogance in Chief

NBC Chicago's  Mary Ann Ahern tweeted about Todays; NATO meeting in Chicago. POTUS jokes why the #NATO fuss "this isn't a big as Taste of Chicago." Maybe Obama needs to talk to the hundreds if not thousands of business that are losing money bec...

May 19, 2012

Obama's Kenyan birth claim: The Kgosie Matthews factor

Have you ever noticed how some white Americans go all giddy around some pompous ass with a British accent?   I suspect that in the late 1980s Obama saw that some Chicago blacks acted the same way around educated black African immigrants. ...

May 17, 2012

Hard to believe Obama didn't approve literary agent listing him as born in Kenya

It is going to be hard for the media to argue this was some inadvertent error as almost all the big names there have literary agents and know the unwritten rule that an author controls what gets said about the author. It should be noted that many of ...

May 9, 2012

Crunching the North Carolina numbers

While some pundits are having fun with Obama losing 41% of the West Virginia Democrat primary vote to a convict, perhaps an even more troubling result for Obama can be found in Tuesday's North Carolina primary.  After all, once the national Demo...

May 5, 2012

Obama's Historical Fiction

For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I've known, and some events appear out of precise chronology. Devices such as composite characters and shifting times to compress the narrative do not bel...

April 12, 2012

Too many Hilary Rosens

In response to question about the kerfuffle over Hilary Rosen's comment that Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life White House Spokesman Jay Carney replied "I know three, personally, women named Hilary Rosen."  Poor Jay Carney. he's soun...

April 10, 2012

Hybrids: Once was enough for most

It seems the majority of those who purchased hybrid cars in the past were not very satisified with their decision. According to a recent survey: Only 35% of hybrid vehicle owners chose to purchase a hybrid again when they returned to the market...

April 9, 2012

Guess who flunks the diversity test?

Below is a picture of the staff at Obama's Chicago Campaign Headquarters from the Washington Free Beacon. Funny how this overwhelmingly white staff has escaped media comment. I guess it doesn't fit the narrative.  Ace at Ace of Spades quipped th...

March 29, 2012

Fashion icons

Back in the era when the fight for Civil Rights was a noble cause instead of a scam the image of a hooded figure carried a whole different meaning. Or did it? Hiding one's face is always in fashion for poltroons and scoundrels. I want to laugh at...

March 23, 2012

Bad week for the EPA

First, in a unanimous opinion on the Sackett case the Supreme Court spanked the EPA for their attempts to browbeat taxpayers into submission by compounding fines while at the same time delaying access to judicial review.  Now a former EPA Genera...

March 23, 2012

Those who can't laugh are lost

Amid the American media fabricated nonsense about their imagined Republican War on Women here comes some amusing political silliness from North of the border.  Wildrose is a political party in the province of Alberta that is to the right of Cana...

March 22, 2012

The Chicago Way: a Timeline

Monday: Democrat power brokers say Vote for Smith the accused crook over the Republican. It's Important.Tuesday.  Smith wins primary over former Republican. Video of supportersWednesday: Democrat power brokers say Smith the accused crook who jus...

March 21, 2012

What about the war against men?

In response to the war on women theme I see a new trend.  Men pushing back about the war against men as waged by women -- particularly baby boomer women over the last 30 years.  Examples:  Vox Day explains that red pill of reality is n...

March 21, 2012

The bad news from Illinois

Turnout was simply dreadful, the lowest in many people's lifetime.  Turnout was low across the state. In Sangamon County, a Republican stronghold in central Illinois, about 1 in 5 registered voters cast ballots. The numbers were about the same i...

March 20, 2012

Duties, Priorities, and Arrogance

There is much buzz today about how news stories of Malia Obama's Spring vacation in Mexico with her classmates keep getting sent down the Internet memory hole.  If the story is true, one thing I have not seen mentioned in a lot is the lack of ju...

March 3, 2012

Law School Priorities

When I was in law school at Loyola in Chicago I needed coffee at lot more than I had time for sex. This was long before the likes of Starbucks.  My choices were the 8 oz cup of instant from the vending machine in the student lounge, a 10 oz cup ...

January 27, 2012

Coincidence?

The often controversial and always interesting libertarian scholar Charles Murray has a new book. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.  Murray's premise is: America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever th...

January 26, 2012

Mitt, the Outsider

I've read a bit in recent days about Mitt Romney's Mormonism being an issue for some voters.  Religious bigotry is almost as dead as racial bigotry as long as the practitioners of a religion also follow our secular legal system and respect the r...

January 25, 2012

The bubble wrapped White House

What world does the White House live in?  I filled up my tank just before I listened to the SOTU address.   Three weeks ago I paid  $3.23 a gallon.  Two weeks ago I paid  $3.35.   Last night it was $3.49. ...

January 24, 2012

The unofficial end of global warming?

I saw a preview for this on Saturday.  My first thought at the image of three whales hopelessly trapped in the ice pack was that global warming must is now be passé in Hollywood.  (Storyline here.) ...

January 23, 2012

Newt's New Game

The salient factor of our age is that anyone with an internet connection can investigate issues or even develop skills without the need for intervening layers of experts or formal instruction.  In such an environment there is no need to treat vo...

December 21, 2011

Romney's Problem with Main Street

Some political analysts see the fadeout of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) as a sign that Mitt Romney won't be in for a bumpy ride over his wealth should he become the Republican nominee.  I disagree.  I also think that pundits who are embracing R...

December 13, 2011

Warm, Fuzzy & On Target

A recent Bloomberg article noted that gun ownership has been spreading into circles where is was once considered anathema.  Underscoring the way gun ownership has gone mainstream is this ad by PRK Arms of Fresno California. with a pitch about ab...

December 10, 2011

GOP elites, the base, and the GOP brand

What Mitt has been trying to do of late is akin to asking John Majors' cronies to attack Lady Thatcher's reputation on his behalf. Beltway insiders may like to point out that after Newt was ditched the Republicans remained in control Congress for sev...

December 8, 2011

Two word response

Romney is sending surrogates to attack Newt.  One of them, John Sununu, has his nose out of joint ever since then Minority Whip Newt hung up on him when Chief of Staff Sununu called to inform him that President George H. W. Bush had surrend...

December 4, 2011

Our off the books economy

I have suspected this for some time now, that one sector thriving under Obama is the Off-the-Books Economy. This week the subject came up on CNBC when Jim Cramer discussed record 631 days the average loan in foreclosure has now been delinquent.　 C...

December 3, 2011

Newt: The Civil Warrior

Over the last couple of days, several well-regarded Republican pundits have taken it upon themselves to educate Republican primary voters about the many shortcomings of Newt Gingrich.  As I read them, I was reminded of Abraham Lincoln's reaction...

October 13, 2011

Obama's marketing boo-boo

Obama's marketing guru David Axelrod apparently never took to heart this lesson from one of the original Mad Men, Jerry Della Femina There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the goo...

September 16, 2011

Huge fire on federal lands

This fire in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota hasn't really gotten the news it deserves. The smoke has already caused air quality warnings as far south as Southern Wisconsin.   The fire was started by a lightning strike a mon...

September 12, 2011

Selling cars (or not)

Chevy Runs Deep?  This one wasn't running at all!   Is America in permanent decline a new selling point?  Open to a 1950s style auto repair place in an almost empty commercial part of town.  There are no signs on the other bu...

September 10, 2011

Ponzi Scheme Pedigree

Given that pundits as diverse as Thomas Friedman and Karl Rove have their conventional wisdom knickers in a twist over Rick Perry doubling down on his position that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, it is instructive to look at where that term has b...

September 7, 2011

Disillusioned

All Obama really had going for him in 2008 was a carefully crafted image that appealed to a media than had been already been blurring the lines between mere celebrity and political acumen.   Unfortunately for Obama after three years even the big...

September 7, 2011

Environmentalists self-destructing

Walter Russell Mead diagnoses how environmentalists undermined their own cause in Under the Bus: A Pack of Pouting Greens. Snail darters beware: green political cluelessness is about to rock your world. The United States and the world need a strong ...

September 6, 2011

The Democrat Republicans want to run against

Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin has announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate.  If you asked Wisconsin Republicans to pick the Democrat they most want to run against for the seat the retiring Herb Kohl now holds,  Madison Congresswo...

September 3, 2011

Duck! It's a Flying Pig

When Anthony Weiner resigned his seat in the House, Democrats didn't spend much time worrying about keeping the seat.  But the electorate, and even some of the liberal media, are up for an other round of the same old, same old.  The New Yor...

September 2, 2011

Obama's Joint Session Blunder

The controversy over President Obama's address to a joint session of Congress underscores his ignorance of history, his lack of understanding regarding the Constitution, and how lacking he is in political skills other than speechifying.  Voters ...

August 30, 2011

From Yamhill to Clueless

The New York Times' Nick Kristof went back home to Yamhill, Oregon for a couple of weeks this summer.  He then wrote a column, Did We Drop the Ball on Unemployment?,  that underscores how utterly clueless columnists for the New York Times c...

August 29, 2011

Doubting Thomas No More

The conventional wisdom on Justice Clarence Thomas is that he is an unimaginative intellectual featherweight and a clown.  The way in which his reputation was traduced in his confirmation hearings and his notorious lack of interest in participat...

August 28, 2011

Fretful practices

Last week the Department of Justice raided the iconic Gibson Guitar Corporation, confiscating materials and records. The reason?   Gibson was allegedly violating the laws of the sovereign nation of India regarding certain imported hardwoods it u...

August 26, 2011

Hurricane danger inland, too

I urge readers in the Northeast who live inland from the path of Irene not to assume that being well away from the coast will protect them.  Inland flooding is nothing to dismiss, especially when the ground is already saturated as it is in Penns...

August 25, 2011

Rick Perry a 'mensch'

Last week we heard Gene Simmons of the rock band Kiss predict that Rick Perry would be the next president.   This week country rock cult musician and writer Kinky Friedman came out for Perry.   A self described Democrat,  Fri...

August 23, 2011

When the floor became the ceiling

For over a year a reading of minus 20 in the Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll could be dismissed an outlier.  Over the last two weeks it can be called a good day for the President....

August 22, 2011

Pets, People, and Civilization

It is interesting to contrast the religiously sanctioned abuse of dogs in the Muslim world with recent movements to remove dog and cat meat from its time-honored place on Chinese and South Korean menus.  Part of the new concern with animal welfa...

August 21, 2011

Obama boxes himself in on jobs

Walter Russell Mead nicely sums up how the Feeding the Mass on Unicorn Ribs green jobs strategy of the Obama administration has now boxed him in on job creation: The cost is not simply the stimulus funds wasted on "investments" that don't produce an...

August 20, 2011

Bailing on the USS Obama

In an article with the ironic title DeFazio says Obama lacks will to fight, may lose Oregon, Oregon Democrat Congressman Pete DeFazio seems to bail out on the President.   He notes that based on what he is hearing at town hall meetings in his ho...

August 15, 2011

Why the Left Elites Are Criticizing Obama

I usually find that Eleanor Clift's columns are either predictably boring or infuriatingly ignorant.  Her latest Why No Democrat Will Challenge Obama was actually fairly interesting, although perhaps not in a way the writer intended.  First...

August 13, 2011

Obama firearms boom continues

There is one American industry that has done very well during the Obama administration, probably to his acute dismay.  In 2009 we read about the tremendous increase in demand for firearms following the election.  After slackening a bit...

August 12, 2011

DOT targets farm tractors

One of the rites of passage in rural life comes when parents decide a child is old enough to help out by driving the tractor.  If the Obama administration has its way that will be a thing of the past.  The Federal government now proposes to...

August 11, 2011

Politics in command on economic policy

During the first six months of the Obama administration there were stories about how difficult it was to fill the political slots at the Department of Treasury.  Some of this was over difficulties with the disclosures and background checks, but ...

August 10, 2011

Fat for the fire

Democrat blogger Mickey Kaus takes issue with President Obama's statement on Monday that discretionary spending has been cut as far as is possible. "Not much further we can cut" seems like a hanging curve ball, an open invitation for ongoing ri...

August 10, 2011

Obama's base losing faith

More on how parts pf Obama's base seem to be losing faith in him. As James Taranto points out about the progressives who say Obama is betraying them,   Progs loved Bill Clinton because he was a winner. They loathe Barack Obama because he i...

August 8, 2011

The Price of Wishful Thinking

Two recent columns deal with Obama's ability to communicate.  Both are by people who were bewitched by Obama's 2008 performance and who have since learned the marketing of the candidate did not predict the performance of the president.  One...

August 3, 2011

Build your own Obama speech

The Obama Board allows you to build your own Obama speech of grandeur.  Just add your own phony Greek columns.   Hat tip: Hot Air...

July 22, 2011

Poll games

Both Big Government and NROs Campaign Spot have noticed what seems to be a trend in recently released polls on political issues and possible 2012 presidential matchups: The use of random samples of "adults" as opposed to "registered voter" or "likely...

July 22, 2011

Poll games: read those crosstabs!

Today brings a classic example of why one should always follow the link to the poll itself, concentrating on the crosstabs while ignoring the media spin.  Question 23 of a new CNN poll of adults asks In another proposal, Congress would raise th...

July 21, 2011

Sauce for the Gerrymander

Those who pay attention to political minutiae know that North Carolina is the most gerrymandered state in the nation.  Indeed, four of the state's thirteen districts made Slate's 2009 list of the 20 most gerrymandered districts.  That compa...

May 5, 2011

Michelle O's Porked-Up Food Folly

What is wrong with this picture? Let's start with what it is supposed to be.  Those peach shaded areas spread across vast reaches of the American landscape are supposed to be our nation's so called food deserts.  What is a ...

November 15, 2010

Voting Integrity Also a Rural Issue

Madison County, NC: Mayberry It's Not Several days after the election, a thousand votes are discovered to have been "inadvertently omitted" from the election night tally. As a result, the loser in a three-man contest for two superior judge seats...

October 6, 2010

Another Demosaur Headed for Extinction?

James Oberstar (D-MN-08) was running for his third term when I left the state in 1980, and he has never really faced a serious challenge. Oberstar, nominally a resident of Minnesota's Iron Range, has actually lived in Marylan...

September 29, 2010

The Pigford Pig-Out and the Election

Is the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)'s settlement of the Pigford class action suit about to become a 2010 election issue? The case, which started to get national notice in July when it came to light as part of Andrew Breitbart's vid...

August 26, 2010

Ad Wars: Republicans Are Winning

In recent years, I've been highly critical of the tired and boring ways most Republican promote their message, especially the ads run by most candidates. The images of McCain's campaign (up until he named Sarah Palin as his runnin...

August 22, 2010

A President Who Wants to Be Anywhere but Here

President Obama begins his sixth vacation of 2010 amid pancaking poll numbers and growing evidence that a double-dip recession is in the making. Other presidents have liked to get out of the fishbowl world of Washington, D.C., whether ...

August 21, 2010

Strip Mines into Elk Habitat

In a story that again shows that mother nature can be much more resilient than some people imagine, for the first time in over maybe 170 years or more, a large wild elk herd roams the Appalachian woods in significant numbers.  I am not...

August 16, 2010

Two Cheers for Old-Fashioned Political Scoundrels

The recently deceased Dan Rostenkowski was an old-school Chicago politician. From my knowledge of the breed, this means that if you had lunch with him, placed a twenty on the table for your share of the tab, and then turned to fla...

August 4, 2010

The Winds of Over-Regulation

The EPA is on the verge of declaring that naturally occurring dust is a pollutant. This means they will penalize farmers whose livestock and horticultural operations create what the Washington bureaucrats consider to be too much of it....

August 2, 2010

Shirley Sherrod and the Race Grievance Industry

Shirley Sherrod, litigant and co-mastermind of the Pigford settlement, which bestowed large checks on 86,000 of the country's 40,000 black farmers, ironically may help usher in a long-overdue post-racial era in America. Publicity, once the ally ...

July 27, 2010

Obama's White House Is 'Too White'?

According to Maureen Dowd, Barack Obama's latest problem may be because he isn't black enough:   The Obama White House is too white. It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent he...

April 11, 2010

Fair Tax Distraction

Every April, as the due date for individual income tax returns rolls around, I watch for two inevitable events. One is reports of various U.S. attorneys all across the nation issuing indictments for tax fraud. The typical targets are local citiz...

March 22, 2010

Voter Backlash Beyond ObamaCare

Voter anger is building on issues beyond ObamaCare. The large group of people already angry over runaway spending and ObamaCare are now being joined by those angry at the EPA for moving forward with controls on greenhouse gases without congressi...

March 15, 2010

No Taxation with Misrepresentation?

If Congress passes a takeover of health care via dubious means, flouting the consent of the governed, the consequences may be far more profound than dreamed by Reid, Pelosi, and Obama. In addition to violating the spirit and perhaps the letter of the...

February 7, 2010

A Trail of Broken Promises to Nowhere

North Carolina's North Shore Road, a controversial 26-mile road through the most remote part of Great Smoky Mountain National Park, was finally killed a couple of years ago. But like so many things involving federal spending, the story...

January 19, 2010

The Brown-Coakley Race, 1978 Version

Some analysts are wondering about historical analogies to what seems to have happened in the Massachusetts special election.  My mind immediately went back to the first major race in which I served as a volunteer. In 1978, a Minnesota Republican...

January 14, 2010

Something about Martha

I have been watching the Massachusetts Senate race with interest. There is a lot more going on there than a backlash against the Democrats in Washington on health care, or even Coakley's sense of entitlement to the "Kennedy seat." Clos...

December 4, 2009

Global Warming's New Clothes

Some are unhappy that the Copenhagen conference on climate change is going forward. I think that it is entirely appropriate in light of the revelations coming out of CRU/IPCC. After all, Copenhagen is where Danish author Hans Christian Andersen publi...

November 9, 2009

Fresh Faces Require Fresh Techniques

Most of the pundits seem to agree that voters currently mistrust both parties. Perhaps one reason voters see all politicians as more or less the same is that that so many candidates in each party follow a campaign template de...

November 8, 2009

Who lost NY 23 for the GOP?

Having been in the position of watching my favored candidate stumble badly in an endorsement session while a more liberal Republican alternative hit all the right notes, I reserved my opinion on the goings-on in the recent Congressional rac...

October 7, 2009

Flush with self righteousness

Environmentalist dreams are starting to rub Americans raw. Greenpeace has turned its attention to an issue that invites both the reporter and readers to make them the butt of jokes, but which is no laughing matter in the end....

September 8, 2009

The Democrats re-fight an old battle

It seems that a decades-old battle for the soul of the Democratic Party has reemerged in the Obama administration.  The media likes to talk about splinters and fault lines among the Republicans, but these have a far shorter history than the...

August 19, 2009

Congress on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Watching our political class fumble with the hot potato of ObamaCare has proven to make for a highly entertaining August.  We assume that elected officials must have considerable people skills.  Yet many Democrats have been ham handed ...

August 15, 2009

Some things don't change

It was twenty years ago next Monday that a group of elderly protesters outside the Copernicus Center in Chicago taught Dan Rostenkowski that the world did not revolve around powerful Congressmen who thought they knew what was best for ...

August 1, 2009

Honing those pitchforks

Stories have been coming out here and there about elected officials or their staffs not treating constituents with respect.  This does not seem to be a good way to win support for Health Care Reform.  Last fall and ...

July 26, 2009

The high cost of the simple life

The First Family will be vacationing on a 'sprawling gentleman's farm' on Martha's Vineyard in August.  Unlike the Clintons, who were often the guests of those who owned estates there things are different with President Obama. ...

July 20, 2009

Hillary and Barack: Can this relationship be saved?

The political marriage of convenience between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is fraying seriously in the face of the changed political dynamic in the last few weeks. Important segments of the voting public that once supported Obama are moving away ...

July 11, 2009

Obamaville City Limits

As I read founder of Creators Syndicates Rick Newcombe's explanation of why he is moving his business out of the increasingly corrupt confines of Los Angeles and the anti growth policies of California in general, I had to wonder.  Business ...

June 22, 2009

Women and the Iranian Unrest

Are the Ayatollahs learning that hell hath no fury like 34 million women scorned, forced out of the workplace, harassed and humiliated by religious police for three decades?  I have noticed some of the bravest protesters in Iran have been...

June 14, 2009

Comedy, Bullies, and American Politics

Saul Alinsky taught two generations of American leftists to use ridicule as a potent political weapon. When the left infiltrated America's entertainment outlets, the practice achieved industrial scale.As I read about the ongoing controversy about Dav...

June 8, 2009

Obama's Broken Feedback Loop

How does a president learn and grow, if the press won't criticize him, and instead treats him as a god. Two articles published yesterday on Pajamas Media, taken together shed some light on the topic.  Victor Davis Hanson's The Reckoning is...

June 1, 2009

Will the GOP Leadership Fail on Sotomayor?

The GOP's leadership is hopelessly out of touch with not only the base, but the mainstream of America, when it comes to confirmation hearings for Judge Sotomayor.  If the DC denizens default in their responsibility to expose her radical views an...

May 30, 2009

What do women want? A timeless question

Sigmund Freud's frustrated query "What do women want?" came to mind as I read Liberated and Unhappy, Ross Douthat's review of the study The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers show...

March 14, 2009

Lessons from the Coldest Winter

Douglas MacArthur and Barack Obama are one of the oddest pairings imaginable, yet they bear comparison.I have been listening to David Halberstam's book on the Korean War, The Coldest Winter on my drive to and from town. Military history is a hob...

February 10, 2009

Who caused the housing bubble?

Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act certainly did their part, but I know where the blame really lies for the housing bubble.Forget about Obama spreading doom and gloom. I'll be more likely to believe the economy is truly s...

October 17, 2008

Will an angry electorate hand the election to Obama?

I sense a very angry electorate, but not a particularly nihilistic one.  They know they have been kept in the dark and been fed a diet of compost about the anointed one -- and about a lot of other things.  Also I used to part...

June 4, 2008

Father Pfleger Ousted by his Cardinal

Pfleger's out.  He's been asked by Cardinal George to take a leave of absence.  The archdiocese has done the right thing, belatedly. But the stakes for it are higher than many might imagineCatholics across the nation have been outraged...

May 16, 2008

The Lessons of West Virginia

I suppose it is fitting that the news media and the super delegates are ignoring the significance of a thrashing of monumental proportions.  After all, this campaign is being brought by to us by a media that gives n...

April 9, 2008

Obama's other spiritual mentor and the Catholic Church

Another far left clergyman, Father Michael Pfleger, has joined his Southside Chicago friend Rev. Jeremiah Wright in the media spotlight, thanks to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. The national political media first noticed F. Pfleger when h...

January 25, 2008

Nonprofits Escaping Tax on Unrelated Business Activities

Large and wealthy not-for-profit organizations are apparently escaping taxation on income earned on commercial ventures (for example, real estate, publishing, mail order merchandise, etc.) by offsetting the income with expenses from other a...

October 17, 2007

Anthropogenic Climate Change Theory and Busted Sod

Anthropogenic theories of climate change have a neglected and tragic precedent of acceptance by consensus. Before Al Gore's Nobel prize for helping politicize the theory of Global Warming came the widely-believed theory ...

November 3, 2006

The Big Loser in the Election: Old Media

I almost fear for RA Baehr's sanity as he sifts through all that polling data. I do not place that much stock in them. Three decades of political activism has taught me to pay attention to four things in the final weeks of a campaign.  1) Who ...

October 23, 2006

Lackluster Leadership and the Coming Election Battle

Does a bad year for Republicans automatically translate into a good year for Democrats?   Perhaps not.  No matter who ends up controlling the House and Senate, the behavior of both the left and right wing fringe elements all but guaran...

September 17, 2006

Faith, Reason, the PC media and Islam

I read Pope Benedict XVI's address 'Faith, Reason and the University'.  It is too bad the media missed the lecture's main thrust of a challenge to modern secularists about their exclusion of peoples of deeply held faith, in their race to write i...

September 8, 2006

A Modest Proposal for a Telecommuting Congress

Many businesses have discovered that there is no real need to keep people in one physical location, in order to effectively and efficiently coordinate their work effort. Telecommuting, the pratice of working from remote locations, be it a client's pr...

September 2, 2006

When 88% is not good enough

In all the publicity about their attack on Senator Joe Lieberman, it has gone almost unnoticed that the far left has also targeted some members of the Black Caucus for their support of highly selective Bush administration policies. This support ...

July 19, 2006

The War Zone Within the New York Times Company

The New York Times Company is reeling, as bad news for both shareholders and employees accumulates. Cash is being pulled out of production facilities and being funneled, by the hundreds of millions of dollars, into a lavish new billion dollar headqua...

May 31, 2006

Al Gore Redux

When I read that Al Gore was riding high on the consulting circuit and putting together a glossy documentary on global warming, I thought back to the night in early 1992 when I was in the audience with about 100 other members of the Chicago Council o...

October 22, 2005

North Country

Being a fan of the British actor Sean Bean ever since he did the Sharpe series, I do try to catch his movies on the big screen, no matter what the subject matter.  This led me into the theater this weekend to see North Country, a film loosely ba...

October 12, 2005

A Modest Proposal

Should there be one non—lawyer or lay Justice on the Supreme Court at all times?  Is it necessary or desirable that the Court be a uniform body of technically sophisticated specialists? Many have noted the lack of a constitutional requirem...