The French will vote next week to elect a new president.
Friday's weak jobs report is more than a disappointing blip.
Suppose the Supreme Court does rule that the health care mandate is unconstitutional? What happens then?
For the record, I'm not a leading fan of the economist Jeffrey Sachs.
As Iran rushes ahead with its nuclear program, some foreign policy thinkers urge Israel to accept that it must live with "incomplete" security.
Compare and contrast the economic plan Mitt Romney released in September with the speech he delivered Friday in Detroit.
As John Avlon has recently calculated, there is a real possibility that the Republican primary process could fail to yield a majority winner.
Newt Gingrich has absorbed a fair degree of ridicule for his campaign proposal to build an American colony on the moon. Before focusing the laughter solely on Gingrich, however, let's recall that it is the declared policy of the U.S. government to return a human being to the moon by 2020, in preparation for sending a human astronaut to Mars. If Gingrich is wrong (and he is), he's not wrong alone.
Watch the Republican primaries, and you can feel: the American political system is working. The GOP is discarding the unqualified and irresponsible candidates and rapidly converging on the person in the race who could actually do the job of president.
Monday is the second day of the year, which means millions of Americans have started new diets. They resolved to lose weight, get in shape, and they are starting strong.
"We are determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons."
Last week, President Obama traveled to a historic town in Kansas to offer a vision of a revived American middle class.
Big events do not always have big causes. The British once went to war over an injury to a sea captain's ear. And today's Pakistan may collapse into military rule because of one man's eagerness to read his name in the newspaper and see his face on TV.
Immigration is the only issue where a political candidate can totally do the bidding of the K Street lobbyists and still be hailed as compassionate and humane.
Americans don't usually pay a lot of attention to Spanish politics, but the election of 2004 proved an exception. The election that occurred Sunday should be a second.
The Euro crisis is not just a Greek crisis, or an Italian crisis, or now even a French crisis.
Late last week, the leaders and finance ministers of the 20 biggest economies, the G-20, met in Cannes for their annual media extravaganza.
A new CNN poll finds that about half of Republicans sympathize with the tea party movement. The other half either remain aloof or (5%) even express hostility.
What's the most emotional and divisive issue in American politics?
There's a lot to like about Herman Cain. He's funny and personable. He's a great American success story. His 9-9-9 tax plan may be half-baked, but the concept behind the plan -- replace the corporate income tax with in effect a consumption tax -- has a lot to recommend it. (Although, the plan has a lot of problems, too.) Finally, in a political cycle that has seen too many coded racial attacks on President Obama and his family, it's a source of great pride to me to see an African-American topping my party's polls.
On this day 100 years ago, troops in the city of Wuchang, in China's Hubei province, launched a coup against local authorities. The coup ignited a civil war that ended in the collapse of China's 2,200-year-old imperial system.
When Tip O'Neill retired in 1987, he was asked how the quality of people elected to Congress had changed in his 30-plus years of service. The former Speaker of the House answered: "The quality is clearly better, much better." But, he added, "The results are definitely worse."
Imagine that some member of Congress back in the 1990s had devoted himself or herself to toughening America against terrorism. He or she had introduced legislation to require airlines to harden their cockpit doors. After years of work, he or she at last prevailed and the new law went into effect sometime in early 2000. The 9/11 plot would have been thwarted without any American ever knowing that the plot had existed.
Over at Bloomberg, Jonathan Alter poses a question to non-supporters of President Obama:
How do you score partisan points against a president who looks to have won a military victory in Libya at very low cost? Simple: Attack him for being away from Washington at a summer house when the victory was won.
Gov. Rick Perry enters the presidential race with one big advantage and one big impediment. The advantage: his record of job creation in Texas. His impediment? His record of job creation in Texas.
A week of bad economic news has led some economists to worry: Is it 1937 all over again?
I'm a Republican. Always have been. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation and limited government. But as I look back at the weeks of rancor leading up to Sunday night's last-minute budget deal, I see some things I don't believe in:
If the debt ceiling crisis were a movie, President Barack Obama would deserve an Oscar for his performance in the role of "the last reasonable man."
In this debt-ceiling fight, I'm having horrible flashbacks to the Republican debacle over health care.
The role of first lady is one of the most difficult in American public life. Few women have struggled with the role as passionately and poignantly as Betty Ford, who died last week at 93.
I was a strong opponent of same-sex marriage. Fourteen years ago, Andrew Sullivan and I forcefully debated the issue at length online (at a time when online debate was a brand new thing).
Sweden is making a political right turn, in a very Swedish way: cautiously, consensually, unflamboyantly. But decisively even so.
Sarah Palin has mesmerized the cable shows by revving a bus and riding a Harley.
The exit of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee from the 2012 presidential race opens a huge void in the Republican field.
The killing of Osama bin Laden raises many haunting questions. Here's the most important:
So much to say about the long-awaited visiting of justice upon Osama bin Laden.
In the fall of 1984, I was a student living in Boston. A high-tax manufacturing state, Massachusetts had been hit hard by the economic troubles of the 1970s. But now suddenly there were signs in every shop window: "Help wanted." Or: "Help wanted!" Or even: "Help wanted!!!"
"The Elba option is impossible in the modern world," sighed an unhappy German diplomat.
You might think the big banks would be too embarrassed to ask Congress for more special favors.
At the end of World War II, a new secretary of state faced a tough management decision.
President Obama's communications efforts on Libya have received generally bad reviews.
It's tough for a Republican politician to lose friends by visiting Israel. Yet Sarah Palin is in danger of doing so.
Has the Obama administration decided it wants the Gadhafi regime to survive?
President Barack Obama is wrestling with a decision whether or not to intervene in Libya.
The New York Times reported this weekend on the story of the juvenile detention center in Wisconsin's rural Manitowoc County, on the shores of Lake Michigan.
An Israeli observer describes the mood of this country's leadership as it watches the crisis in Egypt: "It varies," he said, "from gloom to doom."
It's being called a Palestinian WikiLeaks: a dump of 1,600 Palestinian Authority documents to Al-Jazeera and the British newspaper The Guardian.
Chinese president Hu Jintao arrives in Washington this week at a time of American pessimism.
When people call the shootings in Tucson senseless, they are absolutely right. By all reports, the alleged Tucson shooter was seriously mentally ill and quite probably schizophrenic.
The lesson of the past few years: Watch out for things that can go massively wrong. What could go massively wrong in 2011?
Senators are a lot like college students. For months on end, they seem to do no work at all. And then everything gets crammed into the last weekend of the term.
On my last day on a visit to Beirut, Lebanon, I participated in a long conversation with a Hamas political leader.
"An army travels on its stomach," said Napoleon Bonaparte.
Some say that the WikiLeaks document dump has embarrassed the United States government.
We're approaching the 100th anniversary of the birthday of Ronald Reagan: February 6, 2011. It's time to begin thinking seriously about an appropriate national commemoration of this good man and great president.
The question most readers will bring to George W. Bush's memoirs can be put into just two words: "Why Iraq?"
I'm going to get personal here. On the day that health care reform passed its final vote in the House, I posted on my blog a comment titled "Waterloo."
Some perspective here: On Tuesday, some 37 percent of Americans are expected to turn out to vote. On Sunday, some 66 percent of Americans celebrated Halloween.
After NPR fired analyst Juan Williams, Sen. Jim DeMint sent this tweet to his Twitter followers:
The Germans, for obvious reasons, prefer their politicians dull. The current German chancellor, Angela Merkel, more than meets local expectations. So on the rare occasion when Merkel says something vivid, something important must be going on.
The Financial Times reported Sunday that "global economic co-operation is in disarray and further battles in the currency war look likely after the weekend's meetings of finance ministers and central bankers end with no resolution."
"Be not afraid" was the message of Pope John Paul II's Inaugural Mass. It's a message American conservatives need to take to heart again in the era of Barack Obama.
Give him enough rope and he'll hang himself: That old adage has described U.S. policy toward Venezuela's thuggish president, Hugo Chavez.
The Bush tax cuts are scheduled to lapse in January 2011. Congress is debating some kind of renewal, and most people assume that some kind of renewal will happen. But as the days click away, that assumption looks more and more like wishful thinking.
Which American politician of the past 25 years has had the most lasting influence? Ronald Reagan, with his vision of low taxes and limited government? The triangulating Bill Clinton? More and more I'm beginning to fear: It's Al Sharpton.
Loading weather data ...
© 2011 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
|