A person’s faith should in no way be a disqualifier for the presidency or any other public office. That certainly was true of John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism in 1960 and that is true of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism in 2012, but there the similarities end because there are aspects of Romney’s relationship with the Church of Latter Day Saints that do not necessarily disqualify him but do raise troubling questions — questions that are likely to go unanswered. The fact that some...

BISHOP DOLAN IS GROUCHY In for a dime in for a dollar seems to be the modus operandi in the latest round of culture warfare and even when reasonable compromise is within reach it remains elusive. And so we have the sight of Catholic bishops locking horns with the Obama administration over its principled view that all women need affordable access to contraceptive services and products, including the morning-after pill, which pro-lifers view as a form of abortion. This right happens to be a cornerstone...

A centerpiece of the Republican Party’s social agenda in the new millennium has been to deny women new rights and take away old rights, but it stands to reason that everyone of every political stripe would be opposed to neutering laws that seek to combat domestic violence and sexual assault. But Republicans are less reasonable with every passing election cycle, and so we had the specter this week of every Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee voting against the reauthorization of the...

Comics don’t mind making a fool of themselves, but first ladies? Yes, if you’re Michelle Obama, who has been making the rounds of talk show hosts and beating them in feats of physical fitnessl in the name of her “Let’s Move” initiative. Her latest victim was Jimmy Fallon of “Late Night,” who visited the White House to take on Mrs. Obama in a series of event, including push-ups, tug-of-war, hula hooping and potato sack racing. Click here for a link to the...

The House today overwhelmingly passed a bill to ban insider trading by members of Congress and to impose new ethics requirements on lawmakers and federal agency officials following a similar lopsided vote by the Senate less than three weeks after President Obama demanded such action in his State of the Union speech. The swift response and 417-to-2 and 96-to-3 votes reflected concerns over the low esteem in which voters hold lawmakers but the votes concealed deep differences and a reluctance by House...

Hindsight is always 20-20, of course, but it turns out that the widespread fear — bordering on panic — that there would be a second wave of attacks in the months after 9/11 was misplaced because it turns out that Al Qaeda was a one-hit wonder. This reality is revealed in an article in a leftist rag called the Air Force Times that says that the government underestimated the terrorist group before the attacks and overestimated it afterward. The Bush-Cheney cabal cannot be forgiven for...

Consider this as an indicator of how awfully Mitt Romney performed in Tuesday’s two primaries and caucus: In Minnesota, a state that he won handily in 2008, he failed to win a single county and got just 17 percent of the vote, a stunning 27 percentage points behind Rick Santorum, who made a clean sweep in Colorado and Missouri, as well. Wait, it gets worse: Although the voting in Missouri was non-binding, Romney lost all 114 counties. Wait, it gets even worse: Romney has now gone...

I never thought that I would write a post defending Madonna, whose career successes I respect while not particularly caring for her songifying and dancing, but the deluge of criticism over her performance during the Super Bowl halftime moves me to declare that the criticism is sexist and ageist — and very unfair. I groaned when I read that Madonna would being doing the halftime show but ended up being blown away by her performance, while the chorus lines and bells and whistles surrounding...

Newt Gingrich has a woman problem and the solution would seem to be standing one or two steps behind him. That is his wife Callista, who to my knowledge has been rendered mute — or more likely told to button her lip — at the former House speaker’s campaign appearances. The primary reason that woman voters are turned off to Gingrich is his serial infidelities. Callista is his third wife and he left the first two to pursue affairs and then married his quarry. The French happen to...

The big takeaway from the Republican primaries and caucus yesterday is that the one candidate who has a chance of beating President Obama still isn’t able to close the deal with his own party. Rick Santorum’s victories in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri, where Romney finished third, second and second respectively, is a reflection of the continuing turmoil in the GOP over a month after the primary season began. In Missouri’s non-binding primary, Santorum received more than double...

Having run out of zingers like “what are they smoking?” and “it must be something in the water,” I am left speechless if not wordless that the Republicans once again seem ready to embrace Representative Paul Ryan’s Reverse Robin Hood plan. Should you not recall, this was a deficit reduction plan that would given even more tax breaks to the rich while phasing out Medicare and replacing it with a subsidized private insurance system for newly eligible seniors, as well...

Karen Handel, a senior vice president for public policy at the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation and the woman widely viewed as having pressured Komen to sever financial ties with Planned Parenthood, has resigned. The only question is why it took so long. In a whiny, self-serving letter, the woman who engineered this public relations disaster says that she is declining the offer of a severance package from Komen which might have required her to keep silent: “I am deeply disappointed by...

You have to hand it to the Republican Party: It not only seems incapable of turning the other cheek, but habitually makes matters worse when a little controversy crosses its path. The latest little controversy is a Chrysler Corporation ad titled “It’s Halftime in America” aired during Super Bowl on Sunday evening. The ad, rather drearily uninventive as were most this year, featured Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood extolling the success of the Bush and Obama administration-engineered...

Mitt Romney’s gaffe about poor people has triggered an overdue if likely short-lived debate about America’s underclass. Speaking to CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien after his victory in the Florida Republican primary, Romney blurted out, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Taken in context, the remark wasn’t quite what it seemed to be because the candidate, in another of his breathtaking flip-flops, said in the course of the interview that he was confident that the...

The reversal of field today by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation on its decision to terminate funding to Planned Parenthood clinics is doubly heartening. This is because a grave injustice has been corrected and it was corrected to a substantial degree by the pushback by many thousands of people who vented their displeasure with Komen on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, the first such instance in the U.S. of social media playing such an important role as it has in Arab Spring protests. Breast...

The Susan B. Komen for the Cure foundation has numerous corporate and other sponsors, but you have to question the wisdom of partnering with a handgun retailer. A blurb at Discount Gun Sales’ website: Discount Gun Sales is proud to team up with the Susan B. Koman Foundation to offer the Walther P-22 Hope Edition in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. A portion of each P-22 Hope Edition will be donated to the Seattle Branch of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. The P-22...

The damage that House Republicans have done to their party brand and their chances to take back the White House and Senate is incalculable, but like the last person in the room to get a joke, they finally appear to be wising up. I have spent a good deal of time — usually while sitting on the porcelain throne or chasing the lawn mower around the back yard — trying to fathom why the likes of House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor believed that success laid on the other...

The conventional wisdom has it that Mitt Romney mopped the floor with Newt Gingrich in Florida, and while I do not share the view that his was a come-fr0m-behind victory, Gingrich’s collapse was pretty amazing. But the victory in the fourth primary-caucus go round of the year further confirms that Romney is a candidate at odds with himself and very much at odds with the today’s Republican Party because to win the Sunshine State resoundingly he had to lurch to the left on Medicare and...

NANCY BRINKER KOMEN The Susan Komen-Planned Parenthood debacle is a defining moment for women’s rights in America. As Taylor Marsh writes, it is an egregious example of liberals being asleep at the wheel, but it is much, much more: It is a watershed event in the politicization of women’s reproductive rights in an era in which the Republican Party is doubling down on denying women virtually all rights, when rape is viewed by a president candidate as “a gift from God,” and...

While I don’t imagine that it will be a game changer in the mad charge for the Republican presidential nomination, animal rights activists have created a Web site to remind voters that Mitt Romney once put his Irish Setter, Seamus, in a carrier on his car roof for a 12-hour family vacation trip. As the Boston Globe first reported in 2007, in 1983, Romney drove his station wagon packed with five sons and his wife on a 12-hour trip from Boston to Ontario, where his parents had a cottage on...

While Mitt Romney may be misunderestimating, as a certain former president would say, the damage that his get-filthy-rich tenure at Bain Capital is causing, opposition researchers are having a devil of a time disproving his claim that he created 100,000 or 120,000 jobs (he has cited both numbers) as CEO of the private-equity company, while supporters are having an equally hard time proving that he is right. In any event, the majority of the jobs Romney takes credit for creating come from...

It was 10 years ago, give or take a few days, that President Bush delivered a State of the Union address with a passage alluding to an “axis of evil” and asserted that the world’s leading rogue regimes — Iran, Iraq and North Korea, by name — and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda threatened world peace. David Frum, who had a hand in crafting the speech, writes that it has withstood the criticism it received at the time as well as the scrutiny of 10 years. I happen to believe...

Vote for Newt. Annoy a liberal. ~ SARAH PALIN When the sun comes up tomorrow in the Sunshine State, it is probable that Mitt Romney will have bounced back from his drubbing in South Carolina and defeated Newt Gingrich in the latest installment of the see-saw race for the Republican presidential nomination despite fellow serial adulterer Herman Cain’s last-minute endorsement of the former House speaker. A Florida victory is, of course, is good news for Romney, but it also is great news for...

It’s been a rough few days for the three-year-old daughter of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who remains in a hospital with pneumonia. The longshot candidate described Bella Santorum’s improvement on Sunday as “a miraculous turnaround” and it may indeed be a God job. But the top flight medical care she is getting at a Washington, D.C. area hospital may have something to do with her family having health insurance because of Santorum’s lavish Senate...

SMUG CAPTION ABOUT WHITE REPUBLICANS GOES HERE With five days to go before the Florida presidential primary, public-opinion polls in the Sunshine State are sending a mixed message. But one thing is for sure, a primary that once appeared to be a cakewalk for Mitt Romney may well turn out to be pivotal for the hapless candidate. An averaging of the polls on Wednesday revealed a 4 percentage point lead for Gingrich. With a plus or minus 3 percent error margin, that is not much of a lead. A new poll...