When it comes to the economy, the people running this Administration’s policies aren’t stupid. No, sir. They’re very smart. Too smart, in fact. That’s their problem — and the reason the Democrats took such a whacking in yesterday’s elections. By virtue of their excessive intelligence, these policy setters have been fixated on “the economy” and not on the economic lives...

Full results are not in, but it looks right now like Democrat Bill Owens will win NY-23, tarnishing would should have been a solid night for the GOP. Comfortable wins in the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia seemed likely to serve as appetizers for the real conservative triumph – a victory of Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman. The purging of Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava from the...

UPDATE: All the major networks are also calling it for Christie, guess they were waiting for Hudson too. Now that Hudson County has finally pulled the trigger and turned in the vote we can project Chris Christie the winner of the race for New Jersey Governor. It’s somewhat comic really that they waited at 57% for more than an hour before jumping in an instant to 97% of the vote. With 81% of the vote in...

UPDATE: NY Times projects Bloomberg the winner. No decision yet in NY-23 Polls just closing. Bloomberg should win easily but NY 23rd between Owens and Hoffman could take time

Tell your friends you read it here first. Don’t bother watching the wall-to-wall cable television coverage of today’s handful of odd-year elections. Robert McDonnell, the Republican candidate, will be elected governor of Virginia. Barring a minor miracle, incumbent New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine will lose to Republican Chris Christie. Douglas Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate, will trounce Democrat...

This is an excellent interview by Jeffrey Goldberg of the American Task Force for Palestine’s Hussein Ibish. I’ve spoken positively about the ATFP before, and interviews like this help demonstrate why. Mr. Ibish is a clear and steadfast supporter of a peaceful, two-state solution, and it really comes through in this interview that he gets the conflict and he, from the position of a Palestinian advocate,...

Should the U.S. Treasury Department be privatized? Should Goldman Sachs get the contract to operate it? Some people might ask why we should bother to formalize what has actually been the case informally for years. After all, the last Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, headed GS before deigning to serve in Washington. And the present occupant of Paulson’s job, Tim Geithner, according to phone logs...

Raised as a Pashtun, he’s that people’s star A local tribal hero hailed near and far He spent some years a’crusin’ down in Kandahar At three was selling carpets in its bustling bazaar Hamid, Hamid Karzai, king of the slick veneer. In the final Cold War’s chapter, the Russkie soldiers came Adding a new chapter to the old Afghan Great Game Hamid joined the CIA, the failing bear to...

Since our first look at President Obama’s initiative to improve the nation’s power grid, I’ve been digging a bit deeper into some of the security threats which the aging infrastructure poses, as well as the inefficiencies in the current system. I follow up on the topic today in my next column at Pajamas Media, so dive in and be frightened. (Not in the Halloween way. This is real.) Terrorists...

Too bad about the Obama Administration. It actually seemed to show some promise in its early months. It actually seemed to have a real commitment to change, a desire to see in crises at home and abroad opportunities to strike out in different directions that would lead to a brighter future for Americans and the world generally. But now it’s clear. That ain’t gonna happen. On the domestic front we’ve...

The style book says elected politicians be identified by abbreviations of their political party and state after their names which is why I find it rather amusing that Sen. Joe Lieberman is (I-Conn). That Lieberman is conning progressive Democrats is paramount in their frustration directed at the man selected as their party’s vice presidential candidate in 2000. They overlooked a quirk in Lieberman’s...

It’s turning out to be an eventful weekend, and Cindy and I will be trying to keep pace with it all on Mid Stream Radio today at 1 pm eastern time. Stop by and join in the chat with your own comments or call in to (646) 595-3963 and give us a piece of your mind! (Well… assuming you have enough to spare, that is.) We’ll catch up with the quickly changing NY 23 race and dig into a few more juicy...

The Washington Post breathlessly tells us today that 33 lawmakers are being investigated for questionable conduct that includes defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling. Granted, this is a legitimate story in Washington. But for the rest of the nation, it most likely will produce a collective yawn. “What else is new?” they might ask. The report was prepared in July. It was accidentally leaked...

Try to imagine. It’s 20 years ago. It’s 1989 and you come across the following headline, a headline that actually appeared on today’s New York Times website: “China Helps Build Huge Texas Wind Farm.” In 1989 you probably would have laughed, thinking this headline was totally whacky. So whacky that it must really have been picked up from that year’s equivalent of The Onion....

Although the House has finally come up with a bill for national healthcare it falls short of accomplishing Democrat’s original goal of total healthcare. When the news broke out today it was touted as an $894 billion piece of legislation, but the congressional budget office believes the bill will spend more like $1.05 trillion over the next decade. Republicans fear that the bill will cause a virtual quagmire...

You’ll be seeing many variants of this headline today: “Economy growing, but not jobs.” Like so much of recent economic reporting, it’s deceptive. It suggests a kind of balance between two things of equal weight and importance, one good (economic growth) and one bad (unemployment). Such a deception implies that except for a difficult jobs situation, other key elements of the economy...

Two questions that come up when I write on the subject of our nation’s highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor, are why it sometimes takes so long for the Medal to be awarded and whether an award can be “upgraded” to the Medal of Honor. (I use that term reluctantly because I don’t want to make awards and decorations for our brave troops sound like a product that can be improved—“upgraded.”) I...

If there was ever any doubt why California is known as la la land, I offer these stories ripped off the wires. 1) — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was heckled recently when he crashed a Democratic Party fund raiser, vetoed a bill authored by one of his hecklers and despite the fact the Legislature approved the measure unanimously. Here’s the veto message. Now follow the first letter in the left...

The following is a column by Bob Gorman, a writer for the Watertown Daily Times in New York. He is writing about Dede Scozzafava, the Republican challenger for the 23rd Congressional District in the Empire State left open after John McHugh became Secretary of the Army. While major bloggers have called Scozzafava a “radical leftist,” Gorman presents a view that isn’t so radical. I should...

In the day or two we”ll likely get an official announcement that the recession has ended. If it comes along as expected, it will be based on readings showing that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose in the recently ended third quarter. Economists, a group where unemployment is currently unknown, will hail the report. So, too, will stock analysts whose expectations are invariably exceeded, along with...

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés and I have been posting on a Texas criminal justice case that has now become an issue of national interest. It is the now infamous case of Todd Willingham who was executed almost six years ago for the 1991 arson related death of his three children at his home in Corsicana, Texas. The Texas Forensic Science Commission was reviewing the case and hired the noted fire scientist Craig...

For those of you who believe our mission in Afghanistan is a war of futility as I do then this article in today’s Washington Post reaffirms that notion. As you will learn, Matthew Hoh is no peacenik rabblerouser but a seasoned combat Marine, civil engineer and member of an elite Foreign Service team whose resignation shocked the top civilian foreign policy leaders in the Obama administration. “I...

A lyric from an old Blues song goes, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” There’s a similar disconnect when it comes to the relationship of government to small business. Every government says it wants to help this critically important sector of the U.S. economy. But in countless ways, year by year, most governments continue to make it more difficult for such enterprises...

Note: I originally published this post about 6 months ago and hoped that perhaps as time passed it would become outdated. I don’t mean to suggest that anyone in the GOP or conservative movement leadership was going to listen to lil ol me, but that perhaps they’d change their minds after failures. With a decent chance for the GOP to lose two key races in NY and NJ next week I thought it was worth...

by Walter Brasch There’s a cat fight going on in the Miss USA operation—and it isn’t pretty. It began when an openly gay judge asked Miss California, Carrie Prejean, what she thought about same sex marriage. Prejean, a student at San Diego Christian College, said that although she recognizes and accepts that others may believe in same-sex marriage, “I think I believe that marriage should...