Here’s the text of the latest RNC resolution on Israel: BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the members of this body support Israel in their natural and God-given right of self-governance and self-defense upon their own lands, recognizing that Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others; and that peace can be afforded the region only through a united Israel governed under one law...

What kind of people go to Republican candidate debates these days? What kind of people cheer when one of the aspirants at the podium in this field of bad dreams makes fun of food stamp recipients, the majority of whom are children. What kind of country do we live in today when a candidate for the presidency from one of our national parties not only seeks to protect the wealth of the wealthiest at all costs,...

NOTE: There was an error in our original headline and lede on this story. It has been fixed. We regret the error. Will former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney now quote Texas Governor Rick Perry and say: “Oops!” The Des Moines Register reports that final a final tally of the caucus vote finds that former Sen. Rick Santorum beat Romney by 34 votes: THE RESULTS: Santorum finished ahead by 34 votes MISSING...

Mitt Romney’s ascendancy in the Republican presidential sweepstakes has put his career at Bain Capital, a private equity firm, under the microscope, the result of attacks against him from other GOP candidates. Romney’s apparent strength, his business experience, has instead become a possible liability. It would appear to be counter-intuitive to have Republicans assailing private equity firms, a part of...

Pakistan bankrolled the Taliban, who destroyed the Buddhas of Banyan There is an old Afghan folk tale that portrays a foreigner balancing two connected trays attached to the handheld weighing device used in South Asian bazaaars. The foreigner carefully loads one tray and then the other with frogs. Just as he puts the last few frogs on one tray and then the other, some frogs on the first tray hop off. As the...

Perhaps the best opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden prior to the 9/11 attacks came in 1998 when credible intelligence placed the terrorist leader at Tarnak Farm (image above), a compound on the arid plains near Kandahar in Afghanistan. With the aid of real-time video imagery transmitted by a Predator drone, U.S. intelligence agents half way around the world were able to watch Bin Laden as he walked through...

A European court (the Court On Human Rights) has ruled that the United Kingdom cannot deport a terror suspect to Jordan because the evidence against him might have been obtained via torture. This means that they will either have to charge him in the UK or release him. The suspect in question, Abu Qatada has been a leading spokesman for Al Qaeda and the UK wanted to deport him because of his terror links. This...

John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri A new CNN/Time Poll finds the Republican primary race in South Carolina is tightening: former Massachusetts Gov. Romney is staying about where he was while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is gaining ground: With three days to go until the first-in-the south primary, Mitt Romney remains in the lead in the Palmetto State, but according to a new poll, his advantage...

There is no question as to how utterly uniformed Rick Perry’s remarks about Turkey were Monday night in South Carolina. Calling one of our staunchest NATO partners a country that is being ruled by “Islamic terrorists” is not really the savviest thing one would expect from a presidential candidate. But perhaps we are being too rough on the Texas governor. Here’s the question posed specifically to Perry...

WASHINGTON – This isn’t a left right thing. Yesterday afternoon at a live streaming briefing on the issue you had Adam Green of Bold Progressives standing up to applaud Rep. Darrel Issa for his leadership on this issue, which I watched unfold. Here’s a list of some of the people who took part in the streaming online event yesterday: Alexis Ohanian, reddit co-founder (via video) Craig Newmark,...

Another of the many ‘balance the budget’ programs, this time from the NYT I’ll be curious to see how folks tackle this. I presume some will do nothing but spending cuts while others will focus mostly on tax hikes and cutting the military. But it’s a fun exercise

Due to travel, I got online late. The following are some live blogging entries on the debate in South Carolina between GOPers seeking the 2012 Republican nomination. These are the reactions of an independent voter who has been in both parties — reactions not to political stands as much as to how they answered, came across and how what they say will help or hurt them with their voters and independent voters. Since...

My Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” – Martin Luther King Jr. Doug Bursch blogs and tweets Fairlyspiritual.

No. It’s not your imagination. You’re not a conspiracy hysteric. There is a force out there that is controlling our economic, political and social lives to an extraordinary extent, reducing one of the most sacred traditional rights of a free society, privacy, to increasing irrelevance. To give it a name, call it the MASC — the Marketing-Security Complex. In a 1961 speech, President Dwight Eisenhower...

A quick post. I am in Alamogordo, New Mexico right now about to leave my hotel here for another city on my national tour, but it needs to be said: Barring some huge political event, the GOP nominee WILL be former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Why? 1. A series of new polls show Romney is way ahead of the others nationally. 2. A new poll shows that if Romney runs against Barack Obama the President will beat...

How hateful has our politics become? This hateful: An email recently sent by Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal (R-Hutchinson) to his Republican colleagues appears to endorse a controversial prayer that some say calls for the untimely death of President Obama. “Pray for Obama. Psalm 109:8.” That’s the slogan an email from O’Neal refers to, a phrase that’s become popular in...

With the primary season underway it is already time for people to speculate the winner in November. Of course this is hardly a new situation; pundits have been trying to predict the outcome of the elections for decades and usually with mixed results at best. In the early 1980′s, a political scientist named Allan Lichtman decided to try and figure out a way to predict the outcome of Presidential elections...

New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez has relented and is no longer blocking the appointment of Judge Patty Shwartz to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. His obstruction was apparently due to Menendez’s antipathy to Shwartz’s long time boy friend, federal prosecutor James Nobile, who had investigated Menendez for possible corruption charges in 2006. Menendez’ blockade came...

WASHINGTON – This film is dreadful. If the trailer above was actually representative of the final product you would have had something worthy of the woman who ruled Great Britain with an iron will. However, the trailer is not the journey you take with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in Iron Lady. That the film actually disrespects and marginalizes a woman as large as Margaret Thatcher is movie making...

…He claimed that he didn’t seek reelection as Massachusetts governor because “that would be about me” — as if running for president, which he did instead, was a gesture of sacrifice and altruism. Romney, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg argued this week, has an “authentic inauthenticity problem.” And that is precisely why his struggle is so familiar. He is the political...

WASHINGTON — He would be an elder statesman now, a lion in winter, an American hero perhaps impatient with the fuss being made over his birthday. At 83, he’d likely still have his wits and his voice. Surely, if he were able, he would continue to preach, and to pray — and to dream. For the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., dreaming was not optional. It was a requirement of citizenship to...

WASHINGTON – Newt Gingrich is deservedly getting booed in South Carolina for his Super PACS’ “The King of Bain.” Meanwhile, South Carolina remains a state where political ethics and honesty got to die. The New York Times has a unintentionally humorous story about one of the towns targeted by Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC, which depicts a place that didn’t know they were so much...

Mitt Romney, whose reported net worth is somewhere north of $200 million, argues that he knows how to make all Americans wealthier. In what is perhaps the deepest irony of this presidential season, Newt Gingrich echoes William Jennings Bryan — who declared, “No one can earn a million dollars honestly.” Paul Krugman has attacked Romney’s honesty in earlier columns. But on Friday, he...

Whacking Wall Street should be a major 2012 campaign theme for President Obama. Most of the country is still angry at The Street for helping bring about the present unending recession, for its huge pay packets while most on Main Street have been forced to tighten their belts. And this anger is as strong among Tea Partiers as lefties. On top of this, Mr. Obama’s very likely Republican opponent next November,...

WASHINGTON – The Obama White House isn’t the first to try to kill the messenger, the storyteller of the time over which they preside. They’re just the latest attempting to control an image however they can, as the writer does her best to defend her motives and methods against the fan politics that puts personality and celebrity love over everything else. Jodi Kantor is just the latest author...