I still can’t believe that there are people of either party or no party that could buy into or encourage bilge such as this by Sean Hannity. Even 20 years ago someone like this would be relegated the fringe hours of television.

WASHINGTON — What do Rick Santorum and Clint Eastwood have in common? Sorry Rick, you haven’t made it yet as an Eastwood-style make-my-day cultural icon. But in different ways, Santorum and Eastwood have demonstrated the limits of both an entirely negative slant on politics and a pessimistic take on America’s future. Santorum’s Tuesday sweep of Republican presidential contests...

Has the conventional wisdom been turned on its head again? Or is this yet one more little blip in the hugely funded and professionally organized former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s “inevitable” march to the 2012 Republican nomination? And was there a big message to President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party again: that once more social issues can fuel and excite and outrage GOPers...

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...

Reinventing yourself is a promise of the American Dream. Barack Obama, once a community organizer, is now in the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan, a movie actor, transformed himself into the same role. But evolution stops short of fantasy and now, as the GOP demonizes our 44th President and deifies the 40th, come reminders of the limits. Speaking near Reagan’s grave, Haley Barbour, a conservative, tells colleagues:...

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...

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...

If Charles Dickens had lived until 1888, he might have been among the select group of British eminentoes who recorded their voices for Thomas Edison’s newfangled phonograph. Robert Browning did it, though the aged poet forgot his own verses in mid-recitation. Alfred Lord Tennyson, even older at the time, recorded “The Charge of the Light Brigade” for posterity in a wrinkled sing-song voice....

Independent CNN commentator John Avlon gives these tips on three things you need to know about today’s GOP contests: FOOTNOTE: It’s already looking as if this could be a good night for former Senator Rick Santorum, a wash-out for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and night present front-runner former Gov. Mitt Romney might want to forget. Photo via shutterstock.com

A Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests Mitt Romney is not closing the deal with conservative Republicans. In fact, he has lost a bit of support: Despite his strong showing in early state contests in the race for the Republican U.S. presidential nomination, Mitt Romney’s support nationwide has dipped slightly during the past month, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday. Romney was backed by 29 percent...

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...

Ever so slowly, and ever so reluctantly, Republicans are lining up in typical jackbooted fashion behind Mitt Romney. The still-feisty Gingrich is an exception, of course, and he’s been hammering Romney for some time now as a “Massachusetts moderate,” but so too is Santorum, who is hoping for a comeback, post-Iowa, with strong showings in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri today, strong enough...

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...

WASHINGTON — OK, now it’s settled, right? I mean, it must be settled by now. Mitt Romney is going to be the nominee. Eat your peas, Republicans, and then fall in line, because Romney’s the guy. Right? Probably. Even at this point, after Romney trounced Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary and the Nevada caucuses, there are some fairly compelling reasons for Republicans to pause before...

The Super Bowl commercial that is getting the most welcome and unwelcome buzz is Chrysler’s moving “It’s Halftime in America” commercial featuring the great Clint Eastwood, who praises American’s tradition of coming together and acting as one in times of adversity. He points to how Detroit was written off but survived. Who could argue that was some kind of manipulative political,...

News flash: if you give money to that group that does the “pink ribbon” campaign for breast cancer, some of that money you give might go to an organization that performs hundreds of thousands of abortions every year. That organization also gives out birth control and referrals to other agencies that provide free or low-cost mammograms and other women’s health stuff that are not abortion-related....

I’ve been hearing lately that the Republican Party (note: I am not a Republican) is “in decline” because of this, that, or the other thing. The funny thing about that decline being that according to Gallup, the American populace has been trending away from Democrats and toward Republicans the last few years, and both parties are pretty much at parity. Which looks suspiciously like a decline...

As Mitt Romney takes another step to the nomination and gains momentum, the question of personal chemistry comes to the fore. Would Americans elect a president they viscerally dislike? In a Slate piece titled “Romney is Kerry. Maybe Gore,” Jacob Weisberg argues: “Romney strongly resembles two similarly unloved Democratic nominees from the recent past, Al Gore and John Kerry. Gore and Kerry both suffered...

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...

Are young people in America less stridently nationalistic than their predecessors? Columnist Fyodor Lukyanov of Russia’s Gazeta, citing recent Pew Research Center polling data, asserts in this detailed evaluation of U.S. public attitudes, that there is a declining tendency on the part of the U.S. population to believe in American exceptionalism, and concludes that U.S. foreign policy will be increasingly...

WASHINGTON — We have seen the world created by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and it doesn’t work. Oh, yes, it works nicely for the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, especially if they want to shroud their efforts to influence politics behind shell corporations. It just doesn’t happen to work if you think we are a democracy and not a plutocracy. Two...

Take Back the Republican Party by Linda Gibson It’s time for the grownups among us to quit indulging the tantrums of the political 2-year-olds in the Republican Party hollering “No!” unless they get their way. One way to accomplish this would be for Democrats, Independents, Greens, Libertarians and moderates of all kinds to join the Republican Party. Take it back from the fanatics who denounce those even...

Update: The material appears to have been developed with grants from DOJ, not directly by DOJ. Ten years ago, the Bush Administration pushed a new program, Terrorism Information and Prevention System (Operation TIPS), designed to entice Americans to snitch on their neighbors. From Reason magazine: TIPS in essence deputizes 1 million Americans in 10 cities as government informants. (That’s just the beginning...

How should we characterize the impending end of Western military operations in Afghanistan? Was it a painful defeat, a hard-won success, or something in between? Columnist Danièle Fonck of Luxembourg’s Le Jeudi writes that nothing worthwhile has been gained by the Afghanistan invasion, and the soldiers who died – whether Westerners want to admit it to themselves or not – did so in vain. For...

Armey and Gingrich in not necessarily happier times.. How much work does former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have to win over conservatives and Tea Party members as a viable Anti-Romney option? I’d say a ton of work: Freedom Works chairman and former Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) blasted Newt Gingrich for his continued tough attacks on Mitt Romney saying Gingrich was carrying out a vendetta against the Republican...